Whodunnit: The Upstate Murder-Mystery Weekend

Illustration by Bill Bragg

At the end of this month, Mohonk Mountain House, a grand Hudson Valley lodge founded in 1869, will hold its fiftieth annual Mystery Weekend, in which guests gather for a few days of sleuthing around the property, examining staged rooms and interviewing actors playing characters, in an attempt to solve a fictional crime. The event has a storied history among mystery buffs; some of its first scripts were written by the celebrated author Donald E. Westlake, along with his wife Abby, and they often collaborated with notable writer friends, including Stephen King, Edward Gorey, and Isaac Asimov, on everything from performing to graphic design. A half century ago, few, if any, hotels offered “immersive theatre” as an amenity, and the Mystery Weekend became a hot ticket for city dwellers—the first weekend, in 1977, drew more than two hundred participants. Soon, mystery-solving events were de rigueur at many rural hotels, whose owners found that staging crime scenes was a surefire way to lure cosmopolitans to the country during the off-season. In 1992, the Times reporter Alessandra Stanley noted that the swelling glut of mystery parties came in three categories: serious, “in which participants form teams and spend two to three days”; semi-serious, which “take place in large hotels, over meals, and are meant to be more entertaining than challenging”; and those on cruise ships, which are fully unserious. (Many people on cruises, an expert clucked to Stanley, “have never even read a mystery.”)

The Mohonk Mountain House Mystery Weekend was conceived as—and is still considered—a wonky, knotty game for mystery obsessives who enjoy puzzling out a problem over the course of multiple, often vexing days. But, for those looking for a slightly less intensive experience, the semi-serious murder party—which tends to take place, and to wrap up, during one dinner—has come roaring back in popularity. According to one marketing study released last year, murder-mystery games will be a $2.14-billion retail category by 2031. It makes sense—people are desperate for any form of entertainment that is both escapist and interactive, with nary a smartphone allowed. I recently found myself intrigued by a new mystery fête of the semi-serious variety, taking place, one night per month, at the upstate hotel the Six Bells, in the teeny hamlet of Rosendale.

The Six Bells, which opened last July, has the homespun feel of an olde English inn, but its roots are, in reality, not so quaint; it is the brainchild of the serial entrepreneur Audrey Gelman, who, at just thirty-eight years old, has achieved a striking level of New York notoriety. Gelman is perhaps best known as the co-founder of the women’s co-working empire the Wing, which opened its first location in 2016 and which, with its powder-pink interiors and bathrooms stocked with Glossier products, represented a kind of zenith of the millennial girlboss ethos, before it shuttered after six years, amid employees’ accusations of poor working conditions. Gelman, who stepped down as C.E.O. in 2020, tiptoed back into public life in 2022 with her next venture, a comparatively humble Brooklyn home-goods boutique (also called the Six Bells) that she stocked with countrified wares like Shaker quilts and ruffled gingham pillows.

The Six Bells—the store and the hotel—comes with a quirky concept: a fictional mid-century English village called Barrows Green, complete with its own map and historical lore, invented by Gelman; both the boutique and the inn are meant to exist simultaneously in our reality and in Gelman’s storybook paracosm. (The concept is rapidly expanding: Gelman recently announced a $3.8-million fund-raising round “to build more magical places and things.”) For a mystery dinner I attended last month, Gelman partnered with the theatre troupe What May Come Immersive to devise a saucy plotline involving characters of Gelman’s creation: a bickering, aristocratic married couple as hosts, a handsome local psychiatrist who studied under Freud, a nosy local news reporter, a bitchy gossip columnist. Amid a meal of beet salad, mushroom potpie, and chocolate cake, a murder disrupted the convivial proceedings, and the thirty or so guests attempted to suss out the culprit. The whodunnit wasn’t hard to solve, but the challenge wasn’t the point. The evening was more about the vibe; Gelman encourages all guests to dress up in fancy cocktail attire. Some guests got very into it—one adopted a fake British accent for the duration. Another attendee found herself less immersed; she realized that she’d recently matched with one of the actors on a dating site. Would they eventually go out? It remains a mystery.

Cupid gets his main-character moment this weekend. We asked New Yorker staffers to help build a playlist befitting his romantic mission.

For a classic piece of nineties Brit pop, Oasis’s “Slide Away” is basically an absurdly romantic ballad of plain devotion and yearning—which “Wuthering Heights” has established as the emotions of the season. May your Valentine’s Day be all about both!—Noreen Plabutong

I listen to jazz on Newark’s WBGO all year long, but in February, when last week’s snow is frozen high and gray along the sidewalk, nothing makes me feel luckier to be inside, with someone I love, than jazz. I turn on the radio in the bedroom and stir up an Old-Fashioned, the music playing down the hall like conversation at a party I’ve stepped away from. During dinner with my husband the other night, when the Miles Davis Quintet’s “You’re My Everything” came on, I recognized the first seconds of the rendition’s famous false start, intimate and inviting, before Davis introduces the song’s name. As my husband leaned in to scoop salad onto my plate, I spoke the words in time with Davis: “You are my everything.”—Jenny Blackman

The languid sounds of “Lipstick Lover,” from Janelle Monáe’s excellent album “The Age of Pleasure,” practically insist on a seductive shimmy.—Hannah Jocelyn

John Darnielle, of the Mountain Goats, spent a large part of his early songwriting career describing broken couples, even creating a fictional pair, nicknamed the Alpha Couple, whose marital strife he repeatedly mined. But when he closed the book on the duo, on the 2002 album “Tallahassee,” he included “Old College Try,” a hopeful, delusional paean from one broken spouse to another. They were in this together, all the way to the end, no matter how much it hurt.—Luis A. Gómez

When you’ve been unlucky in love, finally finding someone great feels like entering an alternate dimension—wait, this actually exists? In “Liquidize,” Wet Leg is just as bewildered as you, singing “Love struck me down / The fuck am I doing here?” But once you get used to this new reality, its tenderness wins out, and another, gentler question soon arises: “How did I get so lucky to be loving you?”—Jane Bua

Cuddle Magic’s 2020 album, “Bath”—so named because the band’s six members squeezed into a bathroom to record it—is necessarily about togetherness. But what I enjoy most about the lead single, “What If I,” is the intimate balance of romance and desperation conveyed by the duetting Bridget Kearney and Benjamin Lazar Davis—that, and the gorgeous strains of pump organ and bass clarinet nestled underfoot.—Jasper Davidoff

The best part about being in love, I think, is the constant, overwhelming sensation of looking at another person and wondering in awe, How are you mine? Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and Sammy Davis, Jr., have all done renditions of “I’ve Got a Crush On You,” but it’s Ella Fitzgerald’s version, with her rich and confident voice, that best captures that heart-pounding feeling of an everlasting crush.—Erin Neil

When my toes are losing feeling in my ski boots, I turn on “My Love,” by Metronomy x Nourished by Time. It spontaneously appeared one day (kind of like an Aperol spritz in the hand après-ski) on my “Slopes” playlist. The bassy, buzzy song enters through the ear but resounds somewhere closer to the knees—a perfect tune for carving out turns on a mountain or cuddling in the lodge.—Ryan Gellis

“In Spite of Ourselves” is one of the only karaoke duets a couple can perform without making me want to hurl. Many love songs idealize; here, John Prine and Iris DeMent sweetly rattle off a list of each other’s endearing imperfections. Let’s embrace realistic romance this holiday season!—Kristen Steenbeeke

Some of the best love songs are cheating songs, and there are few sweeter or sadder than “The Dark End of the Street,” an ode to meeting in the secret shadows. This soul standard has been performed by Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin, Linda Ronstadt, Ry Cooder, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Cat Power—cue ’em all up. There isn’t a bad version. But the most achingly beautiful recording is the original, from 1967, by James Carr, the son of a Mississippi Baptist preacher.—Ian Crouch

If you’re a subway performer and you play Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” I promise you, I will give you all the cash I have on my person.—Lauren Garcia

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• We’ve been handling the cold all wrong
• The trial of the Sycamore Gap killers
• The Whole Earth archive