Back in the 70's there was a book called "The Hundredth Monkey". It presented a similar scenario where monkeys in one island would learn how to use a simple tool. Once the "hundredth monkey" had learned that skill, monkeys on other islands mysteriously started doing this.

[en.wikipedia.org] One of your responders referred to the Hundreth Monkey Effect. Here is a link for it

Some thoughts...

1. Do you watch every single time it's being played? Because maybe you just didn't pick up on it before or you missed it. It's called the "frequency illusion" where all of a sudden you start noticing something you didn't notice before. Like, you meet someone name Fredrick, then all of a sudden you start seeing random people with the name Fredrick. Not saying it is that, but just saying it could be.

2. It also reminds me of that scene in Waking Life where Julie Depry and Ethan Hawke are talking and Ethan Hawke's explains a scenario in which isolated people were given crossword puzzles and got average scores, then they gave them day old crossword puzzles and their scores went up 20% and then Hawke's character says, "Once the answers are out there, people can pick up on them. It's like we're all telepathically sharing our experiences"

3. Just an idea, but maybe once someone ran the escape room, do you think that they may have went to the yelp page, FB page or wherever and wrote a cheat for that room?

Perhaps triggered by something seen on television that nobody actually remembers seeing. Something external to the room that everyone experienced.

WOW - that is super freaky. It's like there is a collective consciousness happening? Or do you think these people have talked with the next groups to come in?

I've never done an escape room, I'd like to.

Did you ever play the computer game "Myst"? That sort of behavior sounds like something out of a computer game (even the first versions of Adventure by Woods and Crowther required you to catch a bird, cage it, and then release it to scare/attack/kill the snake in another part of the game.)

What a cool job! I would LOVE to do an escape room sometime! It's on my to-do list.

Hi, Jason, and welcome to the website,

Sounds similar to the controversial "100th monkey" effect. Researchers studying some young macaque monkeys that had learned to wash sand off sweet potatoes in a stream from watching older monkeys doing it, observed that after a certain critical percentage of monkeys learned the behavior through watching other monkeys, that same washing behavior seemed to appear spontaneously in other macaque populations on nearby islands.

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My guess would be that another escape room had to do this (maybe there is another local one or something they seen on tv/internet). I remember seeing an escape room on the Big Bang show but I do not remember if they had to weigh anything or not...

How intriguing. I wonder what psychologists would say about this.