year to revel in spooks and scares. When you’re a child, it’s easy to be put on edge by zombies or ghosts; as we get older and more jaded, the dread of the unknown becomes more muted as it becomes more… well… known. However, don’t be fooled by the idea that just because you may be older, nothing can get under your skin, because there’s one nest of perpetual horror that makes even the most thick-skinned soldiers wince at the thought of journeying to… public laundry rooms.
No matter what dorm hall you live in, unless you lug your laundry home on the weekends—as some do to avoid this soul-rending ritual—you will have to journey to the laundry room. You can only have so many clean clothes, and with every article of clothing that doesn’t go in the hamper as much as it gets piled on, you’re reminded of your impending trip. When you enter the laundry room, you’re greeted with mounds of forgotten clothes piled high on washers and dryers. While many use the strategy of setting a timer on their phone to alert them when their laundry cycle is complete, others use the interesting method of leaving their wet clothes sitting in the washing machine for an undetermined amount of time. The nifty part of this is that it forces a random stranger to take your clothes out. Personally, I don’t see the appeal, but apparently many would disagree with me because I always see at least four mounds of clothes when I walk in there. Now the first thing you gotta do is feverishly check all the machines in the room, because your humiliating three-minute trip lugging weeks of laundry may have been for nothing if you can’t find a machine that is (a) not being used and (b) not broken. Walking in when every machine is empty may just be the college equivalent of hitting the Powerball.
Where there is black, there is white. Yin cannot exist without Yang… and with this logic, what is a washing machine without a dryer? The fun part about dryers is that unlike their sopping wet counterparts, they don’t actually do ANY cleaning. They just heat your clothes up and toss them around. Meaning that if the dryer you picked is dirty, you may just be getting your clothes as dirty after they just got cleaned. A haunting game you can play is one I like to call “dryer lotto.” Take a look in the dryer to see what kind of interesting trinkets have been left behind by your laundry predecessors. Recently I’ve found a guitar pick, nickels, and someone I know was lucky enough to find a whole stick of gum. He was alerted to this only after it was sloshed around with his underwear.
Now if you want a REAL laundry horror story, one residence hall takes the cake. If you ask anyone who was a resident of River Terrace in the spring of last semester what happened to their laundry room, you’ll notice a traumatic chill crawl down their spine as they grimace at you. If you’re lucky, they’ll tell you the tale of how their entire laundry room was shut down. One haunting night, a mysterious ghoul—or a random guy—scattered its ectoplasm all over the laundry room. Or they unloaded a fire extinguisher onto every surface in the room. Regardless of what went down, it cost about $10,000 in damages, and for around a month River Terrace residents were forced to lug their laundry on a three-minute walk across campus to the equally harrowing Davis basement laundry room. Truly horrifying.
