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.
