What better way to celebrate Halloween and Edgar Allan Poe with a treasure hunt celebrating his spectacularly spooky tales? We created this treasure hunt as an activity for our Edgar Allan Poe Halloween Party but you could certainly use it to cap off an Edgar Allan Poe unit study or as a fun game for any Halloween party! Read on to check out the details!
THE THEME
The theme for our treasure hunt was of course Edgar Allan Poe! Rather than search for objects or areas within a house, the objective for each clue was to determine what piece of work (poem, short story, quote, etc) was referenced.
To give the treasure hunt more of a story line, we opened with a note saying we had to find Lenore.
THE SETUP
For the setup, all you need are the clues & print outs of either the title of the piece OR a print out of the actual work. If your group is super familiar with Poe’s more famous work, they might not need the actual poems/stories. Otherwise, if they’re not, they may need the poem/story to look at.
Since we created this for our Edgar Allan Poe party, we thought having a few poems (in the entirety) would be a nice decorative touch, so we had printouts of poems in full. For short stories (though they’re short, they have multiple pages), we only printed out the first page. You can find some pdf versions of Poe’s work here on americanenglish.state.gov. Click into the story and the pdf version is downloadable from the top right. 🙂 Quick note: the poems are stories are in public domain but rules may differ depending on what you reside.
You’ll also need some black construction paper (or you can simply tape/affix the next clue to the back of the printout. We stuck the next clue in between the construction paper and the printout – just in case someone decided to pick up the poem/story and read before the actual treasure hunt 😉
Our treasure hunt ended up with a box of treats BUT you can definitely end up with Edgar Allan Poe bookmarks or other giveaways!
THE CLUES
Most of the clues have no read order to them except for the intro card, last clue, and last puzzle. The intro card sets up the treasure hunt. The last clue references a “key”, and the last puzzle a more complex cipher that they’ll solve before they get to their prize!
FINAL PUZZLE
The last and final puzzle uses a keyword cipher. Essentially, the sender and the recipient should both know the ‘keyword’ which can be used to create the mapping of letters. Once the letters are mapped, then the message can be decoded.
In this image, Lenore has a speech bubble saying, which when decoded says: “Join me in the bookshelf”.
THE PRIZE
Hide your final treat/prize in the bookshelf along with the final image.
THE PRINTABLE SET
Check out the printable set here!
THANK YOU!!!
Thank you so much for checking out our treasure hunt article. Hopefully it gave you some great ideas for your next celebration!
If you did enjoy this, please let us know below or follow us on Pinterest. Also, If you haven’t already and are still looking for more fun activities, feel free to check out some of our other Party Guides, Treasure Hunts, Ideas for Booklovers, or Edgar Allan Poe Ideas!
Happy Treasure Hunting 🙂
