Alex Dezieck ’08 knew he wouldn’t survive when he saw his roommate, who was wearing nothing but a pair of underwear and a bandana on his head, dive towards him from across the second floor of their house. Dezieck was tagged in the assault, his roommate satiated from the kill. Fifteen minutes later, Dezieck tore the bandana from his arm and placed it upon his head, his final act as he left the fully living to join the half-dead zombies in their conquest of campus.

In the fall of 2006, Dezieck took part in a campus-wide “Zombies Versus Humans” competition that consumed the student body for two weeks, turning dorm rooms into fortresses, marshmallows and socks into mechanisms for defense, and the everyday routine of classes and work into a chaotic scheme for survival. After a few years without “Zombies Versus Humans,” the University will see a revival of the competition this year, starting next week.
“It was epic,” said Hannah Masius ’10, a participant in the first event in 2006. “It was a great way to release a lot of energy and have the entire campus involved. It was insanity. People were running around with marshmallow guns, hiding and attacking each other.”
Few rules govern the spontaneous nature of the “Zombies Versus Humans” competition. Two zombies are designated at the start of the event, with the objective to increase their number by tagging humans. Humans must wait 15 minutes after they are tagged before becoming an active human-hunting Zombie, and a Zombie who does not have a kill within 48 hours dies and is removed from the game.
Humans are required to wear a visible bandana on the arm at all times, and Zombies must wear a bandana on the head. According to University-determined rules, bathrooms, academic centers, sports facilities, WesShop and other designated buildings serve as human safe spots. Humans are allowed use of marshmallows, socks, and nerf-guns to defend themselves against the onslaughts of zombies
“We were college students and clearly should have been doing something else, but at the time, this is what mattered,” Dezieck said.
Two students from Goucher College first designed the “Zombies Versus Humans” competition in 2005, and the concept soon spread like a zombie virus to campuses and institutions across the nation and world. A website now chronicles the growth of the movement, even catching the eye of satirist Stephen Colbert, who named the competition as the number one threat facing America in a 2008 episode.
The idea for a campus event originated in the fall of 2006 from a post on the student run blog, Wesleying, by Alyssa Greenberg ’08 who, after hearing about the competition from a friend at Goucher, wanted to gage how much interest there was for a Wesleyan version. She received an enthusiastic response.
Nick Marshall ’10 and Xue Sun ’08, among other students, took on coordinating roles in the first of two campus zombie events: creating a Facebook group, flyering around campus, designating rules, forming a human-zombie tracking system and working to promote campus excitement. Around 150 students participated in the first round, which lasted from Nov. 30 to Dec. 6 in 2006.
An alternative campus reality ensued from the start.
“There were a lot of really crazy things,” Sun said. “One person hid under a bed to grab the foot of their roommate. There were always Zombies jumping out of trees. Humans at the end didn’t go to class.”
Sun recalled how her best friend, knowing her work schedule at the Center for the Arts, staked out her dorm room for hours as a Zombie, waiting for her to return home. Another night, during the campus showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Humans with bandanas could be seen trying to sneak in unnoticed by lurking Zombies. Ultimately, Sun remembers, the last Human remaining was on the cross-country team and simply outran all the others.
For Masius, the most memorable moment occurred at Summerfields, when a group of Zombies tried to attack a Human leaving the dining hall.
“It was like a ‘Terminator’ scene,” said Masius. “This Human outfitted two massive nerf-guns that looked like AK-47s and started pelting away at the Zombies. It’s like cops and robbers but more epically awesome because its Zombies and Humans.”
Dezieck described the intensity of the last few days, once the mildly interested students had been removed from the game.
“Some person as a Human did a drive-by shooting on a zombie—he was a real player,” Dezieck said. “One of the last Humans in the first round who was very into it ended up pistol-whipping a Zombie.”
For many of the participants, the stakeout of Alpha Delt has become a University moment of historical precedence. Sun recalled that towards the end of the competition several Zombies, who were trying to prevent one Human who lived in the building from escaping, encircled Aplha Delt. The standoff ended later that night, as the Zombies overtook the student trying to flee along College Row.
Another unforgettable scene occurred when Brian Studwell ’09 jumped off the roof of MoCon, the old dining hall, in order to ambush some passing Humans. While ultimately victorious, Studwell fractured his heel in the act and was left limping for weeks.
“I remember like it was yesterday,” Studwell wrote in an e-mail to The Argus. “I lept! Arms outstretched and teeth barred onto the backs of two of them! One of my finer achievements as an undergraduate, no doubt.”
During the competition, Wesleying and other web-mediums came to play an important role in facilitating the movement. Daily updates were provided through the University blog-spot about the status of the game, such as how many Humans were left, as well as advice to participants hoping to improve their chances.
“Mini-marshmallows have more spread and less range; Regular marshmallows have more range and less spread,” read a post from Nov. 30, 2006. “Always throw more than one at a time, and keep them in your palms as you walk.”
In addition, after the remaining humans formed the Braintrust, an anti-Zombie fortress, Zombies created the Brainlust, a secret message board that used Facebook and other websites to post the pictures, class schedules, and dorm rooms of the last 24 Humans in order to better coordinate attacks.
Scenes of students clad in bandanas chasing others with nerf-guns while pelting marshmallows did garner some outside attention. On Nov. 30, The Hartford Courant ran an article titled, “The Living Dead Go To College,” chronicling the unusually warring atmosphere for this liberal arts institution.
Students, however, recalled the administration’s hands-off approach to the event as long as it remained safe.
“Ultimately, we got very little attention from the administration,” Dezieck said. “It was President Bennett’s last year, and in terms of student activity, I think he was mostly content to let the students be the students.”
Dezieck explained that the rules of the competition are purposely informal so that the game can be accessible to all interested individuals.
“The biggest thing of the rules is that they are mainly observed on goodwill,” Dezieck said. “You basically don’t cheat. It is one those games where when you try to put constraints on them, people start to get antsy.”
Following the initial success of the 2006 event, Dezieck took on a coordinating role for a follow-up competition in the spring of 2007, which ran for about 10 days and had about 150 participants.
As coordinator, Dezieck and others organized new Zombie Versus Humans missions for the second event, in which the winning group received a pre-determined benefit for a set time. One such mission, Dezieck recalled, required that the Humans retrieve flags hidden in the Center For Arts and bring them to the old campus center within a certain time period.
“There was a small army of about 10 Humans, and about 20 Zombies chasing them around the CFA,” Dezieck said. “The Zombies staked out the campus center and ultimately caught the Humans.”
While a success for the Zombies, Dezieck felt that the missions might have been too structured for many of the participants.
“The missions put a little too much strain on the game,” Dezieck said. “We were asking people to cooperate too much. I felt like it was met with a sense of apathy.”
Yet the momentum of the University’s first battle in the fall of 2006 and the follow-up in the spring of 2007 inspired Frazer Goldberg ’11 to bring the fight to the next generation.
Goldberg is coordinating a game, to begin on Sept. 28, that will be modeled after the decentralized methods of the first event in 2006. After hearing about the competition from a friend who graduated in 2008, Goldberg was inspired to continue the tradition. He hopes to see participation surpass 200 students, so that his role as coordinator will be secondary to the inventiveness of the players.
“It’s the most fun if you let people play and take a step back,” said Goldberg, who has so far received decent interest from the student body.
Director of Student Activities and Leadership Development Tim Shiner considers the competition to be an asset to student life as long as it remains within safe and sensitive boundaries.
“What I saw when the event ran in the past is that it got a lot of students involved and I think it was a very positive community building activity,” Shiner said.
While some past participants are eager for another round, others may watch this year from beyond the battleground.
Marshall, the coordinator of the first game, chose not to participate in the second round in 2007 and does not plan to participate again this year.
“It was fun the first time that it happened, but I didn’t want it to be something that happened every semester and would wind up being lame,” Marshall said. “It’s supposed to be a weird disruption of campus life; I don’t think that it happening every year would be a good idea.”
Adam Schlesigner ’10, an active Human hunter in the first round, will probably participate again, but not with the same enthusiasm.
“[The 2006 event] coincided with a period of time in my life when I had a lot of free time,” Schlesinger said. “I therefore spent many afternoons hunting Humans. It was fun to get involved on campus in a less structured way.”
Goldberg, however, is confident that the campus is ready again for another round of marshmallow-pelting, nerf-gun-yielding Zombie-stalkers, who, in between Topics in Combinatorics and The Psychology of Gender, make the time to defend the human race.