[Group Post] Next Haunt 2024: The Survivors by Jenny B. '25

Jebby

Every fall since 2014, Next Haunt puts together a horror-themed escape room in the Next House basement. In my opinion, it’s one of the coolest showcases of student culture here. Students pitch in their talents and skills—ranging from puzzle-making to set design—to put on a spooky show for the MIT community. In 2021, even former MIT president Rafael Reif had dared to escape the horrors!

Despite the fact that I’ve been living at Next House for 3.5 years, I still hadn’t done Next Haunt.

My excuse is that I forgot to sign up in the previous years. But that isn’t entirely true. For one, I get spooked easily. Whenever I entertained the idea of doing a Next Haunt run in the past, the shrieks from the basement would make me change my mind. I’m also not that good at solving puzzles, especially when I’m under pressure. Getting jumpscared in front of friends is one thing. But displaying my intellectual incompetence to them in real time? I could never.

But since this is my senior year, I decided to suck it up and be a big girl. I enlisted the help of my fellow bloggers so we can make it out of Next Haunt alive.

Andi

This was also my first year doing Next Haunt! I’d heard many great things about it (one of my friends was even a cast member two years ago), but I was always too lazy to gather a group and sign up. So when Jebby did all the hard work of securing a slot this year, I had no excuse not to sign up.

I really enjoy escape-room-style puzzles, and Next House is famous for housing many nerds clever people who create clever and interesting puzzles, so I was very excited about getting to solve these puzzles. Furthermore, Next Haunt was designed with a few quirks that made these puzzles especially challenging:

• We only had 30 minutes to escape (half of what a typical escape room would give us), so we needed to be extra speedy to solve all the puzzles in time.
• The “room” was actually a big wooden shipping container-sized box in the Next House basement, so it was completely dark inside. We were given flashlights to help us navigate, but whoever held the flashlights couldn’t write things down and had to rely on verbal communication.
• Also, Next Haunt was a horror escape room, so we’d get jump-scared by screaming zombies while doing long multiplication (yes, the puzzles were very mathematical). As if that wasn’t terrifying enough, if any of these zombies managed to touch you, you would be “eliminated” from the game. (I later learned that the cast members were told not to eliminate anyone but just get close.)

The first puzzle we faced was an empty room with a colorful toy xylophone, a combination lock, and various newspaper clippings lining the walls. After a minute of confused silence, we realized that the eerie tune playing in the background was also a part of the puzzle. At first, I tried replaying it on the xylophone, hoping a door would magically open. But then I remembered that we were standing in a wooden box with no electronics inside, so that didn’t work. Instead, Jebby and Aiden noticed that the newspaper clippings were numbered and were about specific MBTA train lines (each corresponding to some color). Using these color-number pairs and the colors of the xylophone, we decoded the combination lock and moved on to the rest of the escape room!

Immediately after entering the next section, a scary-looking zombie wearing a pigeon mask burst into the room and split our team in half, which was unfortunate because we were only a group of three (whereas most people do Next Haunt in groups of five or six). Jebby and Aiden were together in one group, while I was left alone in the other.

Giving me no time to process what had just happened, the pigeon-headed zombie ushered me to the next puzzle (Jebby and Aiden got a different puzzle). My puzzle involved using tarot cards to unscramble a message dispersed between three fortune cookie fortunes. I think the intended solution was to walk around the room and use the clues written on the walls, but instead of doing that, I just sat there staring at the slips of paper and trying to unscramble the message in my head. Somehow, this strategy actually somewhat worked, and I managed to unscramble almost the entire message (mostly because I guessed it would involve numbers)!

“Forty-thr… ifty-six? Aha – 4356! That must be the code to the combination lock in front of me!”

However, the lock would not open, and for two reasons: I was missing some letters from the middle of the message (the correct message was “forty-three times fifty-six”), and (more embarrassingly) I was also trying to open the wrong lock.

At this point, we only had about three minutes left to escape. The pigeon-headed zombie must have felt sorry for us because after witnessing me trying to open the wrong lock, they brought me the correct lock and handed me a TI-84 calculator. (Good call on their end – I would not have been able to do the long multiplication in my head.)

It turned out that my puzzle was the last puzzle we needed to escape! So with just one minute to spare, Aiden, Jebby, and I made it out of Next Haunt alive!

Aiden

As a fresh-faced MIT first year, it was only recently that I learned of such important MIT Halloween traditions like Next Haunt. I was walking out of the Next dining hall when I saw a poster with a QR code, told my roommates we should sign up, and then instantly forgot about it until I received an invitation from Jebby. 

Theoretically, Next Haunt should have been where I really showed off my skills. I have been obsessed with escape rooms and everything even horror-adjacent for years. Plus, I go to MIT, so I should be able to do a simple puzzle, right?

Wrong!

The only MIT “puzzle” (AKA the most complicated, time-consuming, and well-put- together thing you’ve ever seen) I had attempted at MIT so far was when the school rented out the Boston Aquarium for a nighttime party/puzzle-solving-sesh at the end of orientation. Apparently most people didn’t finish despite working almost all three hours on it, but a friend and I immediately gave up and went out to the deck to get churros instead. So much to say, I was not going to be the most helpful at Next Haunt.

This was proven true, the moment we stepped into the pitch-black room that was just a little too claustrophobic, all of my skills, hopes, dreams, and aspirations crumbled. I wasn’t so petrified that I couldn’t talk, but Jebby and I definitely stood in the corner furiously looking around us while Andi did the first puzzle (thanks king!). 

Naturally when we were forced to split, Andi, as the smartest and tallest, was forced to be alone, leaving me and Jebby in a room plastered in MBTA maps and an ominous 6:34 written on the wall. And when I tell you that I have never been more grateful that something wasn’t filmed!⁠01 it was filmed :( – Dominic, Next Haunt 2024 Producer I felt like one of those celebrities that would go on Ellen or Jimmy Fallon and do a horror escape room and just look so incredibly stupid (it was hilarious, though).

The puzzle had us do basic unit conversions (i.e. minutes to hours) to find how long it would take to get from a T stop in Boston back to Next House. Out of generosity, Scary Bird Man visited me and Jebby very frequently to point at the maps in a specific order to give us clues.

He did this so many times that it prompted me to ask if he was disappointed in us, at which he shook his head and just handed us a TI-84. After getting the answer wrong another ~1000 times, we stumbled along the right answer and were handed out silver coins to escape the T.

Since we escaped barely in time, the three of us got to solidify our legacy by writing our names in Sharpies on the list of previous winners. 

Overall I am disappointed by how emasculated I felt by the dark, a bird mask, and middle-school algebra, but I am so glad I got to take part in an MIT tradition that I’ll get for the next three years!

Closing statement by Jebby

Our names are forever immortalized as one of the smartest and bravest souls to pass through Next Haunt. Nobody will know that I shrieked and ran from a guy in a pigeon mask.

On the other hand, Petey and other admissions officers went right after us, and they met the demise that we managed to avoid.

Read Part 2 here!