A Night of Fun at Creepy Campus Crawl

For weeks, the word – or words – of the day have been “Creepy Campus Crawl,” the Halloween event that the museum puts on every year.  This year’s theme is Nintendo, and the museum is flush with talk of Mario and Luigi, Pokemon and Zelda, stations and activities.  Just as they have every year, children start to pour in right at 6:30, dressed as characters from Nintendo, Harry Potter, Doctor Who, or whatever character they can dream up.  (One child comes dressed as a vampire bat.)

 In the front lobby, they meet some of the most classic Nintendo characters - entering a raffle with the Ice Climbers, throwing fireballs with Mario and Luigi, meeting Princess Peach.  Packing peanuts – the snow that the Ice Climbers have to climb – litter the floor, to be tracked all around the gallery, but nobody seems to mind.  Today, the museum is hardly the Museum: it’s instead a place of characters and costumes and candy, and everybody knows it.

When they leave the front lobby, the children make their own Pokemon in the Devonian and Pennsylvanian, aided by the Pokemon trainers, who have put together an impressive array of characters.  Although the Ice Climbers might not be familiar to all children, Pokemon is hard to miss.  Elbowing each other for room at the tables, the children color in their own Pokemon cards – some very detailed, some a quick dash - and then hand them to their parents to carry.

 

In the Meskwaki area, decorated with fluffy clouds to represent the world of Kid Icarus, the children wrap aluminum foil around paper plates to make mirror shields, assisted by Palutena and Medusa, the main goddesses from the game.  When they finish, Pit, the game’s hero, shines a flashlight on the shield to make it shine, and the children head to the Ecology section to build rockets with the Pikmin.   

There’s more fun to be had downstairs – where the Geoscience department has set up shop – and in Bird and Mammal Halls – where you can find rupees with Zelda and play skeeball with the cast of Earthbound – but no matter where you decide to go, there’s always something to do.  Each child leaves with an assortment of crafts – shields, Pokemon, rockets – and an evening well-spent.  And since Halloween falls on a Wednesday this year, it’s only the start of an extravaganza.

 

Halloween is that rare holiday where, for a few hours, you can pretend to be someone else.  No matter the strength of the disguise – after all, the scary looking ghoul is always a child underneath – it’s about the fun of playing pretend, of dressing up, of trick-or-treating and pumpkins and ghosts.  For a few hours, you can climb with the Ice Climbers or write yourself into the Legend of Zelda; it only happens once a year, which makes it all the more worthwhile.  

-Written by MNH Volunteer Catherine Babikian