Case of the missing teacher: Solve a mystery at this Edgerton museum’s escape room

One Johnson County Museum is providing a unique way to engage with history. The search for a missing schoolmarm is the focus of an escape room experience at the Lanesfield School, a historic one-room schoolhouse in Edgerton.

Leah Palmer, curator of education for the museum, says the aim is to draw a new audience.

“The Lanesfield School has done one-room schoolhouse field trips for many years — for decades, actually,” Palmer said. “And so we have whole generations of people who have grown up going for a fourth- or fifth-grade field trip out there.”

The idea is to engage people who are past school age and give them a reason to visit Lanesfield.

Planned dates for the escape room experience this year are March 18, June 17, July 24, Nov. 25 and Dec. 30. You can also book the experience privately for another date.

Like most commercial escape rooms, the program runs for an hour, and participants have to make sense of the various clues scattered around the space.

“The premise is loosely based in fact,” Palmer said. “There was a teacher who did leave school unannounced in 1912, and that’s sort of the storyline we’re following. And in the end, you’re going to find out what happened to that teacher.”

Museum staff members found records from the century the school was in operation, so true stories were the inspiration for the program.

You don’t need to have much prior knowledge to solve the mystery: Everything you need is in that room.

Strong reading skills are essential for success, and visitors should have someone in the group who can read cursive. That can make it a good option for an intergenerational experience, as younger participants sometimes don’t have this skill.

“Sometimes we’ll get a group that will come to the schoolhouse and be like, ‘I can’t read that,’ and we’re like, ‘Well, at this time in the schoolhouse, everything would have been written in cursive,’” said museum educator Jessica Smith Doyle. “That’s kind of one of those challenges that we didn’t expect while we were planning it.”

A museum staff member guides the program in character as the replacement teacher. Smith Doyle often fills that role.

“I am dressed like an early 1900s school marm, so floor-length skirt, buttoned shirt with a high neck and puffier sleeves,” she said.

She gives visitors a primer on the history of Lanesfield and the school as they walk out to the building together.

“Historically, every year, the school would get a new schoolmarm — or master if it was a boy — because they thought that if the same teacher stayed, that they would get too soft and not be strict, (as) they would be too fond of the children,” she said.

In the escape-room scenario, the story is taking place when it’s not the typical time for the teacher to have left for the year. Unlike your typical escape room, everything is low-tech, in keeping with its turn-of-the-century setting.

“We don’t have lights. We don’t have things that flash. We don’t have buttons that make sounds. We don’t have any of those sorts things, which I know other escape rooms have, because ours is set in a museum,” Smith Doyle said.

All of this makes this escape room experience stand out from the others.

“A lot of people have said to me that they like that our escape room uses different types of learning,” Smith Doyle said. “There are things that are written. There are things you just find. There things that are more puzzle-like. It kind of hits on those different styles of learning, so usually it’s something everyone can participate in.”

She appreciates that they’re sharing the history of the site in a non-traditional way.

“They think, ‘Oh, I’m just coming to do this escape room, and it sounds like something fun to do,’ but yet we’re talking to them about our historic site and historical things that happened here and what the school day looks like,” she said. “And they just don’t realize that they’re actually learning while doing something fun.”

Register for the March 18 Scandal in the Schoolhouse escape room at jcprd.com/435/Lanesfield-Historic-Site. The group ticket is $80 for up to eight people. At least one person in each group must be an adult. For details about booking an alternate date, contact the museum at 913-715-2570.

This story was originally published March 12, 2025 at 5:00 AM.