As the fall season quickly approaches, Standing Room Only (SRO) Theater’s tradition of providing frights to Yelm residents and members of surrounding communities is set to return on Friday, Oct. 11, as the community-based theater group and its volunteers construct a haunted house dubbed Yell Manor.
Yell Manor is located at Gordon’s Garden Center, 308 E. Yelm Ave. This year, Yell Manor’s theme is “The Asylum,” SRO Theater President Steve Harshfield said. He said the organization is currently in the early stages of constructing the haunted house, but it will be complete for a grand opening on Oct. 11. After it launches, Yell Manor will be open from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. every Friday and Saturday in October, as well as from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 31, on Halloween.
“We’ve spent the last month brainstorming what we want to accomplish with the asylum. It’s nice because, this year, we have a really good volunteer committee for building and design,” Harshfield said. “With Yell Manor, we’re going with an asylum theme. It will be like walking through an asylum, and it will have multiple rooms that you’d expect to find in an old-timey asylum, some of the not-so-fun stuff they’d do with patients like lobotomies, shock therapy.”
Yell Manor will also feature two escape rooms, including themes of a morgue and “Dr. Freud’s Doctors Office.” Harshfield noted that the two escape rooms will be open the same time as the rest of the haunted house.
“Participants should definitely expect some psychological and mental hula hoops, some mental hoops to jump through to get out of there,” Harshfield said. “We also have a really good creative team, with close to a dozen of us on it. It’s been really nice having a good collaboration.”
Harshfield added that the volunteer base started last year with SRO Theater board member Dale Sharp, former Yelm High School drama club teacher, leading the charge. Harshfield added that Sharp brought “a lot of good volunteers” to SRO Theater through the YHS Drama Club program, with many of the volunteers from the haunted house in 2023 set to return to Yell Manor this year.
“Even though there’s not much of a drama program to speak of because of the levy, we’ve retained most of those volunteers from last year, and they’ve brought some friends. It’s grown a bit,” Harshfield said.
He added that SRO Theater would love to find a larger space for Yell Manor but noted that they’re thankful for the 1,800 square feet of space provided at Gordon’s Garden Center in Yelm.
“It would be nice to be able to have escape rooms in an entirely different building or venue,” he said. “A lot of it is related to our expansion plans for SRO Theater in general. It’s just a matter of finding the right venue. There’s not a lot of them around that don’t have to be built from the ground up.”
Harshfield said that a lot of the supplies used at Yell Manor are reused from prior SRO Theater shows in the past. He said the community-based theater group has also used supplies from YHS and South Puget Sound Community College’s drama clubs, too.
“There’s a few things that we inherited or received as donations from the high school or SPSCC or other theaters of things they didn’t need anymore but didn’t want to trash,” he said. “There’s some cool set pieces that we’ve been able to use over the last few years.”
