The Stuyvesant Haunted House

Ah, Halloween: the only holiday with candy that you perpetually feel you’re far too old for, costumes that reveal way too much about their wearers, and a certain flavor that only early Christianization-induced cultural dilution can provide.

Stuyvesant’s Halloween celebrations have all of these qualities turned up to 11: impressively strange costume displays and enough small joys to almost make you forget about your math test tomorrow. Almost. However, Halloween at Stuyvesant misses the most fundamental part of the holiday—the fear of the unknown. Stuy students don’t have that, because we’re so filled with anxiety that under normal circumstances we can’t feel any dread.

Realizing the threat this sad fact posed to our enjoyment of the holiday, Principal Yu made the only logical decision and diverted about 20 percent of the school’s budget from warding off the elder gods to constructing a Stuyvesant-themed haunted house. “If the students can’t enjoy the holiday, what’s the point of not being driven insane by horrors far beyond our comprehension?” Principal Yu exclaimed. As it would turn out, though, the haunted house itself might have been the greatest horror of them all.

“The first week after [the haunted house] opened everything was fine, as not enough people had gone through for the problems to be noticeable. But then people started disappearing,” an anonymous senior reflected. “It was almost like the people of Stuyvesant were traumatized, staying away from the building out of pure fear.” We reached out to those who had gone through the haunted house for comment, but upon approach, every entrant ferociously skittered away.

By the second week even the staff were impacted. The first to stop coming into school were the janitors, stripping Stuyvesant of its last facade of cleanliness. A fungus unknown to modern science cultivated in the crevices of the Sophomore Bar, the cafeteria became overwhelmed with bees, and the second-floor bathroom became only slightly more disgusting. That brings us to today—four weeks after the creation of the haunted house. Only two types of sentient beings remain in the school building: seniors, who through sheer apathy have managed to remain unaffected, and the now-sentient Sophomore Bar fungi. According to the biology department, these advanced fungi have rapidly achieved an understanding of multivariable calculus. Since nobody who’s been through the haunted house is willing to discuss their experiences, the Humor department has decided to enter it ourselves and record everything about each room there, no matter how mind-bendingly awful it may be. Maybe then we can convince Principal Yu to tear it down and return to spending that money on appeasing Yog Sothoth.

Unfortunately, the Spec Humor team we sent in has been unreachable for several days now. In a probably unrelated note, the tentacles growing out the Hudson stairwell have enlarged significantly since the incident.

After these disappearances, Principal Yu had no choice but to take the haunted house down, citing his “disappointment at its phenomenal failure to bring holiday scares” rather than the several missing persons cases it caused.

Upon its demolition, people came back to the school almost immediately. This included the janitors, who immediately spread fungicide around the entire school and ended thousands of sentient fungal lives in an instant. School finally started up again and Stuyvesant students have returned to harboring their normal fears, like socialization lasting more than five minutes.