BAKER LAB—Chemistry students were overcome by sheer terror Monday morning as they entered Baker 200, which had been transformed into a haunted house by changing absolutely nothing. Stepping through the foreboding double doors, students were confronted by the same sights, sounds, and scents as those of any ordinary chem lecture, but only in the context of Halloween did they suddenly recognize the blood-curdling character of what they once considered “normal.”
“There are feet dangling over the edge of the mezzanine,” commented Hal Owens, ’25, hugging his knees and nervously rocking in a main-level lefty-desk. “The shoes are in prime position to plummet onto any one of our heads. I don’t know what’s more frightening—the prospect of getting knocked out mid-class or having to tell people you got knocked out mid-class by a hideous falling Golden Goose.”
Other haunted elements include waves of contagious coughs rippling across the classroom, odors of corrosive chemicals lingering from jump-scare balloon demos, and shrieks from the rusty pulley system swapping the upper and lower blackboards.
“When the professor began to switch the blackboards, I heard the groaning ghosts of 2070 past,” said Stella Ton, ’26. “It’s the same sound the machine thing always makes. But today, for whatever reason, I could make out words in the piercing noise from hell: ‘STUDENTS BEWARE! YOU’RE ALL GOING TO FAIL THE NEXT PRELIM.’ Now I’m scared to death for my S-GPA.”
It is suspected that the hauntedness of Chem lecture has eluded students throughout the year due to memory-altering spell-casting by the professor. Students have pointed to “big scary chem words” as potential spells, such as “antimarkovnikov hydroboration oxidation” and “molecular orbital theory.”
