Teens try to escape the haunted GR library

A late-night exploration through the haunted library gets serious when the explorers are trapped in a puzzle-filled room.

Teens had a chance to take on the Haunted Library Escape Room Thursday night at the Sweetwater County Library. Escape rooms are popular mind games tasking a group of people to figure out how to escape a room filled with logic puzzles within a set time limit.

Youth Services Librarian Stacey Palmer said she worked on the puzzles for about a month on and off; and had other librarians work through the room before setting it up for the teens. After the test run, she decided to make the puzzles easier as the testers were unable to finish in time. Despite that, Palmer said the teens and middle-school students were stumped often.

The room, lit with electronic candles and a board filled with Christmas lights, had a 15-minute time limit for teams to discover the five-digit combination to a lock barring the door shut. While obtaining the five numbers to the combination seems simple enough, another logic puzzle would need to be solved to find out the order of the numbers.