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Couldn’t you just kill someone? Well…if you did it…don’t tell anyone. The point of Murder Mystery Weekends is to figure it out!
- Cris

Mohonk Mountain House

Does it seem like everyone is bragging about being a villain these days? You can still find weekend getaways where you need to solve the murder mystery because no one is shouting “I did it!” There is no better place for a good weekend mystery than Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, NY.

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Whodunit at Altitude: Inside Mohonk Mountain House's Mystery Weekend

The Hudson Valley has a way of making you feel like you've stepped sideways in time. Drive up through New Paltz, wind past the stone walls and hemlock groves, and eventually the road deposits you at Mohonk Mountain House — a Victorian castle perched above a glacial lake, as though someone lifted it out of an Agatha Christie novel and set it down in the Shawangunk Ridge. Which, as it turns out, is exactly the right atmosphere for what unfolds here every March.

Mohonk's Mystery Weekend is now in its 51st year, which means it predates escape rooms, true crime podcasts, and virtually every other form of participatory mystery entertainment you've encountered. This is where the whole concept was born.

Going Somewhere? Protect Your Trip (and Your Sanity)

You arrive on a Friday afternoon. Check in at the front desk, get your welcome letter, and then head down to the Lake Lounge between 4 and 5:30 p.m. to register. That's where the fun starts to feel real: you sign up for the tabletop escape room, register with your team if you've brought one, and get your bearings before dinner. The staff strongly suggests locking your door that evening. They're not entirely joking.

This year's production is Murder by the Book, a four-act mystery performed by Murder Café, the Hudson Valley repertory company that has been staging original whodunits since 1998. The story puts a group of celebrated mystery writers in Mohonk's grand halls as guests of Kent and Miriam Ladue, a pair of high-society bibliophiles with an obsession for murder fiction and apparently very bad luck with their weekend guests. Act I drops at 9 p.m. on Friday. One of the famed authors is dead by morning.

What makes this different from dinner theater is the texture of it. The cast doesn't stay on a stage. Suspects circulate through the hotel, and you circulate after them. Take tea in the afternoon? The suspects have infiltrated that, too. Bring a notebook. Winifred Craneshaw, the Gothic novelist in Victorian dress, will grant you an audience if you press her — but she casts a long shadow over her uninvited handmaiden, Hattie Horton, who may know considerably more than she lets on. Conrad Monjoy, the charming plagiarist clutching a mysterious briefcase, will deflect your questions with a smile. The hard-boiled Eddie Armstrong will give you short answers in shorter sentences. Dorothy Clutterbuck occasionally lapses into what she calls a trance. You will not know what to believe, which is precisely the point.

Between Acts II and III on Saturday, you'll be working on the puzzle hunt designed by Greg Pliska, a composer and constructor whose puzzle credits include public radio's Ask Me Another and twelve years of hunts at Mohonk itself. The puzzle packet may be delivered to you by a mysterious stranger on Friday night. Or it might appear some other way. Don't ask me. The tabletop escape room runs in timed sessions across Saturday, and teams have been known to get competitive about fastest completion. That’s terrifying given how competitive some of my family members are. Gasp!

By Sunday morning, the solution sheets are due in the box in the Parlor by 10 a.m. Then comes Team Solutions, which has operated since the 1970s and remains one of the weekend's highlights. Teams perform their theories in creative presentations — five minutes each, called at random. Over the decades, these have been hilarious, theatrical, musical, and spectacularly wrong in ways that still make sense somehow. Act IV at 11 a.m. solves the mystery, prizes are announced, and the weekend closes.

The $30 program fee covers your participation in all of it. Your stay at Mohonk covers three meals a day, access to the spa (you had me at ‘spa’), hiking trails, the indoor pool, and everything else the mountain house offers. But honestly? For one weekend in March, none of that is the main event (except the spa). The main event is a dead novelist, a room full of suspects, and the creeping feeling as you walk the hallways after dinner that someone is watching you from the far end of the corridor.

They probably are.

I’ll be sitting with my back against the wall, trusting no one.

See you next Wednesday.

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