[Guest Post] Next Haunt 2024: The Haunters by Jenny B. '25

Preface from Jebby: In addition to participating in Next Haunt with Andi and Aiden this year, I was also fortunate to have two Next Haunt staff members reply back to my request for a behind-the-scenes guest post. If you haven’t read Part 1, I encourage going back and reading it for context.

Dominic (Producer, “The Pigeon Man”)

Hey guys, its me, the Pigeon Man, but also the producer of this year’s Next Haunt! There is a lot that goes into making this happen every year, from the puzzles to arranging the build and actually running the thing. Because of that, I wanted to talk about some of the processes that went into making sure everything happened. Sophia will discuss this from a puzzle team perspective, so I’ll go in with a general overview of this year’s timeline!

[March] Recruitment – Part 1

The first major step to start Next Haunt is to recruit exec; most importantly being the producer, a.k.a me. The producers for last year’s Haunt—who became this year’s assistant producers—had interviewed me shortly before spring break about this role, although this was mostly for me to get information on the role rather than anything on their end. As I had been the sound designer the year before, they were already familiar with me. A week or so later, I got the email that I got the role!

[April to May] Recruitment – Part 2: Electric Boogaloo

My immediate first task was to recruit everybody else immediately important; namely the entirety of puzzle team, the art director, and the build director. Luckily, it wasn’t hard to get puzzle team or the art director, as both the puzzle lead (Sophia) and the art director had worked on Haunt the year before and were interested in continuing. Additionally, I was able to convince two of my friends to join puzzle team, as did Sophia, so puzzle team was pretty much filled pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, finding someone to be the build director was much harder. The previous build director was now a grad student, so we had to start from scratch to find someone else. Eventually, we did get a lone application for build director, which was from someone with no experience with Next Haunt, so I was hesitant. But seeing as how they were the only applicant for the position, we had to accept.

[May to August] Summer Scheming

Now that exec is recruited, we use the summer months to start planning for Haunt! The summer months are slow in this regard, but important stuff has to happen in this time for us to be able to do anything in the fall semester. Unfortunately, both the art director and build director were busy during the meetings, so they ended up being just the producers and puzzle team.

At this time though, we ended up on the MBTA theme (at the strong behest of one of the puzzle team members) and started planning out the house flow and puzzles. Importantly, we had to start getting in contact with MIT EHS⁠01 MIT Environment, Health, and Safety Office. The EHS Office oversees several areas at MIT that range from environmental sustainability to occupational safety. to prep for build in the fall, which is delegated to the build director. 

[August] REX Rampaging

Once August rolled around, we had to lock-in on advertising to the new frosh during REX⁠02 Freshmen can figure out what dorm they want to live in during Residence Exploration (REX), a multi-day experience where dorms hold events that showcase their culture. (especially since we cancelled the CPW⁠03 During Campus Preview Weekend (CPW), admitted high school students visit MIT and go to various events that showcase campus culture. event that normally goes on), which meant we had to take a break from discussing the main event to focus on planning for this. Our REX event is primarily a mini-Haunt, where we recycle some puzzles from the year before and make a smaller version of Next Haunt that we run for the frosh.

In essence, because so much stuff is recycled from the year before, we just had to buy prizes and food for everyone (‘Cause everyone loves free food! This is a common theme this year) and set up the puzzles from last year. Running it wasn’t too bad either; we had one person handling reservations and checking everyone in, and a couple more people acting as scare actors to frighten the froshlings.

[September] Recruitment – Part 3: This Time It’s Personal

Now that September was here, it was time to do everyone’s favorite thing: more recruiting! Around this time, unfortunately, the build director had indicated they were unable to continue fulfilling their role, so we were scrambling to find a replacement.

Normally, for the fall, we recruit for less time-intensive positions so we get frosh. Namely on exec, we recruit art team, a costume designer, assistant build directors, and a sound designer (this year we didn’t recruit for sound specifically because my co-sound designer from last year was returning).

Luckily, we were able to recruit people for every role. We recruited a record of eight art team members (this will be important later). Additionally, we recruited an assistant build director which was very helpful for build. However, we needed more people to help to get this done.

[September to October] Sketchy Building

Because of the tight situation we were in, the assistant producers and I decided to just ask the rest of exec if they were able to become build directors as well. Surprisingly, four of the art team members had volunteered to become build directors in addition to the one we recruited. And let me tell you, having the five build directors really saved our asses in regards to getting this house done. We ended up having four build weekends where the house slowly but surely got built. I would love to talk about some of the stories that happened during build, but in the interest of not writing a novel, I’ll have to leave those for another day.

there was a problem on the ceiling

evil charlie on the evil mbta; also the puzzle team member who suggested the theme is named charlie

[October to November] Time to Scare Everyone!

After everything is built, now is the main event everyone has been waiting for: the Haunt itself.

I don’t have too much to add to this beyond what Sophia has said already, although I will say that, as Pigeon Man, it is very hard to be very scary when you see people struggling with arithmetic. Also, the bloggers were one out of only two groups to have all of their members escape the MBTA; they only got everyone out because they were three people.⁠04 I disagree! We got out because we were super smart and totally knew what we were doing. – Jebby

holy shit pigeon guy irl

another costume we used, mask was affectionately referred to as a certain article of clothing

[November] Sketchy Building – Now in Reverse!

Now that everyone was sufficiently scared, EHS required us to take down the building we put our sweat, tears, and blood into (It also takes up the entire Next House basement, so many others were also desiring the destruction of our beautiful piece of art). Thus, every year, we have to do a little thing called strike, where we unbuild the house. Unfortunately, destruction is less tantalizing than construction, so we didn’t get too many people to help strike (I had to pull in a favor to get a friend to help). Luckily, we were able to remove the house from the basement to start Haunt all over again next year.

[December?] PARTY TIME!!!

Except, Haunt isn’t over yet! There is no longer work to be done, but we still gotta celebrate our hard work. Thus, we are planning on having an after-party sometime before finals. This is a Next Haunt tradition, where exec has a dinner where they chill and hang out after everything was said and done, but this stopped because of COVID. But this year, it is coming back with a vengeance! Currently, the plan is to do an escape room with all of exec (very thematic) and then have a dinner with everyone. Once this is over, Next Haunt 2024 can be laid to rest.

Some other fun tidbits I wanted to mention before signing off –

1. We had $850 budgeted for “interior design”. We were never planning on spending any of it on interior design. I have no idea why we still have that in the budget.
2. We had to use a lot of duct tape during the build weeks; don’t worry it wasn’t load bearing duct tape, although EHS can’t have been happy about seeing duct tape all over.
3. During one of the early runs, I was a zombie (not pigeon guy), but I tried a new thing where I just walked around the house after being let out; I was in there for a solid five minutes being a scream generator before I was told to leave cause I was too scary and hampering the group’s progress.
4. So many people forget how to do 1d kinematics when they’re stuck in a dark room, given 25 minutes to escape, and with a scary pigeon headed man looming over them.
5. Finally, one group saw the airport puzzle and said “I don’t wanna do math” and gave up entirely on that room.

Sophia (Puzzle Lead)

Hopefully from the perspective of those participating in the house (e.g. the above bloggers) everything was fun and epic and scary and definitely all functioning as intended. From the perspective of someone running the house, I can say there were literally zero times where everything functioned exactly as intended.

So then it’s a matter of triaging and deciding what things can be messed-up and is still ok, what things can be messed-up for now but should be changed soon, and what things need to be changed asap for the house to be a fun experience. There was a lot of stuff we were constantly changing on the spot because anticipating things in advance is hard, especially when the thing you’re trying to anticipate is “how will a group of human beings interact with our house, given they are potentially quite frightened but also maybe totally unafraid”.

For instance, from a puzzle perspective, we did a lot of changing how the puzzles worked on the spot because we realized they were too hard. Relatedly huge shoutout to build team for navigating a bunch of unanticipated challenges and still managing to build an entire house. Overall Next Haunt is a huge group effort and its kind of incredible that it all manages to come together, but its super fun to see so many groups of participants have fun with the finished product (we end up having on the order of 80ish groups with 5ish participants each).

Incomplete list of fun behind-the-scenes moments:

• At least two instances of the participants trying to scare the zombies (at one point I, as a zombie, made zombie noises at participants and they made zombie noises back at me??) 
• One of the puzzles involved hearing a melody and recreating it on a xylophone. Sometimes we would have a group of pretty tone-deaf participants (no hate, I am also quite tone-deaf) so I got to watch all of our musically inclined run crew take psychic damage as the participants played entirely the wrong notes
• This box. The label on the box not only makes sense in context, but it is also the most concise and accurate label there could possibly be for the box

• At an early exec meeting in like September someone offhandedly mentioned how they were scared of pigeons. What ensued was that our house included many pigeon-themed elements, from the art on the outside wall to one of the zombies dressing as a pigeon (It fits with the MBTA theme too! I just saw a pigeon on a Red Line train two days ago)
• Inside the house we wrote gullible on the ceiling. Sometimes participants would find it, and one time we told participants it said gullible on the ceiling and they immediately stopped doing all their puzzles to go look for it