🧟 It's midnight, the old crypt door is creaking, and something down there is on the move. Every letter in this message has been swapped for a different one — crack the code to find out who's creeping around and what that bump upstairs really was. Typical solve time: 20–35 minutes — hit Start below and see how you do. The answer key sits at the bottom — fold it backward along the dotted line before you start.
Write each decoded letter in the box beneath its coded letter. To start you off: D = B.
This is a straight substitution cipher: 22 words and 101 letters, every letter swapped for a different one, and a single free letter to get you going. At 101 letters it's about twice the length of Something's Brewing, which sounds harder but actually gives you more to work with — more repeats, more patterns, more places for one good guess to pay off. Here is the fastest way in:
The usual advice is to count the coded letters and call the most common one E. Do that here and you'll be stuck before the ghouls are out of the crypt. In this message E turns up only four times, and eleven different letters appear more often than it does. The most common coded letter shows up 14 times, and it isn't E. Short messages simply don't follow the textbook statistics, which is why spotting patterns beats counting. For more cipher-breaking approaches, see our guide to solving cryptograms.
The Crypt-o-Gram is our second Halloween cryptogram, and the spookier of the two. Where Something's Brewing hides a famous line from Shakespeare, this one hides an original message written for the site — ghouls, goblins, an old crypt, a thump upstairs, and a last word that leaves the question open. The cipher alphabet was scrambled at random, no letter stands for itself, and the answer key on the fold strip lists every swap used.
The phrase “things that go bump in the night” is older than most people think. It is best known from a short rhyme usually called an old Cornish or Scottish litany — “From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties, and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us!” — which was already being printed as “a quaint old Litany” in an Edinburgh book in 1905. Nobody has pinned down exactly where or when it started, and both Cornwall and Scotland still claim it.
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Puzzle Packs: Halloween · Logic & Code-Breaking