On the Thursday night before Halloween, Thomas Ratking ’26 walked into Raymond House, unsure of what to expect. He had heard the dorm was lurking with ghosts, witches and zombies for the night of their haunted house. But as he opened the door to a mysterious room on the second floor, the horror that struck him was greater than anything he’d imagined.
He should have been warned by the inhuman noises coming from within the room as he entered. The ceiling was beginning to cave in, with wet plaster eerily dripping from above. Cobwebs dotted the edges of the room. He heard the sounds of rushing water and was soon startled by a gasp as a large stone detached from the ceiling, landing with a thud in a locked shower stall concealed by a curtain.
A putrid odor soon met his nose. “This must be the smell of a rotting vampire,” he postulated. His suspicions were confirmed when a bat flew through the window, darting through the piping, veering above his head and pounding its wings for minutes before perching upside down on a pipe.
Ratking knew that this room was a surreal window into centuries-old history, something that no human had truly experienced in generations. So after consulting a textbook of historical methodology, he heeded the well-respected advice of Karl Marx and posted a Fizz about the room. He explained that it felt like living in a Victorian-era building that hadn’t been renovated for decades (Raymond was built in 1897 and as far as we know, was last renovated then too).
But as 785 students came flocking to the second floor to follow in Ratking’s footsteps, the organizers of the annual Raymond Haunted House sat in the Raymond basement, wondering why no one was attending their usually-popular event. According to more reports on Fizz, the second-floor space had outshone the regular haunted house.
Raymond has since clarified the mishap. “To the Vassar College community, we are glad we could provide you with enough horrors to fill a lifetime. We’d like to apologize and clarify that this is an average Raymond bathroom.”