Things the building says, things the staff whisper and things the fan club has decided to believe. Rated in candles.
Fiction. The building’s voice, the rivalry, the letters and the legends are invented. The dates are real.
Forty-Eight, depending on its mood
Ask Forty-Eight what it was before it was an escape room centre and you will get a different answer every night: a grand house, a boarding house, a warehouse, a theatre, once a bakery. The fan club has written them all down. None of them are confirmed, and the building seems to like it that way.
Verdict: Heritage-listed and more than a century old is all the record says. The rest is the building showing off.
Groups on their way to Cannibal
There is a stair on the way down to the cold room that creaks every time somebody steps on it, and the legend says it is counting: every player who has ever gone down to meet the Butcher. Nobody knows what happens when it reaches its number.
Verdict: Old buildings creak. This one does it with comic timing.
The fan club
When the other adventure rooms moved to the Basement, the legend goes, Pirate Island was packed and ready to leave, and the building simply refused to let the door open. Calico Jack was told he could stay if he kept the parrot quiet during the horror rooms.
Verdict: Pirate Island is still here. The parrot is still not quiet.
Staff, quietly
Forty-Eight has asked, repeatedly, for a plaque reading “Escape This: the first venue”. The legend is that one was made, and that the building rejected it because the font was too modern.
Verdict: Escape This does call Northbridge its very first venue. The plaque remains unconfirmed.
Northbridge night-owls
Before Cathy and her toys moved into The Haunting, the legend goes, the building already had a ghost of its own: a tidy one, who straightens the posters on the wall and has never once been seen. When The Haunting opened, the original ghost was offended and has been sulking in the attic ever since.
Verdict: The posters are always straight. Make of that what you will.
Forty-Eight
Forty-Eight maintains that every copy of its rooms in Sydney and Melbourne is perfectly good, except that none of them creak properly, because creaking takes a century to learn. It offers no evidence and accepts no counter-argument.
Verdict: The rooms are built in Escape This’s own workshop. The creaking is all Lake Street.
