For two weeks each October, the Chester Fritz Library at the University of North Dakota stops being only a library. Four ghosts get loose in the building, and students are invited to track them down. This year the hunt ends on the evening of Oct. 28, when the library's annual ghost hunt closes with "Long Overdue: An Escape Room Experience," a free, drop-in, building-wide puzzle that runs from 5 to 8 p.m. at 3051 University Ave. in Grand Forks.
The premise is a library joke told straight: four ghosts have haunted the Chester Fritz for decades, and they just won't check out. Teams pick a sweet or sour starting path, then follow Shaun the (ghost) Dog through the building to set the ghosts free. The hunt's own event listing names the four: Castiel, Dr. Alice, Hugo and Oswald, each with a sweet side and a sour side. Shaun, the ghostly good boy, only comes home with those who help his friends check out at the finale.
The escape room is the work of two librarians who do student outreach on top of their regular jobs. Rebecca Brown, the library's web services librarian, and Zeineb Yousif, its digital initiatives librarian, have now built a run of these Halloween puzzles, largely by hand. In an interview with the Dakota Student, Brown described the DIY approach: building false bottoms into boxes, creating the cipher, and making "all the weird additional props" in house.
The series began with an accident. During a renovation, workers had to knock a hole in a third-floor wall to reach some wiring, and the library's social media team turned the hole into a joke post, half-inviting someone to climb inside. That post became the plot of the first escape room, "The Lock Box of Chester Fritz." As Yousif told the Dakota Student, the story was that staff had found four lockboxes and a letter from Fritz and his lawyer, and that ever since the boxes turned up, things had gotten strange: noises, flickering lights, falling photographs. The original consultant on the project had walked away, leaving a conspiracy board of clues behind. The library decided to hand the challenge to students.
That first room leaned on the real life of the library's namesake. Chester Fritz, a UND graduate, went to Hong Kong in 1915 and made his mark in banking and shipping, becoming a member of the British Hong Kong Club. His travels ran from Hong Kong to Italy to Zurich and back, and the puzzles followed them. He competed in the Shanghai Paper Hunts, a horse-racing event, placing or winning 22 times between 1926 and 1939, and he climbed Mount Fuji in 1936. The final step was opening a leather-bound notebook. The event drew ten participants at first, with more trickling in, and teams worked through ciphers, locked journals, UV lights and false-bottom boxes.
The following year brought "The Ghost of Chester Fritz: An Escape Room Experience," held in the library's reading room, known as the fishbowl, on Oct. 29. That one picked up where the lockboxes left off. As Yousif put it, the story was that after the boxes were finally opened, things got weird in the building, and a spirit was trying to send a message. The goal was to decode it and name the ghost. Teams raced for Halloween baskets of candy and pumpkin-spice-scented flushable wipes.
This year's version scales the idea up from a single room to the whole library. Instead of one contained puzzle, the ghost hunt spreads across the building over two weeks, with participants collecting the four ghosts as they go, and the escape room serves as the finale where the collected story pays off. It is a format that suits a building the size of the Chester Fritz, which the university describes as the largest library in North Dakota and the primary research facility for UND.
The library has been part of campus life since the early 1960s, designed by the Grand Forks firm Wells & Denbrook, a partnership of Theodore Wells and Myron Denbrook Jr. According to the library history blog "The Fritz at 50," Chester Fritz sent the official donation letter from his villa in Rome on Feb. 8, 1958, naming himself as donor and laying out the terms. The building has since had an addition and interior changes, and a major renovation wrapped up in spring 2021, the first major update to the building in decades.
That history is part of why the escape rooms work. The puzzles are not generic locked-room fare dropped into a campus building; they are built out of the library's own lore, from a hole in the wall to the globe-trotting donor whose name is over the door. Brown and Yousif have turned institutional history and a social media gag into an annual tradition students now expect.
For anyone planning to go, the practical details are simple. The finale runs Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2026, from 5 to 8 p.m. at the Chester Fritz Library, 3051 University Ave., Grand Forks. It is free and drop-in, with no reserved seating and no capacity cap, so teams can arrive when they like within the window. The library asks participants to bring a team and choose a sweet or sour start.
And the hunt does not quite end there. Two days later, on Friday, Oct. 30, from 3 to 5 p.m., the library holds its Trick or Treat event, with stations throughout the building, a prize from the pumpkin patch, a Halloween photo op, and a look at UND Art Collection's new creative projects and the library's building partners, now including tutoring. Staff, students and their families are welcome.
But the main event is the escape room, and its appeal is the same thing that made the first lockbox room work: a library is already a place full of hidden things, and for one evening in October, the Chester Fritz lets people go looking for them on purpose.