When you’ve been doing scavenger hunts for 20 years, and have sent more than half a million people scouring streets across America for answers to tricky questions and taking fun team photos, you’re going to run into a few celebrities. Actors, politicians, authors, you name it, they’ve either gone on our scavenger hunts or wound up in photos with hunters who randomly ran into them.

This happens most frequently in New York City, where celebs are free range; you’d think there’d be a lot in Los Angeles, but of course they rarely get out of their cars. In any case, here’s a look at some of the famous faces found on our hunts or by our hunters.

Jennifer Garner did a private Wizard School Scavenger Hunt with her daughter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner got friendly with bygone New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia on a Secrets of Greenwich Village Scavenger Hunt staged for Lauren Bush Lauren’s birthday. Her husband, David Lauren, is at left above. Fourth teammate Ricky Van Veen, founder of CollegeHumor.com, took the photo.

Meanwhile, Lauren’s cousin—and President George W. Bush’s daughter—Barbara Bush and future-ambassador Ken Howery teamed up on a public Murder at the Met Hunt.

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos celebrated a major birthday by taking his friends and family on the Met Madness Scavenger Hunt. Jeff’s team won and set a record for highest hunt score that remains unsurpassed. Afterwards, he wrote to us, “Thanks for the energy and creativity you put into our hunt at the Met—incredibly original….I loved your witty questions and racing through the museum. Everyone was thrilled. You have 50 new Watson Adventures groupies.”

BBC comedian and talk show host Jonathan Ross is a fan who has been on a number of our hunts. Above, he poses with his teammates outside Federal Hall on Wall Street while tackling Hamilton: The Scavenger Hunt in 2018. He had Watson Adventures founder Bret Watson as a guest on his radio show.

Shazam! star Zachari Levi joined us for a scavenger hunt in Los Angeles.

Fashion designer Cynthia Rowley did a hunt and said afterwards, “The hunt was great. It is the perfect party for adventurous, curious kids of all ages.”

Actor Adam Scott (Parks and Rec) showed his sleuthing skills on our Murder at the National Gallery Hunt in Washington, D.C.

Sony asked us to stage a hunt in Culver City to promote the movie Searching. Actress Michelle La—seen above with Hunt Host Joshua Bott—met with hunters at the finish line. And actor John Cho read one of the clues in a recorded message.

A team on one of our hunts in Midtown New York ran into former Attorney General Janet Reno, who paused to join them in a team photo.

Another team on the Secrets of Greenwich Village Hunt spotted actress Kate Hudson and talked her into a team photo shot.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (above) read a clue to participants in a hunt we staged in The Loop for ABC’s Windy City Live. The show dubbed it the “scAvengers Scavenger Hunt,” and in the photo three hunters wear the special t-shirt.

Journalist MSNBC host Ali Velshi joined us for the Ghosts of Greenwich Village Hunt.

Actor J. August Richards, best known to fans of the TV series Angel, joined us on a public hunt in Los Angeles.

Comedian Ophira Eisenberg, host of NPR’s Ask Me Another, was formerly a Watson Adventures Hunt Host! In the photo above, she’s helping us test the first Wizard School Scavenger Hunt at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Survivor survivor Mitchell Olson also hosted many a hunt for us. In the photo above, he’s MC of our Trivia Slam game.

Best-selling author Nelson DeMille joined us on a hunt in New York.

We staged a custom scavenger hunt in Madison Square Garden for the families of the band Phish, at their request.

For the Komen Tickled Pink Scavenger Hunt aboard the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, we were joined by Logan West, Miss Teen USA 2012.

A team of kids doing a hunt on Manhattan’s Upper East Side were trying to stage a team photo in which they were pretending to apprehend a bank robber. They asked a random passerby if he would pose as the robber, and he happily agreed. After the snap he went on his way. A witness to the scene went up to the kids and said, “Do you know who that was? That was the actor Christian Slater!”

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Things change. That’s the trouble when you create scavenger hunts that uncover the odd, the unusual, the historic, the mysterious, and the hilarious things all around you in cities and museums. We write questions that send people in search of sites and sights worth the effort of finding them. But the problem is, signs come down, businesses close, statues vanish, murals get painted over, exhibits close, paintings go into storage, quirkiness gets gentrified out of existence, and at the zoo the animals, um, move on.

What’s a scavenger hunt company to do? Constant route checking and question rewriting. Sometimes we get lucky: The giant tea kettle we featured on the Freedom Trail disappeared for a long time, but returned in restored glory. Our devilish question about a Met Museum gallery donated by someone named Kevorkian went into mothballs for years while the Arabic galleries were restored, but now it’s back. Let’s take a moment here to remember some of the fallen stars of hunts past, places we’ve featured since our first hunt in 1999 that have vanished.

Dueling neighbors

Dating back at least to 2009, our midtown Manhattan scavenger hunts would take people to this spot near Sixth Avenue and ask, “Two signs in ironic juxtaposition bear bad news for your wallet. What six initials describe those two signs?” But both the National Debt Clock and the IRS office have moved on.

A flash that lost its bang

On our scavenger hunts in Santa Monica, California, we like to send teams into a classic arcade to find this shoot-out game, and challenge them to figure out which item in a list is not an active target. One quick way?  Take a flash photo to reveal all the light sensors that act as targets. The game is still there, but back in the day, when we gave teams digital cameras, the flash would set off every target at once, with a cacophonous explosion of sound. But today, people use their smartphone cameras, and for some reason their flashes don’t activate the targets. Someone from one of our tech clients that do this hunt will probably explain it to us…

Bone, sweet bone

It’s not the best photo, because we took this back in the days when digital cameras (or at least ours) didn’t take great indoor photos in low light. This skeleton family relaxing at home was a highlight of our scavenger hunts at the American Museum of Natural History, since our first one there in January 1999. The question was usually: “Who might ironically want a bone?” Note bony Fido by the TV. But we also might ask about the skeletal version of American Gothic on the wall. Well done, MNH! Alas, this exhibit was replaced by the Hall of Human Origins in 2007. Museums evolve too.

Mini flamingo? Nice touch

We fired up the time machine and went back to 2005 to retrieve a question from our first scavenger hunts in the Loop in downtown Chicago. You might recognize that famous Alexander Calder sculpture in the photo from, say, the parade sequence in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Except that the colossal original stands in Federal Plaza, where we asked teams this question:

“A blind person could help you answer this: How many tons does a giant flamingo weigh (although the blind person’s fingers might tell him it weighs much, much less)?”

The answer: 50 tons. “Inside the post office next to the giant, orange Calder sculpture called Flamingo is a miniature version that blind people can touch, along with a sign that says the large version weighs 50 tons.”

But the post office got renovated and the sculpture disappeared years ago. Unless you know where it is and can tell us. The reward for this flamingo’s capture? A ticket to our weekend hunts in The Loop for the general public. Heck, we’ll throw in two bonus points. We’re feeling generous.

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We’re jumping for joy over our 20th year of running fun-filled scavenger hunts, and we’re hoping you’ll celebrate with us. During the month of April, whether you’re on a hunt or not, take a photo of yourself or your friends in mid-air, jumping for joy. Post the shot to your favorite social media feed and tag Watson Adventures or use #WatsonAdventures. If you’re on a hunt, you’ll earn bonus points.

Even if you’re not on a hunt, every photo will be entered into a contest to win four tickets to one of our weekend scavenger hunts for the general public. After April 30, the four best photos will be posted on our Facebook page and our Instagram feed, and the person who submitted the photo with the most “likes” will WIN! (Only one photo submission per person will be eligible for the final four.)

Easypeasy, right? To inspire you—and give you an idea of what we’re looking for—here are some great leaps made by teams on previous scavenger hunts…

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If you blinked, you missed the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex in New York City’s Soho neighborhood. The mini-museum was like a keyboard player that joins a band for one album and then vanishes.

Back in 2009, the small but artifact-crammed pop-up museum was arguably a pioneer before pop-up museums were a thing. The galleries were like bonus tracks left out of the main museum back in Cleveland. The museum even had a soundtrack—you wore headphones, and the music changed depending on which exhibits you visited.

The annex closed its doors after one year. One problem was the then-high ticket price: $26.50. But in that one year, we managed to offer scavenger hunts that featured tricky questions about Chuck Berry’s leopard-print vest, Elvis Presley’s Bible, a thank-you note from Rolling Stone Brian Jones to a fan who’d given him aftershave, Jimi Hendrix’s TWA flight bag…OK, the relics weren’t always quite as noteworthy as what you’d find in Cleveland. But John Lennon’s piano was pretty cool.

Here are some of the questions from that bygone hunt, rejiggered into trivia questions. For those about to rock this quiz, we salute you.

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Annex Trivia

Scroll to the end to see the answers.

1. What visual artist helped the Material Girl express herself?

2. What was the first rap video played on MTV?

3. Whose famous “Bridge” actually began on East End Avenue (so to speak)?

4. What good-looking athlete inspired a “godfather” to wear part of a super hero’s costume?

5. What “Afrikan” DJ’s intercontinental soulsonic sound was monstrous?

6. How much was a three-day ticket to Woodstock?

7. In what NYC neighborhood did a photographer find the tenement face for Physical Graffiti?

8. Despite the song title, who is really the punk in one of the Ramones’ most famous songs?

9. What did a famed pop artist use for wallpaper in his famous “factory”?

10. If you answered a phone at the Annex, you could say, “Oh, no!” and be right. The artist might have been on the line. Who was it?

Bonus Round

11. In concert, what provided juice for the King? 

12. A funk soul father apparently didn’t want his tunes to use antiperspirant. He said, “Music has to breathe and sweat.” Who was he?

13. The section on “Poetry in Music” featured Elvis Costello, who apparently liked to move while working on “sole music.” What did he write the lyrics to the song “Red Shoes” on?

Answers

1. Madonna’s friend Keith Haring hand painted a leather jacket that was on display at the Annex.
2. “The Rapture,” by Blondie
3. A copyright certificate for “Bridge Over Troubled Water” showed Paul Simon’s address as 200 East End Ave. He didn’t write the song at his publisher’s office.
4. Wrestler Gorgeous George was James Brown’s inspiration for wearing a cape.
5. “Soulsonic Godzilla sound by DJ Afrika Bambaataa,” according to a flyer that was on display.
6. $18
7. The building on the cover of the Led Zeppelin album is in the East Village. You’ll see the building on our Secrets of the East Village Scavenger Hunt.
8. The song “Judy Is a Punk” repeatedly insists that Jackie is a punk. Judy, meanwhile, is apparently a runt.
9. Andy Warhol decorated the walls of his artist studio, which he called “The Factory,” with aluminum foil.
10. Yoko Ono sometimes answered if you picked up a phone on display linked to her.
11. Elvis Presley said he thrived on the “electricity“ generated by a cheering crowd.
12. James Brown
13. Elvis Costello wrote the song on a train ticket.

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Few things can make you feel instantly old like bygone gadgets that nobody uses anymore—the kind that people post on Facebook with the question, “Do you remember what this was for?” You sound like your grandpa as you eagerly reminisce: “Back in my day, you had to flip open your phone! And to enter a name, you might have to press the 6 key four times or more to select a capital letter O!”

When Watson Adventures was born in 1999, the cutting edge of technology was represented by video tapes you had to (please) rewind before returning them to Blockbuster. You burned your music to CDs, you backed up your files on floppy disks, and if you needed to take a photo and see it instantly, you used one of these beauties:

Geezers will recognize the svelte, turtle-back form of the Polaroid camera in the photo above—a photo taken with a digital camera on a phone. Back in 1999 or so, this silver plastic beauty was the sleek, state-of-the-art model. When we first added team photo challenges to our scavenger hunts, the only way to easily see whether the teams had actually met the conditions of the challenges was to give each team one of these machines to crank out instant photos and present the results at the finish line.

Our Hunt Hosts had to lug one of these for each team to the start of the hunt, along with these instructions for the technophobes:

How to Operate the Camera

• Flip the top of the front upward to reveal the lens.
• To shoot, pull back the round button on the right side.
• Take a TEST PICTURE of your team before you leave.
• Flip the top down to close the camera between shots so you don’t drain the battery.

Hunters would be challenged to complete a task such as, “Take a team photo looking terrified of a live animal.” Once a team posed with a suitable pooch, someone would pull back on the sliding plastic trigger, the camera would cluck and whir and spit out a square photo in a heavy white plastic frame. The surface of the photo would be moist, and the proud paparazzo would wave the photo in the air to help it dry. (Polaroid said this was not necessary, but it was part of the ritual.) There were only 10 photos in a cartridge, so if you made a mistake or took a dud, too bad, you were stuck with it. No points for you.

To the Future!

After the turn of the century, when compact digital cameras became reasonably priced, we purchased swarms of them. Hunters experienced the joy of taking endless photos and selecting the best. At the finish line, they would hold up the tiny screen to the Hunt Host and tap-tap-tap through the images.

Few people were more delighted than us when smartphones with cameras found their way into everyone’s pockets. At the finish line hunters could swipe through their photos for the Hunt Host to score them.

Today, our hunters text their shots—like the one below—to an online gallery that everyone can enjoy during and after the game. For bonus points, they can post a photo to this newfangled thing called social media, where they tag the post #watsonadventures. Back in our day, that # was called a pound sign, and you pushed it on your phone to retrieve your messages from your answering machine back home. Now, gather ’round for the story about the great terror known as Y2K…

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You don’t spend 20 years putting on thousands of scavenger hunts for countless hunters without the hard work—and fun-loving spirit—of people around the country. We couldn’t do what we do were it not for the hunt coordinators, hosts, assistants, and more who make each and every hunt possible. Here are just a few of them from the two decades of scavenger hunts.

Actress Jennifer Garner joined host Kim Greenberg in 2017 to flaunt her first-place medal at the Wizard School Scavenger Hunt at the Met Museum. She definitely displays that at home next to her Golden Globe, right?

In 2018, Los Angeles host Joshua Bott and actress Michelle La led an unusual social media hunt to promote La’s movie Searching.

Worlds collided in 2018 as Chicago hunt host Brittany Gillespie and Chicago hunt coordinator Valerie Querns met up with Washington, D.C., coordinators Sharlette and Bobby Williams.

In 2009, hunt host Mitchell Olson, one of the stars of the second season of Survivor, helped a team on the Munch Around Chinatown Scavenger Hunt make weird faces. Those teammates were Carly Blatt, Abbi Duncan, Watson Adventures Hunt Producer Rachel Duncan, and Watson Adventures Chief Development Officer Julie Jacobs.

Author A.J. Jacobs, hosts Andy Redeker and Chad Murray, Julie Jacobs, and host Shannon Haddock recently threw a special scavenger hunt celebrating the 100th anniversary of The Dalton School in New York. A hundred years is good, sure, but our 20 ain’t nothing to sneeze at, y’know.

Our Washington, D.C., crew—Sharlette Williams, Dan Velasquez, Robert Smith, Bobby Williams, and Marquis Mix—assembled for a huge hunt at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center.

Sometimes even hunters help make the magic happen. In 2018, Watson Adventures Founder Bret Watson (in front) invited experienced scavenger hunters to help test a new game in Grand Central Terminal.

In 2013, reigning Miss Teen USA Logan West climbed aboard the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum with Watson Adventures General Manager Stacy King and hunt host Andy Redeker for a scavenger hunt with the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Why hunt at one museum when you can hunt at five? Our Los Angeles crew hosted a five-museum scavenger hunt in 2018 as part of the Museum Mile Festival.

In 2013, hunt hosts Lauren Meley and Greg Roderick guided the many hunters who turned out for a hunt sponsored by the CBS series Sherlock. Greg sports the T-shirt that CBS made for the hunters: it says NO SHIRT SHERLOCK.

Hey, that’s us! Hosts and staff gathered for their annual summer rooftop bash in New York City in 2018.

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In 1993 I staged my first scavenger hunt at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which teams followed clues to find art and answer tricky, humorous questions about what they discovered. No previous knowledge of art was required: to win, you just needed sharp eyes and comfy shoes. See Part 1, “1993: A Scavenger Hunt Is Born.”

In 1999, Watson Adventures was formed. What took so long?

I moved to Los Angeles for my job as a writer at Entertainment Weekly. Hunt-free years passed. When I left EW and returned to New York, friends asked, “When are you going to do another one of those scavenger hunts?”

So in 1998 I ran the Met hunt, for free, for friends and friends of friends. One question, for instance, sent hunters into a particular room in the Lehman Wing to answer the question, “What wise guy can’t get his wife off his back?” They needed to find the aquamanile pictured above, of Aristotle and his wife Phyllis.

Next, for grins, I created a hunt at the American Museum of Natural History. People kept saying, “You know, you could charge money for these things.” For me, the best part was getting to do a deep-dive into a museum. It was a game for myself: How much could I look at? How many weird or cool things could I unearth? How could I make clues that would make people laugh?

The night of 100+ hunters

This unusual hobby took a turn thanks to an extraordinary friend named J.D. Schramm. He takes up the story: “Bret created these amazingly cool and incredibly witty scavenger hunts in museums all over the city. I had done a few of them with friends and always had a great time. In 1999 I set the audacious goal of doing multiple AIDS fundraising bike rides in one year. I asked Bret if he would run a pro-bono hunt and let all the proceeds go to the rides.

“The event was a huge hit: we had nearly 110 people attend the hunt (and after-party at a friend’s home). The hunt was the best way to bring so many people together to have a great time raising money.”

A participant named Dan happened to work for a major financial firm. The following Monday he was sitting in his office when he overheard a woman in a nearby office who was in charge of planning activities for the summer associates. She was telling someone that she was looking for something competitive, but not a sport, something with a level playing field, something that would also challenge their brains, maybe something with a cultural aspect…

The first corporate team-building lead!

Dan stepped into the other person’s office. “Excuse me, I overheard what you were talking about just now, and it sounded just like you were describing this scavenger hunt I went on at the Met this weekend.” She was interested! Dan passed along my contact info, and to my astonishment one of America’s largest companies called to ask if I could create a scavenger hunt in the Wall Street area for about 100 summer associates.

I had never heard of corporate team building. I never suspected that companies would want to do scavenger hunts. The hunt for the financial firm was such a hit that it led to many more hunts for other divisions within that company. By the spring of 1999 I acquired a certificate of incorporation for Watson Adventures LLC. Now the game was to see whether such a thing could be a viable business.

J.D.’s delightfully biased opinion

“Years later,” J.D. says, “whenever I hear people talk about Watson Adventures, I love saying, ‘Well…I knew him when it all came into existence.’ The scavenger hunt empire he has built is a great credit to his energy and passion and vision…and just plain fun.”

Aw shucks.

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2019 marks the 20th anniversary of Watson Adventures. One way we’re marking the occasion is with a new weekly series of blog posts that look back at the highlights—and perhaps a lowlight or two—of the past two decades. What better way to start than with our own origin story, as told by Bret Watson.

Amused at the museum

It all started with Mick Jagger. On a Friday evening in 1993, I was wandering alone through the galleries of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and chance took me into the Medieval Treasury. A full-length rendition of a saint in a stained-glass window made me pause. To me, he resembled a young Mick Jagger. The saint was hitching up his skirt to display a sore on his thigh—a bubo, the label explained. As in, the bubonic plague. He was the patron saint of plague sufferers. No wonder he looks like he can’t get no satisfaction, I thought. Appropriately enough, his name was St. Roch—which can be pronounced St. Rock.

The next room featured medieval household objects. I peered into a large metal bowl, mounted on the wall so one could faintly make out the embossed image on the bottom…the bare bottom of a man over the knee of a woman, who was spanking him. The label reported the bowl’s material in suitably deadpan style: “beaten brass.”

These gags practically write themselves, I thought. The museum was a treasure house of such unusual details that most visitors probably missed. The saint popping out of a dragon’s mouth. The traditional bull fighter who was actually a woman. A reliquary featuring a tooth supposedly from the mouth of Mary Magdalene. The Siddhartha who looked like he’d gone too far with the SlimFast, with his rib cage in stark view through taut skin. The kids hiding from the census taker. The weird African ladle with legs. The bust of a woman on the mantel whose earring could be tugged to reveal the time in her eyes—something you’d only know if you read the fine print on the dimly lit label. You could literally gaze into her eyes for hours. Or at least her left eye; you could gaze into the right eye for minutes.

What to do with this stuff?

How could I get my friends to see these funny finds? Could I turn them into a sort of comedy routine at the Met? I could string them together…maybe make my friends find them…give them clues…prompt them to answer a question that was like a joke, with the answer as the punch line. It would be sort of a comedy scavenger hunt.

In the weeks and months ahead, I spent way too many hours searching out amusing, amazing, strange, and wonderful objects and details in the museum. I had pages and pages of scrawl in notebooks. This was before digital cameras and websites, so I had to take extensive notes about the art, the location, what was nearby, and make inept drawings.

I wrote a two-hour hunt with 70 questions. Mind you, the typical two-hour Watson Adventures hunt at the Met today has no more than 28 questions. The hunt included these questions:

• Which stained-glass saint looks most like Mick Jagger? (Look for the guy hitching up his skirt to show a little leg.)
• In a room with a case full of medieval door equipment, what’s the wife doing to her husband on the beaten plate?

Those questions improved over the years. For instance, the second question changed to make hunters discover that the bowl was made of beaten brass. But the emphasis was always on the idea that no previous knowledge about art or the museum would be required to answer the questions. I wanted the game to be inclusive and to feature discovery, laughter, and teamwork. The hunts remain that way to this day.

I invited my adventurous friends for an evening of fun at the museum. Afterward we reconvened at a friend’s apartment, where we partook of pizza and I shared the correct answers to the questions and presented Met coffee mugs to the winners. It took another six years before this odd hobby turned into a business, when Watson Adventures was born.

How did this onetime hunt lead to the creation of Watson Adventures? See Part 2: “Watson Adventures Is Born.”

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