Minute Mystery solutions
~1. A bunch of people are
on an ocean voyage in a yacht. One afternoon, they all decide to
go swimming, so they put on swimsuits and dive off the side into the
water. Unfortunately, they forget to set up a ladder on the side
of the boat, so there's no way for them to climb back in, and they
drown.
~2. Alice is a goldfish; Ted is a cat.
~3. The husband killed himself a while ago; it's his ashes in an
urn on the mantelpiece that the wife looks at.
~4. A poor peasant from somewhere in Europe wants desperately to
get to the U.S. Not having money for airfare, he stows away in
the landing gear compartment of a jet. He dies of hypothermia in
mid-flight, and falls out when the landing gear compartment opens as
the plane makes its final approach.
~5. The man is a midget. He can't reach the upper elevator
buttons, but he can ask people to push them for him. He can also
push them with his umbrella.
~6. The sisters are Siamese twins.
~7. The man has hiccups; the bartender scares them away by
pulling a gun.
~8. The man used to be blind; he's now returning from an eye
operation which restored his sight. He's spent all his money on
the operation, so when the train goes through a tunnel he at first
thinks he's gone blind again and almost decides to kill himself.
Fortunately, the light of the cigarettes people are smoking convinces
him that he can still see.
~9. The woman is a tightrope walker in a circus. Her act
consists of walking the rope blindfolded, accompanied by music.
The musician (organist, or calliopist, or pianist, or whatever) is
supposed to stop playing when she reaches the end of the rope, telling
her that it's safe to step off onto the platform. For unknown
reasons (but with murderous
intent), he stops the music early, and she steps off the rope to her
death.
~10. The man was in a ship that was wrecked on a desert
island. When there was no food left, another passenger brought
what he said was albatross but was really part of the man's wife (who
had died in the wreck). The man suspects something fishy, so when
they finally return to civilization, he orders albatross, realizes that
what he ate before was his wife, and kills himself.
~11. He stood on a block of ice to hang himself.
~12. He stabbed himself with an icicle.
~13. He jumped out of an airplane, but his parachute failed to
open.
~14. He was with several others in a hot air balloon crossing the
desert. The balloon was punctured and they began to lose
altitude. They tossed all their non-essentials overboard, then their
clothing and food, but were still going to crash in the middle of the
desert. Finally, they drew matches to see who would jump over the
side and save
the others; this man lost.
~15. The radio program is one of the
call-up-somebody-and-ask-them-a-question contest shows; the announcer
gives the phone number of the man's bedroom phone, and a male voice
answers.
~16. He worked as a DJ at a radio station. He decided to
kill his wife, and so he put on a long record and quickly drove home
and killed her, figuring he had a perfect alibi; he'd been at
work. On the way back he turned on his show, only to discover
that the record was skipping.
~17. The man is a blind midget. For various reasons too
complicated to go into, someone else has been sawing small pieces off
of his cane every night, so that every day he thinks he's taller.
Since his only income is from being a circus midget, he decides to kill
himself when he gets too tall. (Variant answer: instead of sawing
pieces off of his
cane, someone has sawed the legs off of his bed. He wakes up,
stands up, and thinks he's grown during the night.)
~18. A midget is jealous of the clown who walks on stilts.
He saws partway through the stilts; the clown walks along and falls and
dies when they break.
~19. A blind man enjoyed walking near a cliff, and used the sound
of a buoy to gauge his distance from the edge. One day the buoy's
anchor rope broke, allowing the buoy to drift away from the shore, and
the man walked over the edge of the cliff.
~20. The man is a travel agent. He had sold someone two
tickets for an ocean voyage, one round-trip and one one-way. The
last name of the man who bought the tickets is the same as the last
name of the woman who "fell" overboard and drowned on the same voyage,
which is the subject of the article he's reading.
~21. Several men were shipwrecked together. They agreed to
survive by eating each other a piece at a time. Each of them in
turn gives up an arm, but before they get to the last one, they're
rescued. They all demand that the last man live up to his end of
the deal. Instead, he kills a bum and sends the bum's arm to the
others in a box to
demonstrate that he fulfilled the bargain. Later, one of them
sees him on the subway, holding onto the overhead rings with the arm he
supposedly cut off, realizes he cheated, and kills him.
~22. Both women are white and single. A black male friend
of the one who goes into the bathroom was recently killed, reportedly
by the KKK. The woman who goes into the bathroom discovers a
bloodstained KKK robe in the other's laundry hamper, picks up a nail
file from the medicine cabinet, and goes out and kills the other.
~23. He is in a hotel, and is unable to sleep because the man in
the adjacent room is snoring. He calls the room next door (from
his own number he can easily figure out his neighbor's, and from the
room number, the telephone number). The snorer wakes up, answers
the phone. The first man hangs up without saying anything and goes to
sleep before the snorer gets back to sleep and starts snoring again.
~24. It's the man's fiftieth birthday, and in celebration of this
he plans to kill his wife, then take the money he's embezzled and move
on to a new life in another state. His wife takes him out to
dinner; afterward, on their front step, he kills her. He opens
the door,
dragging her body in with him, and all the lights suddenly turn on and
a group of his friends shout "Surprise!" He kills himself.
(Note that the whole first part, including the motive, isn't really
necessary; it was just part of the original story.)
~25. Abel is a prince of the island nation that he landed
on. A cruel and warlike prince, he waged many land and naval
battles along with his father the king. In one naval encounter,
their ship sank, the king died, and the prince swam to a deserted
island where he spent several months. In the mean time, a regent
was appointed to the island nation, and he brought peace and
prosperity. When Prince Abel returned to his
kingdom, Cain (a native fisherman) realized that the peace of the land
would only be maintained if Abel did not reascend to his throne.
~26. The drinks contained poisoned ice cubes; the man who drank
slowly gave them time to melt, while the other didn't.
~27. Joe is a kid who goes trick-or-treating for Halloween.
~28. He's a smuggler. On the first cruise, someone brings
the contraband to his cabin, and he hides it in an air conditioning
duct. Returning to the U.S., he leaves without the contraband,
and so passes through customs with no trouble. On the second
trip, he has the same cabin of the same ship. Because it doesn't
stop anywhere, he doesn't
have to go through customs when he returns, so he gets the contraband
off safely.
~29. Hans and Fritz do everything right up until they're filling
out a personal-information form and have to write down their
birthdays. Fritz' birthday is, say, July 7, so he writes down
7/7/15. Hans, however, was born on, say, June 20, so he writes
down 20/6/18 instead of what an American would write, 6/20/18.
~30. Another WWII story. Greg is a German spy. His
friend Tim is suspicious, so he plays a word-association game with
him. When Tim says "The land of the free", Greg responds with
"The home of the brave". Then Tim says "The terror of flight",
and Greg says "The gloom of the grave". Any U.S. citizen knows
the first verse of the national anthem, but only a spy would have
memorized all four verses.
~31. The dead man was the driver in a hit-and-run accident which
paralyzed its victim. The victim did manage to get the license
plate number of the car; now in a wheelchair, he eventually tracked
down the driver and killed him.
~32. His home is a houseboat and he has run out of water while on
an extended cruise.
~33. I'm told this is a true story. Windows in Paris at
that time were apparently imperfectly flat; they could act as
lenses. One particularly hot day, the sun shining in through such
a window caused a woman's lingerie (which she was wearing at the time,
awaiting her husband's return) to catch fire, and eventually the entire
house caught
and burned.
~34. He's leaving a hospital after visiting his wife, who's on
heavy life-support. When the power goes out, he knows she can't
live without the life-support systems (he assumes that if the emergency
backup generator were working, the elevator wouldn't lose power).
~35. Both twins were wearing glasses. The burglar, however,
was wearing photosensitive sunglasses; the policeman noticed them
changing shade and realized the man must have just entered.
~36. Let's say "she" is named Suzy, and "they" are named Harry
and Jane. Harry is an elderly archaeologist who has found a very
old skeleton, which he's dubbed "Jane" (like "Lucy"). Suzy is a
buyer for a museum; she's supposed to make some sort of purchase from
Harry, so she invites him to have a business dinner with her (at a
restaurant). When
she calls to invite him, he keeps talking about "Jane," so Suzy assumes
that Jane is his wife and says to bring her along. Harry,
offended, calls Suzy's boss and complains; since Suzy should've known
who Jane was, she gets fired.
~37. The man was a lion tamer.
~38. The murderer set the car on a slope above the hot dog stand
where the victim works. He then wedged an ice block in the car to
keep the brake pedal down, and put the car in neutral. The
murderer then flew to another city to avoid suspicion. It was a
rainy day but warm enough for the ice to melt. When the ice
melted, the car rolled down the hill and struck the hot dog man at his
roadside stand, killing him.
~39. There's a car wash on that corner. On rainy days, the
rain reduces traction. On sunny days, water from the car wash has
the same effect. If rain is threatening, though, the car wash
gets little business and thus doesn't make the road wet, so I can take
the corner faster.
~40. The object she threw was a boomerang. It flew out,
looped around, and came back and hit her in the head, killing her.
~41. He saw the bird at 20,000 feet get sucked into an engine.
~42. The man is a heroin addict, and has contracted AIDS by using
an infected needle. Since he has no hope to live, he shoots
himself up with an overdose, and commits suicide.
~43. The man walked into a casino, and went to the craps
table. He bet all the money he had to his name, and shot
craps. Since he was now broke, he became despondent and committed
suicide.
~44. Kids getting their pictures taken with Santa.
~45. He's a priest; he is marrying them to other people, not to
himself.
~46. It's the cabin of an airplane that's crashed there.
~47. It's a game of Monopoly.
~48. She was a circus performer who performed rope tricks.
During one of them, she hung from the ceiling holding only a rope in
her mouth. The other end of the rope was held by her husband.
~49. This is a post-holocaust scenario of some kind; for whatever
reason, the man believes himself to be the last human on earth.
He doesn't want to live by himself, so he jumps, just before someone
else calls.
~50. The dead man is Santa Claus; he slipped while coming down
the chimney and broke his neck.
~51. He's with a policeman, who's taking him to jail, and he uses
the policeman's gun. He was convicted of his wife's murder; she
had framed him for it somehow, involving cutting off two of her own
fingers and mailing them to the police. Since he had already been
convicted of her murder, he couldn't be tried twice for the same crime,
and since he obviously hadn't actually been guilty before, he's set
free.
~52. The dead man is Superman; the rock is Green
Kryptonite. Invent a reasonable scenario from there.
~53. It's a wolf pack; they've killed and eaten (most of) the man.
~54. The room is the ballroom of an ocean liner which sank some
time ago. The rays are manta rays. The man ran out of air
while diving in the wreck.
~55. The man works in a lighthouse. By turning out the
light he killed a couple hundred people. After reading about that
the next morning, he killed himself.
~56. A group of people were floating down the Amazon river when
they floated under a big tree. A snake was hanging down, so the
entire boat ran to one side and capsized; the people were then eaten by
piranha.
~57. The man caught a large fish and was so excited he went to a
phone booth to call his wife. In trying to describe the size of
the fish, he said, "It was THIS big!" and stretched his arms wide to
indicate its length. His arms went through the sides of the phone
booth, his wrists were sliced by broken glass, and he bled to death.
~58. The woman outside is a psychotic librarian. The woman
inside has an extremely overdue book.
~59. A mosquito bit me, and I swatted it when it later landed on
my ceiling.
~60. It's in Canada; she pays in American money and receives
change in Canadian money.
~61. The comma, in European numbers, is used the same way
Americans use a decimal point. The man thus (Americans would say)
walked 62.137 miles.
~62. The children are two of a set of triplets.
~63. The house is at the south pole.
~64. It's the remains of a melted snowman.
~65. It was a husband calling from overseas to see that his wife
arrived home all right. Hanging up before three seconds elapse
results in no charge to the calling party. He could not call
person-to-person because the local operators did not speak English.
~66. The seals were frightened by an audience of nuns, who, to
the seals, looked like a herd of killer whales.
~67. The man died from eating a poisoned popsicle.
~68. The man had already sugared his tea before sending it back.
~69. The man was a paleontologist working with the Archaeological
Research Institute. He was reviving a triceratops frozen in the
ice age when it came to life and killed him.
~70. He was a mail courier who delivered packages to the
different foreign embassies in the United States. The land of an
embassy belongs to the country of the embassy, not to the United States.
~71. It is sunny and hot.
~72. It's daytime; the sun is out.
~73. The sole survivor of a shipwreck reached a desert isle.
Unfortunately, he was blind. Luckily, there was a freshwater
spring on the island, and he rigged the ship's bell (which had drifted
to the island also) at the spring's location. The bell rang in
the wind,
directing him to water. When he was becalmed for a week, he could
not find water again, and so he died of thirst.
~74. The wise man tells them to switch camels.
~75. The man has put a quarter of the cost of a new car into a
down payment; he then drives away in the car.
~76. The man was a sword swallower in a carnival side-show.
While he was practicing, someone tickled his throat with the feather,
causing him to gag.
~77. The man falls off the river bank and drowns.
~78. The pope has returned to the village where he began his
priesthood fifty years earlier. He was late for the ceremony, so
the mayor spoke first; he claimed to be the first person to give
confession to the pope, fifty years earlier. When the pope
arrived, he related that the first confession he had heard was that of
the murder of a young
woman. The man in the audience had a sister who was murdered at
that time.
~79. The man is a mummy, on tour to different museums throughout
the world.
~80. It is a painting of Henry VIII.
~81. A baseball game is going on. The base-runner sees the
catcher waiting at home plate with the ball, and so decides to stay at
third base to avoid being tagged out.
~82. The bicycles are Bicycle playing cards; the man was cheating
at cards, and when the extra card was found, he was killed by the other
players.
~83. The one who looks around sees his own reflection in the
window (it's dark outside), but not his companion's. Thus, he
realizes the other is a vampire, and that he's going to be killed by
him.
~84. Should be done orally; the envelope is an envelope of dye,
and she's dying some cloth, but it sounds like "opens an envelope and
dies." if said out loud.
~85. He's allergic to whatever's inside the box.
~86. The man was on a bridge.
~87. The man was an astronaut out on a space walk.
~88. It's a model train set.
~89. He saw it happening on TV.
~90. The man was an amateur mechanic, the book is a Volkswagen
service manual, the beetle is a car, and the pile of bricks is what the
car fell off of.
~91. The dish is a satellite dish.
~92. He is on a traffic island.
~93. The postman is a man. The doctor and lawyer are women.
~94. Bruce is a horse.
~95. The flat tire is his spare.
~96. The man was a night watchman who told his boss that last
night he had a dream that the boss would die in a plane crash.
The boss fired him for sleeping on the job.
~97. The two bodies lacked what only Adam and Eve would lack
--bellybuttons.
~98. A chess game; knight takes pawn.
~99. The two priests are playing chess; one of them just mated by
moving his queen.
~100. One is in Eastern Oregon (in Mountain time), the other in
Western Florida (in Central time), and it's daylight-savings changeover
day at 1:30 AM.
~101. The surgeon is the boy's mother.
~102. The man is an avid reader, who worked at a bank. On
his lunch break, he wondered off into a vault to read, when nuclear
holocaust occurred, leaving him the only man alive on Earth. The
prospect of being alone didn't phase him since he had plenty of books
to read and food to eat. However, one day, he tripped and broke
his reading glasses, so he killed himself because he was unable to read.
~103. The man is running to stop the execution (via electric
chair) of a death row inmate since new evidence has cleared his
name. But when he sees the lights flicker, he realizes that he's
too late.
~104. The doctor is a psychiatrist, and the woman is seeing him
to help her get over her recent divorce. The doctor has been
having an affair with another patient, and wants to kill his
wife. So, he tells this woman that he needs to hypnotize her to
help her get
over her ex-husband. But under hypnosis, he convinces her to
drive to his house and kill his wife. But the doctor is worried
that she might remember at some point, so he calls her that night,
entrances her over the phone and tells her to kill herself, which she
does.
~105. The room is the ballroom of an ocean liner which sank some
time ago. The man ran out of air while diving in the wreck.
~106. The woman
is the assistant to a circus knife-thrower, who stands in front of a
target as knives are thrown around her. The new shoes have higher heels
than she normally wears, causing the thrower to misjudge his aim.
~107. The murderer
sets the car on a slope above the hot dog stand where the victim works.
He wedges an ice block in the car to keep the brake pedal down, puts
the car in neutral, and flies to another city to avoid suspicion. It's
a warm day; when the ice melts, the car rolls down the hill and kills
the hot dog man.
~108. They were
skydiving. He broke his arm as he jumped from the plane by hitting it
on the plane door, and he couldn't reach his ripcord with his other
arm. She pulled the ripcord for him.
~109.
Mr. and Mrs. Browning had
just gotten married. Mrs. Browing was subject to fits of depression.
They had their first fight soon after they were married; Mr. Browning
stormed out of the house, and Mrs. Browning went into the garage and
started up the car, intending to kill herself by filling the garage
with car exhaust. But the car ran out of gas quickly, and Mr. Browning,
returning home to apologize, found
Mrs. Browning in time to summon help and restore her to health.
~110. It's the middle of the night. The man goes outside to get
something from his car, but forgets which room he was in. His wife is
deaf, so he honks the car horn loudly, waking up everyone else in the
motel. The other residents all get up and turn on their lights, and the
man returns to the one room that remains dark.
~111. Because there
was a heavy fog, two people driving in opposite directions on the same
road both stuck their heads out of their windows to see the center line
better. Their heads hit each other at high speed, killing them both.
~112. The two
men were working in a small room protected by a carbon dioxide gas fire
extinguisher system, when a fire broke out in an adjoining room. One of
the men ran through the fire and escaped with only minor burns. The
other one stayed in the room until the fire extinguishers kicked in and
died of oxygen starvation.
~113. A large man takes the elevator from the ground floor to the
third floor penthouse apartment he shares with his wife. After greeting
her, he sees a man's watch on the table and assumes she's been having
an affair. Thinking her boyfriend has escaped down the stairs, he
rushes to the French windows and sees a good-looking man just leaving
the main entrance of the building. Furious, the husband pushes the
refrigerator through the window onto the young man below. The young man
is killed by the refrigerator. The husband is killed from a heart
attack caused by overexertion. The wife's boyfriend, who was hiding
inside the refrigerator, is killed from the fall.
~114. The two
people are Siamese twins. One wakes up, notices that the other one is
dead, and realizes he will die soon, too.
~115. The island is a traffic island.
~116. The man walks into a casino and goes to the craps table. He
bets all the money he owns, shoots craps, and loses. Now flat broke, he
becomes despondent and commits suicide
~117. Beulah and Craig were hurricanes
~118. The native chief asked him, "What is the third baseman's
name in the Abbott and Costello routine 'Who's on First'?" The man, who
had no idea, said "I don't know," the correct answer. However, he was a
big smart aleck, so if he had known the answer he would have pointed
out that "What" was the
second baseman's name. The
chief, being quite humorless, would have executed him on the spot
~119. He was a skywriter whose plane crashed into another plane
~120. The young woman is Dorothy, and the story is
The
Wizard of Oz
~121. The solution is quite complicated: Joe went to his favorite
bar for his usual drink, which is made with blue curacao. The
bartender, Steve, is out of curacao, so he hands the empty bottle to
his trainee, Alan, and tells him to fill it up with some more "blue
stuff" from the supply in the back. Alan can't find any "blue
stuff" in the supply room, so he assumes the bartender wanted
some sort of windex. Since he can't find this either, he goes to
a car parked out back and drains its windshield washer fluid into the
bottle and hands this to the bartender.
Unknowingly, Steve makes Joe his drink with the washer fluid, and Joe
drinks it and heads off. When he reaches his car, he begins to
feel sick, and decides he'd better get to a hospital. However, it
has snowed and his windshield is snow-covered. He reaches to
spray his windshield with de-icer wash, but it's empty since it was HIS
car from which the trainee drained the washer fluid. But he's too
ill to waste time cleaning off the windshield or allowing it to melt,
so he pulls out of the space, but immediately runs over the bartender,
Steve, who was taking out the trash.
Joe gets out of the car to see what he hit, but he collapses
immediately and dies, having succumbed to the poison. Steve is
critically wounded, but manages to yell out for help. Alan hears
his cries and runs out the back door to see what's wrong. But, he
slips on a patch of ice, and lands on his head, killing him
immediately. Shortly thereafter, Steve dies from his injuries.
~122. He picks the third door because the reason the lions
haven't eaten in 3 years is because they are dead.
~123. The woman was a photographer. She shot a picture of
her husband,
developed it, and hung it up to dry.
~124. The poor man is hired by Aladdin to clean his palace. Aladdin only wants
the man to clean part of the palace because he does not wish anyone to enter his
bedroom, where he keeps the magic lamp. The poor man meticulously scrubs the
palace from head to toe, and rubs the magic lamp in the process. The djinn
appears; the poor man wishes for riches, and no longer needs the job.
~125. He was a referee who made a poor call. He was burned to death by fans
reflecting sunlight from their slick-covered game programs.
~126. The two men started at opposite ends of the trench, digging toward each
other. Instead of meeting up, though, they pass each other, meaning that one man
dug at a skewed angle, or started at the wrong place. They call their
supervisor, who tells them that one man was right and the other must re-dig his
half in the right place