The Halloween spirit began to fill the air on Thursday, with students dressing up for their classes and ending their nights at a party or haunted house. The Herald followed members of the Brown community as they organized and attended Halloween celebrations throughout the weekend.
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On Thursday, students in NEUR 0010: “The Brain: An Introduction to Neuroscience” dressed up in neuroscience-inspired costumes, such as Otto Loewi’s famous frog heart experiment. Every year, Professor of Neuroscience Michael Paradiso and Teaching Professor of Neuroscience John Stein host a costume contest. This year, the coveted participation prize was a gummy candy eyeball.
For around five decades, Professor of Computer Science Andy van Dam has leveraged skits in his teaching. Whenever Halloween comes around, the skit in his class, CSCI 0150: “Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming and Computer Science,” takes on a spooky posture.
Van Dam said that his course’s skits — which are performed by teaching assistants — are a “powerful attractor” for students.
The skit performed closest to Halloween is called “Slush Gray and the Seven Vertically Challenged TAs,” a play on the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. In this skit, van Dam plays the Wicked Witch. The goal of the skit is to teach students how arrays, or groups of items, work.
To make the skit more festive, the CSCI 0150 team decorates the walls and ceilings of the Salomon 101 stage with cobwebs and pumpkins.
“As the cliche goes, we are serious about what we teach, but we don’t have to be solemn,” van Dam added.
Students dressed in costume and performed amid a haunted Underground cafe.
Kicking off the weekend’s festivities on Thursday, the Korean American Students Association and Chinese Students Association co-hosted perhaps one of the most sought-after Halloween events. Tickets for the “Phantoms at Platforms” party sold out about three hours after they were released, according to Jaych Hahn ’28, a vice president of KASA.
At the event, students danced under cobwebs, ghosts and glow-in-the-dark skeletons. The DJ was even dressed as a hot dog.
Based on his 38 years in the Providence Police Department, Brown Police Chief Hugh Clements called Halloween “one of the most unpredictable nights” of the year. But this was Clements’s first Halloween since starting his positionat Brown.
According to Clements, the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Management is “constantly paying attention to activity and trends that would lead towards victimizing students who are out enjoying a good night.”
To respond to the Halloween chaos, Clements said that his department has added additional patrols. They work closely with the Providence Police Department to monitor high traffic areas and off-campus gatherings. For safety reasons, he did not comment on the specifics of his department’s scale-up.
“We want to ensure that we have a visible, friendly and accessible presence,” he added.
DPS patrols areas where they suspect students will be partying in order to “stay ahead of it in terms of just keeping everybody safe,” he said. “We do have access and knowledge of exactly where all the off-campus housing is, and that is part of our routine protocols and patrols.”
As night overtook College Hill, students gathered at the Stephen Sondheim Amphitheater for a series of performances from student bands.
According to Emily Cook ’29 and Charlotte Hensley ’29, the co-heads of events for the Brown Student Radio, the concert was one of the first student-run music events held in the amphitheater, which was built last year.
BSR also collaborated with Birbs@Brown, which crocheted a pumpkin-shaped bird to offer as a prize for the event’s costume contest.
Featured at the concert were Stacy, Please!; You Can Be Tigers But No Crashing; Cocoon; Kimberly; and Junction.
“I got to meet new people and hear new music, and it was fun to be able to give student bands an opportunity to perform,” Hensley said.
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“Javaspook,” a coffee-themed Technology House party, featured activities from Halloween trivia to apple bobbing. A fixture of Tech House’s yearly Halloween festivities, the party serves as a prime opportunity to show off the house community and begin recruiting for the spring, according to Tech House Social Chair Leana Lee ’28.
While the name Javaspook is likely a play on the coding language JavaScript, the theme lends itself to a party full of coffee-flavored treats, Lee said.
The event, which took place on Friday, is a dry party, according to Lee. “I think it’s good for there to be fun, dry events on campus where you can experience basically all of the aspects of a party, but without the drinking,” they said.
Alexander Khosrowshahi ’27, a project manager at Tech House, spearheaded the effort to get live bands to perform at the event.
According to Lee, Javaspook had bands perform live for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic. This year’s event featured student bands Island Rovers; Stacey, Please!; Denim; and Friday Butterflies.
“I think oftentimes people reach for alcohol immediately because it gives them the license to let loose and have fun,” Khosrowshahi said. “I think the philosophy of a lot of our events is that you are kind of just disarmed by the nature of the event being silly and fun and not taking itself seriously,” he added.
On Friday, Sunrise Brown hosted its second annual haunted house in the Urban Environmental Lab. Eliot Waldvogel ’29, a co-action lead for Sunrise Brown, said their haunted house was unique because it is “environmental or political themed.”
Because Sunrise is running a campaign to fundraise for the RIPTA, this year the haunted house is “transportation and industrial themed,” he added.
According to Waldvogel, the haunted house drew about 200 students last year. “A lot of people were quite scared," Waldvogel said, “in fact more scared than I think they anticipated being.”
The actors in the haunted house are mostly members of Sunrise or their friends who work with a team of directors to develop short scenes for each room.
He added that even though the concept of a political haunted house is “quite goofy and campy,” they do a good job of “creating something that was actually rather frightening.”
Jasper Yeh ’24 MD’28, a Brown Emergency Medical Services supervisor, who is also a former senior staff writer for The Herald, has worked as a first responder during every Halloween weekend since 2022.
“If I’m gonna dedicate 12 hours to being here, then I might as well be busy,” Yeh said. “You get to feel like you’re making an impact, and as a supervisor, I can do a lot of teaching during these shifts as well.”
According to Amy Sanderson, the BEMS chief and the director of emergency management for student health and wellness, while Halloween weekend may entail an increase in calls, BEMS still follows the same operations as any other night.
“As an ambulance service, we prepare to be busy on every shift, because every day is different and not entirely predictable,” Sanderson wrote in a message to The Herald.
Yeh said that working Halloween — and other festive days like St. Patrick’s Day and April 20 — can be very “taxing” when responding to back-to-back calls.
He noted that while BEMS responders are “doing this over and over again,” it is important to remind himself that for some patients, “it’s their first time encountering the situation and knowing how to navigate that is sometimes hard.”
While Yeh has worked every Halloween for years, he noted that he only works one night, giving him the chance to celebrate the holiday with his friends on a different night.
“I have worked several Halloween shifts during my 24 years at Brown, but I cannot say that they were particularly memorable or challenging other than the obvious challenge of costumes — depending upon how elaborate they are — for emergency responders,” Sanderson wrote.
The Midnight Halloween Organ Recital has been a tradition at Brown for decades. Disuse of the organ led to a pause in the tradition in the ’70s, until Teaching Professor of Music and University Organist Mark Steinbach brought the concert back when he was hired in 1993.
At first, Steinbach’s performances consisted of a simple “candelabra on top of the organ and a jack-o-lantern.” They have since grown into a spectacle with actors and staging.
Steinbach said that he tries to vary the music in his Halloween repertoire, but some songs are staples that must be played. When he skipped Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor — a Halloween classic — one year, “the crowds got very angry at the end.” Still, he tries to “shake it up” with pieces like “Monster Mash.”
One year, Steinbach surprised the audience by having President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 perform the outro to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”
Sayles Hall has a “party atmosphere” on the night of the recital from the built-up anticipation from students who have been waiting for several hours to hear the organ, Steinbach said. “It’s very festive.”
Students looking for one last scare found a ghostly experience at the Japanese Cultural Association haunted house in the basement of Sayles Hall.
Remi Takahashi ’28, JCA co-president, said that the planning process for the haunted house began during the summer. After polling their members, the organization landed on this year’s theme: haunted hotel.
The experience begins with a video shown on the first floor of Sayles explaining the backstory of the haunted house, which is held across five rooms in the basement.
“Some people are really scared, and they’re screaming throughout the whole time. Some people are laughing at us,” Takahashi said. “Whether that’s them laughing or being scared, it’s a good opportunity to bring people together.”
Takahashi said she isn’t sure when the haunted house became a JCA tradition, but she noted that while people in Japan don’t typically celebrate Halloween, visiting haunted houses is a popular summer activity.
“I think bringing that to Brown during Halloween — we’re trying to mix these two different cultures together,” she added.