You got out of Cathy’s house once and swore you’d never set foot in it again. Ten years on, the door has swung shut behind you, and this time she isn’t asking you to play. She’s redecorating.
In short: In The Possession, your team goes back into the house it fled a decade earlier. Cathy, once a lonely child ghost, has become something worse and decorates her rooms with the souls of past visitors. You have one hour to get through her collection without angering her.
Ten years have passed since your team clawed its way out of Cathy’s house. In the daylight you told yourselves it was nerves, bad wiring, a ghost story that grew with every retelling.
So why are you standing at that front door again? Perhaps you needed proof it really happened. Perhaps, under all the fear, you felt sorry for a little girl who only ever wanted company.
Whatever brought you back, the house has been expecting you. The air is thicker, the walls have gone further to rot, and something low and cold settles in your stomach the moment you step inside.
Cathy is no longer just a lonely spirit. She has become something else, and the visitors who came before you have been turned into her playthings, their torn souls hung about the rooms like ornaments.
You have one hour to work through her collection without making her angry. Run out of time, and you become the newest piece of décor in the house.
You made it out once. Cathy remembers.
The Possession was built to feel like a home that has kept rotting since your first escape: blood-red lamplight, smoke hanging in the air, cabinets crammed with dolls and the remains of earlier visitors. Puzzles are layered, and the scares land in between them.
Stills from Escape This’s footage of The Possession.
The Possession was Escape This’s first sequel. The studio took the house it had built for The Haunting, moved the story on a decade and asked what a lonely ghost would turn into with ten more years alone.
It opened at Northbridge in November 2021, a few doors from the prequel, then arrived at George Street in Sydney in October 2024 and Collins Street in Melbourne in August 2026. Each city got its own build of the same story.
Come as paranormal investigators, a priest and his reluctant helpers, or the battered survivors of your first visit. Closed shoes are a must, and in Melbourne pick clothes that can handle a crawl.
A house you already escaped once. The Possession is Escape This’s 60-minute horror escape room set ten years after The Haunting: you return to Cathy’s home, find it darker than you remember, and have an hour to get out before she adds you to her décor. It runs in Northbridge, Sydney CBD and Melbourne CBD for teams of two to eight, all aged 15 or over.
Ideally, yes. The Haunting is chapter one and The Possession is chapter two: the same house, a decade apart. Escape This says you can walk into The Possession cold, but knowing Cathy’s home from the first visit makes the return hit harder. The Haunting only plays at Escape This Northbridge, so Perth teams can take both chapters in order on one night.
The Possession leaves that deliberately open. Escape This’s Perth version asks whether you came back because you doubted your own memory of the first escape, or because you pitied Cathy. Either way, ten years later something has pulled you through her door again, and The Possession starts the moment it closes.
Something much worse than a lonely ghost. In The Possession, Escape This says Cathy has become “something else”: she turns visitors into grotesque playthings and dresses the house with what remains of her “friends”. Your team has to get through her collection without provoking her.
Yes. The Northbridge telling of The Possession names the building as Atkins House and calls it Perth’s most haunted house, the scene of twelve macabre deaths over 125 years. Escape This built the room inside its heritage-listed Lake Street venue, a building it describes as having a dark past of its own.
Only the opening. In Sydney CBD and Melbourne CBD, The Possession begins in a decaying building that has stood abandoned behind the city’s glass towers, a place you wrote off as rumour until you were shut inside. The fate to avoid is identical: ending up as one more piece of Cathy’s collection.
Escape This bills The Possession as based on a real haunted house and inspired by its true history, and its old room site pointed to the deaths recorded in the Northbridge building. The game itself is a scripted horror story, so take the ‘true history’ as atmosphere rather than a documentary.
Yes, and plenty of teams do. For The Possession, think ghost hunters, exorcists or shaken survivors of the first visit, but wear closed shoes and something easy to move in. In Melbourne, choose clothes you don’t mind crawling in.
Escape This did, as the follow-up to The Haunting and the first sequel room it ever made, and it runs all three versions. Escape This is Australia’s largest escape room operator, and runs its own escape room design studio and escape room factory in Australia. It was named Escape Room Operator of the Year in 2025 and 2026.
She does. Cathy writes a diary on the site of The Haunting, the first chapter, and calls Desmond “the Beeping Man”. Many of her pages describe the same nights as his files, seen from the upstairs window instead of the footpath, without repeating a word, and neither one spoils The Possession.
Book The Possession in Perth, Sydney or Melbourne. Two to eight players, 15 and over, one hour with Cathy.
