Fellow Bwoggers ventured into the laundry rooms of their freshly moved-in dorms and noted just how incredibly scary they are. When every trip to the laundry room feels like a descent to hell, Bwog feels that it is necessary to rank each dorm by how likely you are to be found dead while laundering.

From least to scariest:

5. McBain

This laundry room is at the bottom of the list because I honestly would feel pretty safe doing laundry solo here. McBain has a run-of-the-mill laundry room; this L-shaped configuration of machines is exactly what comes to mind when I try to picture a dorm laundry room. If you live in McPain, the laundry room is the least of your problems; the bathrooms that aren’t cleaned over the weekend are probably more lethal than the laundry room ever will be.

4. 616 West 116th St.

This one is also fine. The exposed pipe on the wall makes me nervous, but beyond that, this really seems like a spacious and nice laundry room. I can see everything in the room, and it is well-lit—what more can I want? But if anything spooky ever does happen, I can always try to break through and climb out the windows. The table beneath the window functions as an excellent ladder for escape.

3. 601 West 110th St

The exposed and heavily tape-reinforced pipe sitting tightly above the dryer threatens to burst at any moment. The girth of the exposed pipe here makes the one in 616 look like a joke. Exposed pipes in general make me incredibly anxious, but the way this one sits on top of the dryers makes my heartbeat especially fast. The machines are so jammed and sardined together that they almost seem to form one mega dryer entity, capable of overthrowing human civilization.

2. Furnald

Practically speaking, this laundry room has the highest likelihood to cause an actual death from sock slippage. Looking at this is mind-boggling—just how many people have to forget to take out their laundry for the pile to get so mountainous? The old-timey, informational posters are also a nice reminder of the history of the room and that probably many generations of haunted spirits lurk here.

1. Broadway

If looking at this doesn’t make your blood curdle, then you probably never got nightmares from scary Spongebob episodes as a child. I don’t need to take Art Hum to tell you that the chiaroscuro in this image, with the stark contrast of the light and darkness, is a pants-dropping level of frightening. Once you step beyond the light, who knows what might engulf you along with the darkness? Even worse, imagine if, suddenly, there is a power outage (or ghost) and the light goes out on your way to the washing machine. Are there even washers and dryers in Broadway, or is there never a laundry room to begin with? What if it’s all a front for the ghosts to lure you into their darkness at the other end of the hallway? I can say for sure I don’t have what it takes to do laundry alone if I lived here.

laundry room via Bwarchives

McBain, 616, 110, Furnald, and Broadway laundry rooms via Bwog Staff