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I recently got turned on to the idea of scavenger hunts in and around some of our fair city’s most fascinating locations. One that stood out, and incidentally has captivated my imagination for quite some time, is entitled Murder at the Met. As the name suggests, the event is based around a (fictional) murder in the Metropolitan Museum, which the guests have to solve by finding clues related to pieces of art in the museum.

The Mystery
Now if you’ve ever been to the Met or at least read my previous post about it, you’ll know that a scavenger hunt involving clues strewn across the museum’s many wings of fabulous art and sculpture is no small task, but that’s not all! Using the sheet of notes provided to get you started, combined with an answer sheet to write down your clues, and a numeric cypher, you have to guess not only the murderer’s identity, but also their motive. All within the time limit of 2 hours.

To get us started, each team was given a clue to start with, along with a guide for getting to the next clue. We were thankfully given the first clue to start with, so our journey was more or less by the numbers. Over the course of our search, we traversed the museum many times over, occasionally having to “be resourceful” about finding clues or rewriting directions when a particular wing of the museum was closed off. I’m proud to say that my team did exceptionally well despite getting totally lost looking for some 18th Century American portraits.

Eventually, we arrived at the Temple of Dendur, a massive hall with the remains of an ancient Egyptian temple, much of it still kept whole despite the long intervening centuries between its construction and subsequent excavation. We still had a few minutes which we used to run through the clues and make our guess about who among the multiple motivated murder suspects was the actual killer. Unfortunately, despite getting nearly every clue correct, we couldn’t figure out the cypher, and finally just guessed at the culprit, though we did manage to parse out the precise motive from the notes and the clues we’d gathered.

The Museum
The Met itself was no less impressive the second time around, and the added aspect of finding clues in the art gives you an excellent means by which to explore and scrutinize many of the museum’s permanent collections. On the downside, you get caught up in the competition and will probably find that you don’t have time during your hunt for clues to linger too long in any one place, so your opportunities for leisurely examination of any particular piece will be limited. If you still have the energy after the hunt ends, however, the price of admission to the museum is included in the cost of the ticket, so you can stay as long as you like to look at other exhibits.

The Bottom Line
Do it! But plan well in advance. The Murder at the Met series occurs several times a month but at times, you may have to book up to a month in advance. Perhaps by luck, when I finally did resolve to go, I was able to book tickets for the event only two weeks ahead of time. The tickets are a bit pricey at around $40 for an adult, $32 for students, but since they include price of admission to the museum, you can get a lot of bang for you buck, plus the event itself is totally worth it. A great way to spend a few hours on Saturday night!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 1:03 am and is filed under Museums, Sight Seeing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.