Lived Through This
What I Overheard as an Escape Room Actor
Lock a group of people in a room and you’ll witness some surprising confessions
A few years ago, I was tasked with creating several escape rooms in a historic county park. As the only park employee who happened to be a professional writer and game designer, I became the project’s manager. We wanted to make use of a few beautiful old buildings on the park grounds, so the “scary” room I chose was half the second story of a 150-year-old house. The place was frightening enough before we brought in the flickering lamps, skeletons, and strange potions.
And what could be scarier, of course, than stumbling across a live human prisoner in the half-shadows? For a majority of the attempted escapes over those first two years, that human was me.
During Halloween season, several hundred patrons would play the escape rooms each week. As they progressed through the house, they would eventually discover that the owner of the place had chained someone to a wall (hi). Supposedly, the owner had imprisoned me for some nefarious reason.
My first responsibility was to scare the group. Once they were scared, my job was to make them generally uncomfortable while offering hints, usually in a cryptic and insane manner.
