Happy haunts materialize......
There has been much discussion and debate about the new Haunted Mansion interactive queue. While I haven't experienced it yet and therefore won't dare to venture an opinion, I do have one thought that I'd like to share at this time. The queue has a lot of cool-looking features: a ghost that asks you to help her write poetry, a gravemarker that plays music at the touch of your hand, etc. However, some of the features haven't revealed their interactivity yet. There's been some brief mention of these features, with notes that maybe their secrets will be revealed eventually, but no speculation as to what those secrets might be. Well, consider this post the first (only?) attempt to solve that riddle.
It is April 15, 2011, and I *think* I am making the first guess ever (at least from the 20 or so blogs and 20 or so podcasts I follow) at what one of the currently "silent" queue features will become (or already is but has gone unnoticed by the masses thus far): a murder mystery that YOU get to solve!
My evidence will focus the busts of members of the family that used to live (and now presumably haunt) the mansion. What tipped me off to the murder mystery theory were the poems that appear underneath the busts describing the subject's death and the small icons/pictures that appear right above the poems. Let me walk you through them.
Cousin Maude:
Icon: a hammer
Poem: Our sleeping beauty who never awoke the night her dreams went up in smoke.
The Twins, Wellington and Forsythia:
Icon: a dead/falling bird
Poem: Departed for life while in their beds with identical bumps on identical heads.
Aunt Florence:
Icon: a gun
Poem: Never did a dishonorable deed, yet found face down in canary seed.
Bertie:
Icon: poison
Poem: Avid hunter and expert shot, in the end that's what he got.
And the kicker....
Uncle Jacob: Icon: none?
Poem: Greed was the poison he had swallowed, he went first the others followed, his killer's face he surely knew, now try to discover who killed who.
So OBVIOUSLY, what we have here is a murder mystery, no? The last line of Uncle Jacob's poem seems to be presenting a challenge to the guest.
***SPOILER ALERT***
I'm going to solve it here and now, so if you don't want to know, STOP READING NOW.
Let's go backwards:
Uncle Jacob was poisoned. Bertie has poison as the icon on his bust. So Bertie poisoned Uncle J.
Who killed Bertie? Well the poem says he was shot, and Aunt Florence's icon in the gun so she must have shot him. Although her poem says she never did a dishonorable deed, I like to imagine she shot Bertie to try to prevent him from killing her husband, Uncle Jacob. That's pretty honorable, considering, no?
Auntie F died in canary seed, so clearly a bird was involved in her death. Maybe it's a killer bird? Or toxic seed? I don't know, but the twins' icon is a bird so I am willing to bet they killed her.
And how did the twins die? With bumps on their head. From a hammer perhaps? That would make Cousin Maude their killer.
I'm guessing Cousin M's death involved fire (because of the smoke reference in the poem), and I don't see fire anywhere on the icons or in the other clues. However, Uncle Jacob is the only one left who hasn't killed anyone in this story so by process of elimination, we can say that Uncle Jacob killed his daughter, Maude. It looks like my friends at Meet the Magic may have a clue about the fire!
And there you have it. A previously never-discussed (to my knowledge) secret of the new Haunted Mansion queue.
UPDATE: Main Street Gazette has now covered this idea. Please note that I did it first ;)
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