Midnight Mystery

At 11:59, a crowd had gathered outside the Library, clustered around tables of lemonade and chocolate chip cookies and pretzels. Mr Body lay dead on the floor in front of the Circulation Desk, and the characters of our game of Clue gathered to face the music. Mrs. Peacock, complete with feathers in her hair, Madam Black, Ms Rose, Ms. Peach, Lord Cranberry, Mr. Brown, and a host of others assembled near our announcer with the bull horn.

She exclaimed that Mr. Body's body had been discovered by our evening maintenance man. We needed help discovering who done it - in what room - with what weapon, and invited teams of 5 people to collect playing cards and enter the lights out Library to investigate. One by one the teams entered and selected a room to begin their search for the true story of who killed Mr. Body (who, btw, had come back to life as a zombie and was schlepping about the building, dragging one leg behind him and begging people to hurry up and figure out who had killed him).

Kids had a ball moving from the graduate study room to the archive room to the curriculum center to the reference desk and group study rooms and listening room, figuring out from their clues whodunnit. Screams punctuated the air and excited chatter rose and fell for over an hour as our freshmen became familiar with the library even though they didn't know that's what they were doing.

In the end, everyone was a winner, walking away with a candy bar. And for each team, the person who figured it out first got their name put in a drawing for the bigger prizes. Even I had a good time and I hate to play games. Now if they could just figure out how to move the midnight mystery to a better time, it would all be golden.