You might be sleeping (and partying) in your suites, but you’ll probably end up at least once (hopefully more than once, please do your laundry) in a basement, whether in a residential college or on Old Campus. Down there you’ll find washing machines, televisions, gyms, pool tables, kitchens, butteries, pianos, bookbinding workshops, ballet barres, computers, and dysfunctional water fountains. Whatever you’re looking for, we’ve got some advice on where’s best for what.

Basement You Are Most Likely to Be Murdered In: Saybrook

The hallways are narrow, the paint on the walls is rough and off-white, the flooring is that awful high-school-cafeteria linoleum. Random doors line the walls, and opening them may reveal a music practice studio, an electric panel, or an axe murderer. For some reason everything is sort of curved, and if you make too many turns you’ll never find your way out. On the other hand, the Squiche has a fantastic menu. It’s a trade-off. (Tip: if you think you’re lost, just keep following the hall and eventually you’ll be back where you started, provided you live.)

Basement You Are Most Likely to Be Murdered In But At Least There’s an Air Hockey Table: Branford

Most parts of Branford’s basement look just like Saybrook’s, except bigger. And nicer. And freshly renovated. And there’s an air hockey table. (Okay, so some of us are a little bitter.) The best part is that you can get to the Branford basement from Saybrook, and vice versa, so you can experience a genuine horror movie chase scene when someone jumps out at you with a knife.

Best Basement to Go to When You Want to Make Art While Feeling Bad About Your (Lack of) Finances: Jonathan Edwards

If you haven’t heard already, JE has the largest endowment, and it shows. Besides a gallery of Walker Evans prints, there’s also a darkroom, a dance studio, a 60-seat theater (renovated from a squash court), and a print shop (also newly renovated) for the JE Press. Make art and watch other people make art and enjoy the resources that you won’t have when you’re a starving artist after graduation. But don’t feel too bad because money is the root of all evil and Jonathan Edwards’s ghost is definitely lurking around down there, stamping out sin in generations of Yalies, if the huge quote in the stairwell is any indication.

Best-Smelling (and Best-Tasting) Basement: Bingham

It might not be very pretty, with its bare white walls and industrial lighting, but as one of two locations to do your laundry on Old Campus (the other is Farnam), it always smells fresh and crisp, the air choked by detergent. Plus, if you do your laundry at a normal hour you can drop into the Chaplain’s Office to get an ice cream sandwich from the freezer or a handful of Swedish Fish. Clean underwear and sugar: what more could you want?

Basement In Which You Will Realize You Are Actually Attending Yale: Calhoun

If you took every preconceived stereotype you had of how Yale would look—polished wood paneling, plush wine-red rugs, austere leather chairs—and threw them together into one room, it would probably look a lot like Calhoun’s basement. As you descend the carpeted stairs, fingers trailing the smooth banister, you will sink deeper into the realization that yes, you are actually here (!), at Yale (!!), where neatly coiffed students in gold-buttoned blazers and cocktail dresses cross their legs and debate politics and Foucault and The Name of the Rose (!!!). Plus, you’re in the basement of that college that’s always on the news for racism. It’s just like the Yale you dreamed.

Keep reading here!