Zombies, xylophones, and 20 minutes to escape

Victor Hung ’15 and a few of his Next House dorm mates were talking about Halloween in the fall of 2014 when the conversation took a familiar turn—toward what they might build.

As residents of Safety Third, they’d all chosen to live in a dorm wing known for tackling ambitious projects and whose name hints at a certain comfort with risk. A few had recently tried escape rooms. Someone mentioned a haunted house. Someone else suggested combining the two. 

Then someone counted the days to Halloween: “We have 26 days—how can we do this in that time?”

They moved fast, dividing the work. The Next House president told them they’d need to get approval from every wing rep—the students representing each section of the dorm—before they could proceed with the build. Meanwhile, the Safety Third team sketched plans, designed puzzles, and began fabricating sections of the house. 

They dubbed it Next Haunt before they even knew if they’d be allowed to assemble the full structure. Hung says it was “a little bit of an ‘ask for forgiveness, not permission’ type thing.” While they did some of the work in the TFL (as the dorm’s tastefully furnished lounge is affectionately called), they also stashed pieces under stairwells and kept plans taped to a dorm room wall. They made their walls modular, small enough to move and ready to set up if the plan went forward.

By the time they got the official okay, much of the Haunt was already built. Over a couple of long nights, the students carried the sections into the basement and fitted them together—walls, rooms, puzzles, a ladder—until a two-story haunted escape room stood inside Next House.

Less than a month after the idea first surfaced, teams of students were lining up to enter and see if they could make it back out.

Twenty minutes in the dark

More than a decade later, Next Haunt has grown from a spontaneous experiment into an annual production, rebuilt each year in the dorm’s basement by “hauntmasters”—a cadre of “Nexties” and collaborators from other dorms who’ve inherited the tradition and the challenge of bringing it to life. It generally runs for two weekends around Halloween, with the final Sunday typically reserved for alumni.

COURTESY OF NEXT HAUNT

The structure is small—usually about 160 square feet, four or five rooms, packed tight. The theme changes every year, and with it the layout, the puzzles, the props, the sounds, and, naturally, the scares.

For participants, the premise is straightforward: Teams of up to six people voluntarily get locked inside and have 20 minutes to escape. (Designated emergency exits are, of course, unlocked.) They move from room to room, solving puzzles that open locks and allow them to advance. 

The puzzles vary widely by design. Some depend on spatial reasoning or pattern recognition. Others require careful listening, physical manipulation, communication between rooms, or the ability to keep thinking while a zombie bangs on the wall beside you. In 2024, an MBTA-themed puzzle had players move small plastic cars around a grid to free one of them from a traffic jam—a riff on the popular sliding-block game Rush Hour. The year before, a puzzle required solvers to place specific sets of physical weights on a scale; if they balanced things just so, the scale revealed the letters that would open a lock.

This variety ensures that the Haunt doesn’t test just one kind of knowledge. Teams must divide tasks, notice clues, communicate, and keep moving under pressure.

One year, that pressure arrived in the form of a mini xylophone. A short tune played over the speakers, and teams had to reproduce the notes on colored keys that had to be matched to newspaper clippings to get the numbers of a lock combination. The hauntmasters expected that in a group of several people, someone would usually have a good enough ear to help.

In practice, the puzzle proved impossible for some teams. While many eventually figured it out, others were, as hauntmaster Sophia Benjamin ’26 remembers, “completely lost.” “Sometimes we’d get a group of all tone-deaf people,” says Benjamin, who served three years on the puzzle team (including two as a puzzle lead), and those watching by security camera would be “dying” as they witnessed the teams “epically failing at playing music.”

On top of the puzzles, the house’s Halloween-y nature adds its own layer of difficulty. The rooms are dark with black walls, and teams have only a few flashlights. Spooky music plays in the background. A sound cue marks each five-minute interval. Zombies—portrayed by costumed hauntmasters—appear through openings, wait behind doors, or pound on walls while teams attempt to focus. “Something you don’t realize is how different a space is when it’s just completely blacked out,” Hung says. 

For Katherine Panebianco ’26, who went through Next Haunt every year as an undergraduate, managing the game’s spooky side got easier once she understood the format. During her first Haunt, a jump scare caught her off guard within the first few minutes. “I spent most of it just kind of huddled in a corner with one of my other friends, who also got really spooked at the beginning,” she says. “The other years, I’ve been more helpful with the puzzle solving.”

Benjamin sees that dynamic from the design side as well. A puzzle may seem reasonable during testing, only to turn out to be just the opposite once a real team enters the room. “I think the people who it’s easiest for are just the people who are not fazed by zombies,” she says, “and also who are practiced puzzle solvers in general.”

“You’re like ‘Oh, yeah. That dumb scare. I thought about that, and I am directly responsible for all those lovely screams emanating from the basement.’”

The hauntmasters aim for an experience that is difficult but not impossible—frightening without shutting down the game. Participants should feel disoriented but not helpless, rushed but not frantic, scared but still able to think. When a team gets stuck, organizers occasionally slide a hint under the door on a slip of paper.

The 2025 Haunt, inspired by the video game Portal and called “Get in the HOLE,” sent teams into an unethical research laboratory. Seventy-three teams attempted it. Just 12 escaped. The record stood at 14 minutes and 51 seconds.

The numbers give the event the flavor of a competition and hint at the design challenge underneath: building something that feels exciting, unknown, and genuinely hard while still giving contestants a fighting chance. The first year, Hung remembers, the organizers watched the tally board—teams that escaped on one side, those that didn’t on the other—and noticed that too few were succeeding. They responded by tuning the puzzles until the success rate bumped up to about 25%. Today, the target is roughly 20%.

Once the clock starts, participants experience all the carefully planned and executed details through motion and surprise: a code works, a lock opens, a door gives way, a zombie appears. For the students who built it, those moments are crucial tests of whether the house is functioning as intended.

Michelle Liang ’28, a mathematics major and a previous Next Haunt producer, says the work’s payoff often comes in real time. Even a brief reaction from a stranger moving through the dark can feel rewarding. “You can just see people’s reactions in the house,” she says. “You’re like, ‘Oh yeah. That dumb scare. I thought about that, and I am directly responsible for all those lovely screams emanating from the basement.’”

Before the clock starts

The hauntmasters’ work begins months before a team steps into the dark.

Preparation starts in early summer, when organizers begin debating the year’s theme and the layout that will carry it. The two decisions evolve together. A puzzle cannot simply be dropped into any room; it depends on what the team has already seen, which door needs to open next, which lock controls which clue, and whether players can communicate across walls or only with the people standing beside them.

By early September, the building begins. Volunteers work in shifts, often on weekends. The structure goes up first; then the rooms fill with puzzles, props, and furnishings sturdy enough to survive team after team. Sound engineers create custom audio, preparing everything from spooky thematic narrative voice-overs to musical puzzle clues. 

The hauntmasters aim for an experience that is difficult but not impossible— frightening without shutting down the game.

Benjamin has learned to think about puzzles as both ideas and physical objects. In most puzzle-writing contexts, the challenge lives on a page or a screen. At Next Haunt, a puzzle has to withstand darkness, panic, repeated handling, and the fact that people under pressure do not always use things the way designers expect them to.

For one recent puzzle, Benjamin wanted to create something tactile and nearly unbreakable. She imagined wooden cubes marked with symbols on different faces. Solvers would arrange the blocks so that matching symbols touched; the correct configuration would reveal a code on top. The first version began on the back of an envelope at an airport.

Hauntmaster Sophia Benjamin ’26 portrays the zombie Pigeon Man. She says Haunt is easiest for practiced puzzle solvers who are not fazed by zombies.

COURTESY OF NEXT HAUNT

Benjamin built a prototype, watched others test-solve it, and discovered it was too difficult in ways she hadn’t anticipated. She reduced the number of symbols, added instructions that had initially seemed unnecessary, and rebuilt the final version for the Haunt.

An effective Next Haunt puzzle feels challenging and satisfying to solve but not so demanding that hauntmasters have to become tutors. In a previous year, Benjamin says, the puzzles were so hard that zombies occasionally had to help. More recently, the team has worked to correct that: easier puzzles, scarier zombies.

First-years and power tools

Liang discovered Next Haunt through posters around campus. She joined up as a first-year and became a producer the following year. In that role she helped coordinate the production teams, keep the work moving, and get sign-off on safety plans from the MIT administrators. She jokes that Next Haunt helped cure her fear of email.

Every year, the Haunt draws in new volunteers. An electrical engineer, a painter, a train enthusiast, and a first-year who has never touched a power tool can all end up working to gird the structure so it can survive repeated runs by frightened students, professors, and alumni. “A lot of frosh join us in the fall, and it’s a chance for them to do something at MIT that’s maybe outside of what they usually do in high school,” Liang says. “It’s a really great experience to work with all these people and make something that’s so ambitious and really cool.”

In the weeks before opening, the pace picks up and the hours increase. Liang playfully calls the pre-run push a kind of trauma bonding. Late nights, last-minute fixes, fatal puzzle flaws surfacing at the worst possible moment, instructions that make sense to their authors and no one else—all reinforce a closeness that comes from collectively freaking out over the same deadline.

The xylophone puzzle required teams to reproduce the notes of a tune played over the speakers and then match the colored keys to newspaper clippings to get a lock code.

COURTESY OF NEXT HAUNT

The Haunt is hard on its infrastructure. Students build it, run the experience, reset everything between groups, and repair what breaks—at times with the next would-be solvers already waiting outside. During one run, a frightened participant stepped on a wooden box holding a puzzle component and crushed it. The Haunt team swapped the box before the next group arrived and then ordered a replacement advertised as strong enough to hold ammunition. By teardown just days later, that box had broken too.

Like Liang, many first-year volunteers who show up in September often end up running parts of the production within a year. Former producers—typically juniors or seniors—also stay involved as assistants, helping the new crew absorb what predecessors learned through trial, failure, and repair.

A haunted admissions test

MIT admissions officer Chris Peterson, SM ’13, first encountered Next Haunt through Hung when it debuted in 2014.  He now encourages members of the admissions staff (most of whom are not MIT alumni) to go through the Haunt each year, in part to “acculturate” them to the campus. A 17-year veteran of the admissions team, he sees it as a way of giving them stories for the road and a sense of MIT’s residential culture—the things students build together in their dorms, apart from any official programming. 

The experience also offers a glimpse of something he thinks outsiders can miss about MIT: the humanistic, narrative, and design skills that are central to what its students do. Next Haunt is, he says, “very characteristic of the zany, creative things that you’d only see at MIT, and among MIT students.” It is an engineering project but also a storytelling one; hauntmasters think through atmosphere, pacing, visual design, and the emotional arc of the solving process.

Since 2014, contestants have navigated a haunted asylum, an alien invasion, a lighthouse haunted by drowned souls, and a nuclear meltdown. In 2023, they puzzled their way through “S.T.U.D.: Spooky Terror Under Destruction,” a riff on MIT’s own Student Center, which was then shuttered for renovations. In 2024, it became an MBTA tribute seeded partly by one puzzle-­team member’s enthusiasm for trains and the old song about Charlie, trapped forever beneath Boston.

Peterson has been through it most years, but over more than a decade of Next Haunts, no admissions office team has escaped. He finds that fitting; he reminds admissions staffers that their job is not to be smarter than MIT students, but to admit students capable of doing things MIT students should do. 

He also thinks there is something instructive in the feeling of being genuinely stuck—clock running, puzzles unsolved, zombies at the door. “Getting the equivalent of a 25% on an exam is not something most MIT admissions officers would have done,” he says, “but it’s maybe something most MIT students have experienced.” So he sees failing to escape as a good reminder of the psychic terrain their students inhabit.

After the walls come down

Hung did not expect the Haunt to last. “I thought it was, like, an insane activity,” he says. During those first 26 days, he was focused on getting something built before Halloween.

From a distance, though, he’s followed as other students reuse pieces, invent new themes, and push the project further than he imagined. “It’s really great to see it continue on and get crazier and crazier every year,” he says.

After MIT, Hung continued to be driven by what he describes as a desire to “add more delight to the world.” He now runs the entertainment company Midnight Mansion, which is currently developing a new project called Edge of Elsewhere, a 12,000-square-foot immersive experience combining art, puzzles, and mysteries.

Next Haunt began with a similar impulse: to build something, without a prompt or a grade, that would make people shriek in a basement, argue over a puzzle, and perhaps even bond over the experience. (At the exit, participants sign the playful “you survived/you died” board—and only a proud few end up on the survivors’ side.) Keeping the Haunt tradition alive has required engineering and fabrication, but also judgment, trust, and the willingness to spend long hours on something built to disappear after a few short weeks.

When the final run ends, the walls come down, props return to storage, and puzzles get dismantled, repaired, or retired. Students graduate. The basement resumes its ordinary use.

Each fall, a new group inherits the same question Hung and his friends faced in 2014: how to make this work in time.

They answer by building it again.