Over spring break, the Waidner-Spahr Library hosted an escape room for students remaining on campus. Groups of four to eight students had to work collaboratively to find and defeat the mysterious “Count Stackula.” Over the course of two hours, the “amateur vampire hunters” found clues in the form of letters from famous pop-culture vampire hunters that directed them to locations all throughout the library where answers were hidden in books, computer harddrives and even painted rocks. The experience culminated with students opening two locked boxes, which directed them to a hidden coffin containing Count Stackula himself: an adorable vampire plushie with a mermaid tail.
This popular activity over spring break served as a fun way for on-campus students to hang out with their friends while testing their critical thinking skills and exploring the library’s resources.
The escape room was organized by Circulation Specialists Destiny Eisenhour and Micala Hotra-Schubert with the assistance of Library Fellow Moses Krueger. The first library escape room was held last fall during a pre-orientation program, where Library employees attempted to “add a little mystery and fun to figuring out what the library has to offer,” Eisenhour said.
The trio explained that the escape room was based around the Count Stackula plushie because he is the library’s “little mascot” and many of Dickinson’s buildings have a castle-like appearance, making this campus a fitting place for a vampire’s castle.
For Eisenhour, the best part of running this escape room was “seeing in real time students interacting with library resources … for the first time.” The escape room required its groups to explore the entire library from top to bottom, allowing many students to discover parts of the building that they had never been to before, such as the Archives and the rock garden. While it was originally designed for first-years, the escape room was even fun for upperclassmen who had never explored the library in its entirety.
The escape room was designed to be completed in under two hours but it took the librarians between six to eight weeks to create. It has since been run seven or eight times, including the preliminary test-runs by other librarians.
The librarians plan to run the escape room again in the future, although they may adapt it to make it “more accessible,” according to Eisenhour, meaning that they will probably shorten the completion time so that it fits into more peoples’ schedules and alter the design so that students will not have to spend as much time running up and down stairs.
The librarians hope that more students will try out the escape room in the future, as “it’s a lot of fun, for us and for them.” The escape room will likely not run again this semester, but students next year should keep an eye out for more opportunities in Castle Waidner-Spahr.
