Over the last few months, Forgotten History Hunts has released a series of Armchair Treasure Hunts on the MW Forum. These awesome adventures have been free to participate and can be solved from the comfort of your own home. Not only do they offer the chance to claim some wonderfully unique treasures, but they provide challenging fun.
They are a great way to get introduced to the armchair treasure hunting world!
Let’s learn more!
Six Questions with Forgotten History Hunts:
- 1Q) I love the adventures you are offering searchers and I appreciate the time you are putting into them. To date, you have released 3 different treasure hunts of historical fun! I always find it interesting to learn what inspires someone to create a ‘treasure hunt’…. What inspires you?
Thank you Jenny, for inviting me to answer these questions – what an honor! I was always one to rush to the library after watching a ‘based on a true story’ movie, or after visiting historic ruins to find out what the ‘real’ story was. I wanted to know more about what I had seen. I also love doing research and creating puzzles, so it all came together to try making up some hunts.
- 2Q) As mentioned, over the last few months, you have released hunts on the MW Forum. I’d love to learn more about each one. How had you picked your topics and chosen the prizes? Let’s start with your hunt, The Roaring Twenties. Can you share a bit of how this came to be and how it all went down with searchers?
For that hunt, I was looking for a haunted place with an interesting story. I searched for quite a while before the New Amsterdam Theater caught my eye. I had never heard of Olive Thomas or her story, yet it was a huge news story in 1920. One thing I try to figure out before deciding on a topic is whether I can come up with prizes that can be tied to the story, even if loosely. Olive Thomas died after accidentally ingesting poison. I found some ‘poison rings’ (also known as perfume rings) from that era which I thought were fun.
Searchers tackled the puzzle in a variety of ways. Some figured it out by all the references in the poem to movies she had been in. Others focused on the newspaper article which was about the Ziegfeld Follies and when researching the article found that one of the pictures is actually Olive Thomas. I think everybody approached it differently, but once they solved a couple of clues, they were able to find the rest, filling in details of her story.
Most noticed the phrase I added to the article, AL BARL IS CARM/N, which was a cipher using the atomic weights of elements to spell out Mercury, but only one deciphered it. No one identified the strand of syphilis at the bottom of the page, though!
- 3Q) How about The Overseas Matron? Again, like The Roaring Twenties, an incredible array of ‘Treasure prizes’ were rewarded. Besides sharing some of how this puzzle progressed, can you also share more about the prizes? Had the topic of the hunt inspired the search for those particular prizes or had you collected these prizes previously, and you created a hunt around them?
I have to admit The Overseas Matron (an anagram for Romanov’s Easter) got away from me! I started out with the intention of having just 3 prizes, but I kept finding more eggs I liked, so I expanded it.
This time I was looking for ‘lost treasures’ when I came on an article about the missing Imperial Faberge eggs along with the Romanov story. I knew of Faberge and vaguely about the eggs, but I loved how each egg had its own story. Six missing eggs was manageable for my hunt so I made up an image for each egg based on the description of the egg.
When I decided on this hunt, I ordered three faux Faberge eggs, each with a surprise inside like the original eggs. As the hunt progressed, I saw that so many people were putting a lot of effort into solving each image, even after they had figured out the topic, and I found more eggs I liked, so ordered more! I wanted people who were working hard and solving the hunt, but maybe slower than others, to have something for their efforts.
- 4Q) And what about the latest one solved, Table for Two? (I discovered the title is not about Tea, as was my first thought! Be careful out there!) How did this topic come to your attention? What made you want to share this ‘forgotten history’?
On a visit to the Field Museum in Chicago years ago, I saw the exhibit of the Tsavo lions. I found out that until the movie ‘The Ghost and the Darkness’ came out, these lions for 70 years were simply the ‘Lion’ exhibit. It seemed unbelievable they would not include the wild story of who these lions were and how they came to be in their museum. Then I was told the museum is full of similar things – items and exhibits that came to them with fantastic stories, but are simply labeled by what they are. If that movie had never been made, these lions might still be an anonymous exhibit at the museum. I want to know these stories and I hope that by sharing them as puzzles, other people will enjoy learning about them as they work through the puzzles.
- 5Q) What are you enjoying most about creating the treasure hunts?
All of it, really. I’m enjoying researching topics and figuring out which to use for hunts and what to find for prizes. It gives me an excuse to search databases and old newspapers for interesting stories. I like seeing how people interpret certain clues, sometimes as I intended and often in ways I never imagined.
It is humbling to be on the other side of a treasure hunt as I have a better understanding of how hard it is to predict how the clues will be seen by the people working on the puzzle. It is hard to judge which clues will be seen as easy and which as unsolvable.
- 6Q) Do you have any advice for new armchair treasure hunters who would like to get involved in your hunts? Do you feel anyone new to the hobby can solve and claim one of your ‘hidden treasures’?!
For starters, my hunts will not be cipher dense. I am not familiar with most of the more complicated ones and I find them more frustrating than fun. If I use any, they are usually some form of a simple substitution cipher. Anagrams, cryptograms, word play, braille or Morse code are possibilities. I did use a polybius cipher in Table for Two as well as a phone keypad cipher, which are probably the most complicated I will use. I might use rebuses or images that are associated with the topic.
Most people new to treasure-hunting should be able to solve my hunts if they are willing to do some searching for that right match, which will offer that aha! moment. The idea is for it to be fun, not frustrating.
I will answer questions for clarity as well as post hints. My next hunt, Bad Omens, is a little different from the first three hunts, so I hope people have fun with it!