Last week, in the spirit of Halloween, we rang your doorbell with some tricky New Haven riddles and the chance to win a treat: one of three $50 gift cards to a restaurant of your choice.
Now, like a kid assessing their haul of candy at the end of the night, we’ve counted and analyzed all your submissions, and we’re experiencing quite the sugar high. The average number of solutions per person was noticeably higher than the first time we did this, at 3.63, with an extremely healthy 37% of respondents solving five or more riddles. One person—shoutout to Max S.—even solved all eight, though a handful of others were just one solution shy.
The easiest by far was riddle #2: “Named for a body of secrets unshared, its teeth and blades ever crave fresh hair.” The setup refers to Yale’s Skull & Bones secret society, but the answer, as more than 83% of participants deduced, concerns the salon named after it: Skull & Combs.
Riddle #6—“In the House on the Hill, as legend has it, he haunted his foes with ‘Sachem’’s hatchet.”—proved second-easiest. Yet it was also much trickier, with a solve rate of less than 51%. The answer is a New Havener who served in the House (of Representatives) now located on the Hill (Capitol Hill): James Hillhouse. His nickname, meanwhile, was “Sachem,” a chiefly title derived from native regional tribes, and legend does have it that he would brandish a hatchet during contentious congressional debates.
Nearly 47% of us were in the right state of mind to solve riddle #3: “Jarring collection of severed heads? Or charming bistro for walking dead?” The second part clarifies that “heads” means “brains”—in zombie parlance, “braaaaains”—and, together with the first part, leads straight to the jarred specimens at Yale’s Cushing Center.
Only one fewer person solved riddle #8, which reads, “‘Shhhhhh!’ ‘Hssssss!’” Shushing is to readers as hissing is to snakes, leaving one clear solution: the Yale secret society known as Book and Snake.
More than 43% of respondents solved riddle #5: “Between two stops, a howl to obey: ‘Let loose the hounds, but only if trained!’” The “stops” in question are New Haven’s two train stations, and there’s one place between them to unleash our well-behaved pups: Union Street Dog Park.
Riddle #4—“In castle ruins, with sound and light, it slays two thousand on a good night”—was slightly more confounding. The answer, as more than 40% of respondents realized, is College Street Music Hall. The Hall was built out of the old Palace Theatre in 2015, and it regularly wows crowds of up to 2,000 people with its world-class sound and lighting.
The last two riddles proved noticeably harder. Second-toughest was riddle #1: “Freed from the cave that hid their flight, two of three killers now hide in plain sight.” Almost everyone recognized this as a reference to the regicides who famously fled from England and hid in New Haven. Many fewer, less than 27%, narrowed their answer precisely down to the men the riddle seeks: William Goffe and Edward Whalley, the two regicides who (a) hid in Judges’ Cave and (b) “now hide in plain sight.” They do this at the middle of the New Haven Green, on a pair of easily overlooked commemorative headstones fastened to the rear of Center Church.
Most elusive of all, however, was the solution to riddle #7, which had a 17% solve rate: “Where conjurers practice the arts they chose, this school is endorsed by murders of crows.” Crows, of course, go “caw,” while, to some of us, at least, Creative Arts Workshop goes by “C.A.W.”
So, who won? After tallying up the entries and using an automated number generator, we randomly selected David Z. and Jeannette P., who’ve both chosen gift cards to September in Bangkok, and Liz E., who picked Tavern on State.
Congratulations to them, and to everyone who riddled with us: We hope you had fun with it, and thanks for playing!
Written and photographed by Dan Mims. Image 1 features College Street Music Hall. Image 2 features detail of the fence outside Book and Snake.
