Students competed in teams for Halloween baskets, comprised of candy and pumpkin-spice-scented flushable Dude Wipes, by racing to see which group could solve the mystery of who has been haunting the Chester Fritz Library first. The event, titled “The Ghost of Chester Fritz: An Escape Room Experience,” was held at the CFL’s reading room, or fishbowl, last Tuesday, October 29.
The escape-room experience was organized by Rebecca Brown, the CFL’s web service librarian, and Zeineb Yousif, the CFL’s digital initiatives librarian, who both, in addition to their position’s responsibilities, assist with student outreach at the CFL.
During this time last year, Brown and Yousif organized another escape-room event, “The Lock Box of Chester Fritz.”
“That was based off our social media post; that is kind of our claim to fame. There was a hole they had to knock in the wall to do something with the wiring,” Brown said. “So, one of the people on our social media team did a really witty post. Where she was like, ‘oh, we’re looking for someone to climb into this hole in the wall.”
This social-media post was where the plotline of their first escape was derived from, which follows into their subsequent escape-room experience.
“What we said, in the first one, was ‘hey, we wanted to get these boxes unlocked, but ever since that happened, things got weird in here,” Yousif said. “We’d like hear noises, lights flickering, and photos falling, so clearly a spirit is trying to tell me something.’ The goal of the escape room was to decode the message and tell us who’s haunting us.”
To decode the message, students used a cipher to crack the code. Along the way, students were faced with puzzles, locked journals, UV lights, and false-bottom boxes.
“We definitely did a lot of the DIY. So, building the false bottoms into boxes, creating the cipher, and creating all the weird additional props, it was all in house,” Brown said.
In its entirety, this escape-room experience took about a month to prepare. The event coincided with a ghost hunt, where teams could find six different types of ghosts across the CFL to get a deduction from their final time.
“I’m assuming they were all found, but we hid about 300 of them,” Brown said.
Next year, Brown and Yousif plan to create a new escape-room experience that develops their storyline.
“We are looking into, potentially, making an actual escape room in terms of a can we get people out of a room,” Yousif said. “I do want to follow the storyline.”
Brown uses CFL’s student outreach to promote the CFL as a neutral space where people can connect.
“We’re not associated with any department or organization,” Brown said. “I feel like we’re perfectly positioned to be that meeting ground for all types of people and different kinds of events.”
Dylan Campbell is a Dakota Student General Reporter. He can be reached at [email protected].
