Yale Physics hosts Haunted Hallway and Halloween Demo Show

The Yale Physics Department, in partnership with Yale Pathways to Science, hosted its annual Haunted Hallway and Halloween Demo Show at Sloane Physics Laboratory (SPL) on Saturday, November 1. 

The outreach event was geared toward students in grades 6–12 and their families, with the objectives to share science with the local community and showcase the department’s collection of physics demonstrations. Costumes were encouraged.  

About 275 people attended, with students and their families coming from public schools in New Haven, West Haven, and Orange. 

The Haunted Hallway and Halloween Demo Show was led by the Yale Physics instructional team—Caitlin Hansen, lecturer; Paul Noel, Interim Manager, Instructional Labs; and Matthew Ennis, lecturer; with logistical support from Pathways to Science. Also supporting the event this year were thirty-two volunteers, including research scientists, staff, postdocs, graduate students, undergraduates, and visiting high school students from Wilbur Cross High School. A number of the volunteers were members of Wright Lab. 

The event began with over thirty hands-on demonstrations in the SPL hallways, including a “zombie detector” that used an infrared thermal imaging camera to detect body heat; a liquid nitrogen station where visitors could see materials become brittle at cryogenic temperatures and smash frozen racquetballs; and a vortex cannon that launched toroidal air rings to knock down stacked cup pyramids, showing off principles of pressure and fluid dynamics. 

On the third floor, visitors experienced a Pepper’s Ghost photobooth, which uses a piece of acrylic set at a forty-five-degree angle to create the illusion of ‘ghostly’ figures floating in space. There was a supplemental Pepper’s Ghost “make-and-take” activity, developed by Rona Ramos, where families built their own miniature versions they could take home with them by using transparency film and their cellphones to create their own illusion.  

After an hour of hallway demonstrations, attendees gathered in a lecture hall to experience a live demo show, hosted by Wright Lab graduate students Emily Pottebaum, Andrew Tamis, and Greg Penn. Tamis and Penn performed as “dueling podcasters,” using live experiments to demystify ghostly phenomena. 

Halloween Show Presentation Slides 

Photos of the event by Yale Pathways to Science photographer Kyo Lee.