Bellingham is home to four escape rooms, but two are owned and operated by the same people — and they’re all 30 or younger.
Hugh Wichman, CharLee Bethje, Eileen Lee and Adam Hockemeyer co-own Fairhaven’s Cryptid Escapes and downtown Bellingham’s The Eureka Room. Virtually self-taught, they each bring a different skill set to small-business ownership.
Escape rooms are unique in the business world — customer lifetime value is low and repeat business depends on room changeover.
“Once you know the answer to a question or a puzzle,” Wichman said, “you can’t unknow it.”
But in a college town with more than 3,000 new students every fall, business is steady.
Industry standard is to rotate a room every two to four years, but the rooms at Cryptid Escapes (Robotic Resurgence and Murder Mystery) and The Eureka Room (Backstage Breakout and Out of Orbit) are still going strong.
“They’re kind of not petering out,” said Hockemeyer, 30.
Designing a new room
The group’s newest room, not yet released, is set in a ranger’s cabin. The goal is to find out what type of cryptid is terrorizing you before escaping.
The rectangular room with maroon walls currently stores a table, cabinets, various props, and a fake taxidermied talking deer head named Buck. Most items come from thrift stores, friends and family.
Designing a new room is an all-hands-on-deck task, but begins with Bethje, whose idea usually starts with a setting, followed by a series of questions: What items fit in the room? What’s the floor plan? How and where can puzzles be incorporated? What props are needed?
Bethje, 26, had no experience with escape rooms until he got a job at The Eureka Room in 2018 when it was owned by Jesse Stanton. Bethje gained design knowledge from Stanton’s books on word puzzles, as well as an episode of an escape room podcast that focused on building rooms.
“Building the tech was often a limiting factor because I didn’t know anything about coding before starting,” said Bethje, who depended on books and online forums. Now, he takes the lead on coding and all RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) objects. (If you’ve done an escape room, think about those moments when you placed an object somewhere and something else opened up.)
Following the puzzle design, Wichman, 29, helps with set design and tweaks the puzzles — which usually start too hard for the average layman. The group works together to “playtest” the room and then brings in friends and other escape room owners to playtest more.
A change in ownership
The first escape room in Bellingham was a pop-up downtown built by Stanton — a “one-man show” in 2017. He had recently experienced a “really bad” room that gave him “false confidence” that he could make one himself. After traveling to Seattle and playing more rooms, he realized building one is an art.
“This isn’t just some puzzles in a room,” Stanton said. “This is where you try to tell a story and really transport people into something different.”
He built another room in the Herald Building, followed by Backstage Breakout in Bellingham Crown Plaza, where The Eureka Room still lives. One of his earliest rooms, espionage-themed, required you to “check in” at your time slot by standing outside with a newspaper under your arm so he could identify you.
Public response was great, Stanton said, and he soon hired employees to help. First Lee, then Bethje. They were eventually promoted to managers, responsible for scheduling, marketing, hiring, training — essentially everything that wasn’t “business stuff.”
Stanton was busy — he had a family, wanted to go back to school and played in a band — and he recognized his two young employees had more ideas and energy. He was ready to pass the torch.
In 2020, he floated the idea of selling The Eureka Room to the duo.
“It didn’t feel that crazy of a leap,” said Lee, 27. “It was really cool. I didn’t expect it, but it made a lot of sense.”
Two years later, the idea became a reality when the duo partnered with Lee’s partner Hockemeyer and their roommate Wichman, who had worked together on game development for a card game.
Wichman remembers asking: “Can we afford not to buy this?”
They took the reigns in February 2022 and opened Cryptid Escapes shortly after. Three years later, the machine is well-oiled — Lee does marketing, hiring and training; Bethje does room and puzzle development; Hockemeyer does accounting; and Wichman often serves as game master, introducing players to the story and room, reading the rules, locking a group up — then watching via a camera and giving hints as needed. They now have five employees.
When Cryptid Escapes opened, Stanton brought his kids to complete his 50th escape room (yes, he tracks it on a spreadsheet).
“I felt like it was in good hands,” he said.
Great room, dream team
The dynamic quartet travels across Western Washington to play rooms together. They think a great escape room includes immersion, smooth game flow, exciting tech, “aha moments” and seamless setting changes.
According to the experts, the key to escaping is communication. Large groups that play and don’t share information struggle. When one person thinks they have all the answers and shuts down others’ ideas, a group fails miserably.
“Being unsure and a good listener is way better than being confident and wrong,” Stanton said.
After observing many groups play, Lee and Stanton said an escape room dream team would include a couple of engineers (for tech), some 12-year-olds (children are often right because they think outside the box), teachers (good at listening, communicating and sharing), and a grandparent (for multigenerational perspectives).
But every group is not a dream team, and game masters have seen it all.
Game master: ‘An art, not a science’
Some players dress up in costumes and wigs. Tweens have sacrificed friends for hints during birthday parties. One group of older people tried to sneak in a mini keg.
Bethje said game masters are “therapists and babysitters.”
“I’ve seen someone get fired in an escape room,” Lee said. “And I saw a couple break up.”
“I saw couples that should break up,” Stanton added.
Game masters are always watching, and they see the good and the bad — from the moment when a secret door opens and players celebrate in unison, to players hyper-fixating on items in a room that aren’t puzzles at all.
“[Escape rooms] are pretty idiot-proof,” Lee said. “They’re not going to make you rip the sconce off the wall because there’s something behind it. But a lot of people are like, ‘What if there’s something in this lightbulb?’”
A good game master makes or breaks an experience, Lee added. Bethje said it’s a “blessing and a challenge” to find good game masters who can vibe-check a group and adapt accordingly.
Outreach and expansion
The co-owners are passionate about being active in the Bellingham community, specifically in Fairhaven. They designed a puzzle game for Village Books, which is available to play at the 11th Street store, as well as a Minecraft escape room for a robotics kids’ summer camp. Last year, they wrote the Dirty Dan Murder Mystery Weekend story, which they will do again for this year’s April event.
Though Cryptid Escapes is becoming a Fairhaven staple, it may not be forever. The building where it’s located, at 1514 12th St., will be demolished in 2027.
“We’re looking for our forever home right now,” Wichman said of a new space, which may be in Fairhaven or downtown.
Unsure if they’ll keep Cryptid and Eureka separate or merge them, they do know what they’re looking for: an unfinished space with minimal windows where they can put up walls, build new rooms, and lock you in.
Editor’s note: Jesse Stanton is a regular music contributor to Cascadia Daily News.
Jaya Flanary is CDN's designer/digital editor; reach her at jayaflanary@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 106.
