The Wild Hunt
Midwinter Hunt
Honor Is Heaped Upon the Winner of this Midwinter Scavenger Hunt
About The Wild Hunt
Tonight the Wild Hunt rides, and it is a thing of beauty. What was once a ghostly procession across frozen skies is transformed into a citywide, semi-mystical scavenger hunt filled with puzzles, side quests, traps, snacks, betrayal, and the triumphant return of the Sacred Tooth of Yomar. This is no backyard Easter egg run. The best Wild Hunts are planned weeks in advance by a secret committee (organized into cells to avoid crosstalk) sworn to secrecy and driven by petty competitiveness. Designing the game is half the fun. Participants may be asked to decode cryptic messages, recite obscure lore, balance a candle on the forehead, or locate a cursed sock in a cemetery. The winners—if any survive—are crowned with excessive honor, laurel wreaths, or, at the very least, a commemorative mug. The losers are not openly mocked, but they are remembered; they also have to pay for breakfast at IHOP. For children, a scaled-down version (with glowsticks and far simpler clues) delivers just as much epic joy.
Ways to observe
(A) Low effort
Hide a small object in your house. Make a three-step riddle for someone to find it. Hugs and kisses upon success.
(B) Recommended
Organize a local or family-wide scavenger hunt featuring clues, small prizes, and one challenge that forces someone to wear a cloak. Include at least one trivia question no one can answer without help. Celebrate the winners; lightly ostracize the losers.
(C) High effort
Form a shadowy Wild Hunt Committee and plan an all-night, multi-location, riddle-laden, semi-mystical scavenger hunt involving at least 7 teams, 3 obscure landmarks, a fake website, one red herring quest, a mandatory snack stop, and a final showdown to reclaim the lost artifact of your choosing.
Inspiration
Let it be known: today is directly inspired by the MIT Mystery Hunt. If that name means nothing to you, you may look it up and either (a) feel inspired to Da Vinci-cide your own neighborhood, or (b) feel overwhelmed and replace today’s activities with a Howard Hawks film. But for the rest of us, those whose hearts race at the mention of logic puzzles and ancient riddles, this is our day.
The original Wild Hunt comes from ancient European folklore: a spectral cavalcade led by gods, witches, or trickster spirits, tearing across the winter skies in pursuit of something terrifying and undefined. A sighting once meant war, plague, or catastrophic change. In our version, it means you might end up in a parking garage shouting anagrammed bird names at strangers while dressed as a druid. The modern Wild Hunt channels that ancient dread into gleeful, overengineered chaos. It can be epic in scope, but should not require machine-learning algorithms or sleep-deprived MIT students to complete it. Your puzzles can be janky, your storyline ripped straight from a Sherlock Holmes novella, and your participants unaware of what is happening. The only requirements are a measure of secrecy, a surplus of creativity, and an unshakable belief that grown adults should, at least once, wield a foam sword and scream “By the Candle of Rönald!” at a municipal fountain.
Adornments
Watch
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
Three down-on-their-luck men head into the Mexican mountains in search of gold. What begins as a physical treasure hunt becomes a moral one.
The Goonies (1985)
A group of misfit kids stumbles upon a pirate map in their attic and sets off on a perilous subterranean treasure hunt to save their homes from foreclosure. What follows is a madcap race through booby-trapped tunnels, riddles, waterfalls, and encounters with both villains and monsters.
The City of Lost Children (1995)
In a foggy harbor town that feels like a Dali painting, children are being kidnapped for their dreams. When one unlucky child is taken, his burly big brother (Ron Perlman as a circus strongman) embarks on a bizarre odyssey to save him.
It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
An over-the-top comic chase film in which a group of strangers scramble across Southern California in pursuit of buried treasure. What begins with a dying man’s cryptic confession quickly escalates into a frenzy of car crashes, collapsing buildings, and double-crosses.
Read
The Owl Service by Alan Garner
Set in a remote Welsh valley, this haunting novel entwines three teenagers with an ancient myth that refuses to stay buried. When one of them assembles a pattern of owls from dinner plates, she unwittingly reawakens a cycle of love, betrayal, and transformation from the Mabinogion.