LAUREN PLATT

Themed Entertainment Engineer

-Next Haunt Puzzlemaster Award-

Project Overview

Next Haunt is a student organization at Next House at MIT which plans, builds, and runs a haunted escape room every year for Halloween. I was on the executive board for both the puzzle and build teams for two years. I was the first non-resident of Next House to ever join the executive board.

The Nightmare Before Christmas - Virtual Minecraft Haunt (2020)

As a result of the pandemic in 2020, Next Haunt was unable to create and run its haunted escape room as normal. Instead, did it virtually in Minecraft.

We chose a theme of the Nightmare Before Christmas and spent months working as a team of five on the executive board to plan virtual puzzles including mazes, lever puzzles, carnival games, and more. We built an entire server environment in Minecraft. Guests would enter in a recreation of Next House at MIT, travel down to the basement where Next Haunt traditionally takes place, and entered a portal to the Nightmare Before Christmas environment. The environment had houses, hedge mazes, a theme park, the famous curly mountain, a cemetery, and more. Guests would work as a virtual team on zoom to make their way through the environment, solve puzzles, and get back home to Next House. We also had live actors on Zoom and in the world that would scare the guests and other actors that would interact with them in the world. 200 student and faculty guests experienced the world through Halloween weekend 2020. The executive board and I planned, built, and ran the world entirely virtually.

I worked on general planning of the puzzles, environment, and guest experience. I also worked on some of the houses in the environment in Minecraft.

The Terror Beneath (2021)

I was on the executive board for both build and puzzle teams for our old mine-themed haunted escape room. I worked with a team of ten people to design a two-story house layout, engineering plan, and six puzzles. I also helped to construct the house according to Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) standards. I also worked as an actor in several different circumstances. I worked as a zombie actor, scaring groups as they went through the house! I worked as a clue zombie, knocking scarily on th walls and dropping clues whenever groups got stuck. I worked as a mine guide welcoming guests into the experience and giving them the background story and instructions. 450 MIT community members experienced the 25-minute house over the 2021 Halloween season, including MIT President Rafael Reif.

Our first puzzle where guests used clues from the newspaper and posters to determine who the criminal was and what item was stolen from the mine (jewel)

A favorite puzzle that I worked on was our "split the team" set of puzzles. There was an activity in which guests would need to hold up lanterns to symbols on the wall. The lanterns would illuminate when they touched the sensor in the wall. This activity served to separate the group across the room and allowed us to begin our avalanche sequence! A crew member in the attic of the house would drop a foam wall down to separate the group. Then, foam rocks would fall down with different symbols spray painted on the sides. Teams would have to communicate with their teammates across the wall about the symbols on the blocks to solve the puzzle and reunite. During several runs, I acted as the crew member in the attic initiating the avalanche sequence, dropping the wall, and dropping the foam blocks.

When the lanterns were held up to the matches (sensors) around the room, the lanterns would light up

After reuniting with their teammates, guests would move on to our mine cart puzzle, another of my favorite puzzles that I worked on. Guests open a door to discover a mine cart. A zombie jumps out of the mine cart to scare them! After the zombie leaves, the guests would roll the mine cart down the hallway. Halves of letters were inside of the cart and the other halves of letters were along the wall. Guests would roll the mine cart until the two halves of the letters matched up. When two halves of a letter matched up, an indicator at the bottom of the mine cart would point to numbers on the floor that indicated the order of the letters needed to spell out the word for the next lock. During several runs, I acted as the zombie hiding in the mine cart!

During runs, the Next Haunt crew and I would sit in another room and watch camera footage of the guests inside of the house to monitor their progress and to know when to drop hints when guests got stuck

Contact

508-404-3168 | leplatt@andrew.cmu.edu | Pittsburgh, PA | https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenelizabethplatt/