Despite the rain, the “Halloween Whodunnit” hosted by the Union Programs Council After Hours committee took place Friday night. The event featured a university-wide “Clue” game, finishing with a murder mystery and improv show performed by On The Spot Improv.
Instead of dampening the mood of the event, the rain added to the atmosphere of the scavenger hunt, according to Stephen Kirkwood, freshman in business administration.
“The rain added this spooky effect and the fact that no one was in the buildings that we went into just like amplified it even more,” Kirkwood said, “The atmosphere was just so much more spookier.”
For Halloween, UPC After Hours normally coordinates a show with On The Spot Improv, according to Rachael Herter, junior in fine arts and After Hours co-chair. She said UPC members expressed the desire to make the show a little bit more interactive, which resulted in the idea to have a scavenger hunt similar to a well-known board game.
“Much like the game ‘Clue,’ students were given a list of possibilities and they needed to use deductive reasoning to figure out which of those possibilities was put in the secret envelope,” Herter said.
According to Herter, the game included 10 campus buildings, 10 K-State celebrities as suspects and 10 different murder weapons. She said some of the suspects included people such as Willie the Wildcat, vice president of student life Pat Bosco, director of bands Frank Tracz and Bill Smriga, executive director of K-State Student Union. The weapons were not necessarily lethal but were random items found on campus like a gavel, football, sculptor’s pick and rope.
“’Whodunnit gets students involved with the campus and familiarizes them with places they wouldn’t normally go,” Herter said. “It also is a great chance to meet people and a great way to get involved.”
The scavenger hunt brought Alice Harris and Ryan Schmid, both graduate students in entomology, to unfamiliar locations on campus.
“I really like going into buildings I have never been in before,” Harris said. “I have been here for four and a half years and have only ever been in like McCain, Waters (Hall) and the Union. I had no idea what was in all the other buildings so it was neat to see some of them.”
For the game, students could compete as individuals or in teams of up to six players. The students were given a sheet of paper with clues to the locations of the hidden cards and also a solution sheet of all the possible people, weapons and buildings included in the “Clue” game.
The winners of the “Whodunnit” game were announced during the intermission of the On The Spot Improv performance. According to Herter, the individual first place prize was an iPad mini and the prize for the winning team was the choice of a trip to either Locked Manhattan, the zip line course or the paintball course in Junction City.
