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How to have the most interactive experience at Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe, NM.
Living room inside House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe, NM. Photo by Kennedy Cottrell
Do you know how many dragons are hidden in the front yard of the Selig House? I bet you didn’t even know there were dragons in the front yard of the Selig House to count! Next time you’re there, count em. There’s an entire horde of dragons just waiting for you to find them.
This document isn’t about dragons, though. It’s about the experiences to be had within House of Eternal Return. The only way to begin is by beginning, so, in no particular order, here are some of the lesser known, the hidden, and the brand spankin’ new HoER experiential to-dos.
We made an app, folks. We really really did the thing. Meow Wolf 5000 Ultra Mega App Of Good Times & Shenanigans: The App. It's actually just called “Meow Wolf,” but it has all those other things in its heart of hearts and you can get it now in the various app stores.
But what is the Meow Wolf App? It’s a collection of short videos, an eye-spy game, and a pet in your pocket. It’s a place to get tickets to an exhibit and read the credits for that artwork you love. It’s Meow Wolf without the walls or travel. Once you are in an exhibit, though, it turns into a super-charged storyteller.
The Psychic Sensor is your gateway to the story. As you wander through the realms inside the exhibit, you will encounter pockets of psychic traces that the app will help you decode. With the help of our friendly AI travel guide Alva, you can collect and explore the videos, audio, and readables that you encounter in the Selig Home at your leisure. Alva also has behind the scenes secrets to share about the art itself.
This is my personal favorite interactive activity at the House. It’s in the tiny room at the top of the stairs in Fancy Town. You step in and are greeted with walls covered in light up buttons. There are diagrams on the walls of constellations. The key here is to figure out which constellation goes with which set of buttons, then to find the right order to push the buttons. If you do them all, you get a pretty sweet reward.
Take the portal from Portals Bermuda to Murok-Inoo. Here is a trailer owned by Lucius Selig. Inside is a radio that plays two mysterious broadcasts. One is Lucius himself talking from somewhere in the multiverse. The other is from a radio station calling itself ETNL.
Back in the far corners of Portals Bermuda is a window into a prehistoric landscape. Here, you can gaze into the past. And you can interact with the friendly dragonfly that’s sitting here. Just lightly — LIGHTLY — tap the glass and watch for its reaction. Just don’t go into the portal and step on anything… you might change history.
We all want to learn new things. Like how to knit or how to crack a safe. In reality, most people pick really bad passwords, this is true for safe codes as well. People always use a birthday or an anniversary. And some… not naming names or anything, but hello Emerson!… then keep documents with those dates all over the place where even an amateur safecracker could find them.
Hamsters live for only a short time, usually. They also usually don’t go galavanting around the multiverse leaving weird echoes of themselves throughout space and time. The Selig’s hamster, Nimsesku, is not “usual.”
This quite possibly immortal little guy went with Morgan after the events in the House. But he left traces of himself behind for us to ponder, question, and find!
We think there are somewhere between 20 and 30 variants of Nimsesku throughout the Santa Fe exhibit. The trouble with Nimsesku is that he’s lived a million lives, so there are always more to discover.
This is only a small sampling of the out of the way and new things to experience at the House of Eternal Return. We really meant it when we said Eternal Return folks. Come back and see what you might have missed.