I shit you not: Alumnae Hall basement

Thanks to advances in technology, society has been gifted with higher definition entertainment. Such includes horror video games such as Outlast, Until Dawn, and recently, Man of Medan. The gore is significantly more pronounced, with guts glistening in the screen and blood that no longer looks like chocolate syrup. Death scenes are more graphic, with characters’ faces contorting in ways horrifyingly accurate to real life faces. These games are all set in different places, but the creators of the games never neglect one constant of humanity: shitting. There are always bathrooms in these high definition horror games, sparing no detail about the toilets, especially the horrible things that have been disposed in them. And while I have not run into gore during my time at Brown, I believe I have experienced a bit of the horror of walking into a bathroom in one of these games. The perpetrator? The bathroom in the basement of Alumnae Hall.You can get to this bathroom by either going through the door in the lower floor, or through the door in the top floor and going down a really fun looking spiral staircase. For maximum creepiness, sneak into the building past 1, when most of the Pembroke folk are shut up in their dorms. Spiral staircase. Cool. Trapdoor underneath the staircase with a chair perched over it? Not cool. This is the point in the video game you reload all your weapons or prepare for a bunch of quick time events because you know something’s going to emerge from it when you’ve got your back to it.Down the hall we go, lit with yellow-tinted fluorescent bulbs. Even as a person under five feet, this hall was suspiciously short, with barely an extra foot above the doorway. If this was a chase scene, you would not be able to jump over anything.I pushed open the heavy, creaky door, the varnish just ever so slightly sticking to my fingertips. Why are one of the vent things on the door gone? Why was it replaced by an off-brown colored panel? I stepped into the dark bathroom, lit up only by the barred window at the other end. Ah, yes, the single exit during the inevitable chase sequence. I turned the flashlight on, looking around for the light switch, trying to forget about the fact that some of the stalls were ominously shut, as though they were hiding some...strange shit. I shit you not, this bathroom scares the shit out of me. Once the lights are on, the bathroom regains about half of its...shittability? There was surprisingly nothing suspicious in the actual stalls, no dismembered body parts or slime. Most of the physical toilets were clean, the toilet paper standardly single-ply, the flushing mechanism wonderfully mediocre. One good thing about this bathroom? The doors shut really snugly. I mean really snugly. To the point where I had to barge through it to exit, but I had little fear about someone coming in and seeing me at my most vulnerable state on the toilet. It wasn’t like I was sitting there comfortably. I kept getting the feeling my exposed feet would be my downfall, as though someone would grab my ankles and pull me out from under the stall. If I pulled my feet up, I would be able to stay in the stall undetected, but this knowledge led me to realize that it would also be supremely easy for someone to be hiding in the stall next to me, just waiting. 

I’m rather confused about the sink situation. What’s the deal with the two taps? Why do we love binaries in this society? I want warm water, not just hot water or cold water. Am I just supposed to freeze my fingers or burn myself? The sinks are also just way too close to each other. If I’m washing my hands, there’s not only a good splash zone, but also some elbow room I’m going to need. How the heck am I supposed to do that if someone else is standing shoulder to shoulder with me?

 

I was happy to leave this bathroom. I was so relieved to leave behind the bathroom of a horror game without having encountered any body parts or even people. 

There was a strange clanking sound coming from the upper floors, which would’ve been fine if there actually people around. Something was going on in the main hall, but the sound was calling me from the spiral staircase. This, of course, would be the part in the horror game where the protagonist (stupidly) decides to explore the area, splitting up with their friends, but I was alone and had already done my duty in Alumnae Hall. I had no reason to go looking for ways to get killed. Toilet quality wise, it’s functional. The sinks are functional, despite their binary nature. The toilet flushes. It’s not physically uncomfortable to sit on the toilet. It’s by no means comfortable, sitting there, waiting for your imminent death, but there’s leg room. But if you’re already in Pembroke, you might as well use a bathroom that doesn’t look like it’s straight out of a horror game.  Images via MJ Lee '22