When realtors try to sell expensive houses, they "stage" them -- fill them with tasteful furniture that sells you not just on the house but on becoming the kind of person that would own this kind of furniture.

It gets old. There's only so many tastefully karate-chopped pillows and color-coordinated drapes a person can look at.

Throughout 1940s and 1950s, Frances Glessner Lee created 20 dollhouse miniatures of crime scenes, usually composites or variants of real crime scenes, used to train detectives in forensics. (I was recently reminded of that when episode 2 of "The 3%" featured a clever twist in a "here's a frozen scene, tell me what happened" puzzle. That one was life- sized, though.)

Why not combine the two to draw traffic to a realtor's website? Among the vases and inoffensive modern art, hide a trail of footsteps, blood spatter, spilled vichysoise -- and is that the torn-out power cable of a toaster I see sticking out of the bath tub? Why, I think I know where the body must be!

Give visitors to the website a way of entering their conclusion of who did it, where, and with what. Randomly drawn winner gets free run of the open house an hour early.
-- jutta, May 31 2018

Vox Almanac: Frances Glessner Lee https://www.youtube...watch?v=9hdT8PgT19w
Video [jutta, May 31 2018]

https://www.google....igC&biw=360&bih=512 [hippo, Jun 01 2018]

You’ve been keeping that one under wraps for a while.....{+}
-- xenzag, May 31 2018


Nice. Related to this, it's extraordinary that it's not possible to buy rugs woven with a chalk corpse outline pattern
-- hippo, May 31 2018


// a chalk corpse outline pattern //

They use tape now.

// you can’t get red wine stain out //

That's because it's blackcurrant juice ... well, maybe blackcurrant juice. Or possibly tomato sauce. Red wine doesn't cause a reddish-brown colour like that.
-- 8th of 7, May 31 2018


might make for an interesting open house strategy
-- theircompetitor, May 31 2018


"... and here in the dining room you will find a length of rope, a piece of lead piping, a dagger, a candlestick, a pistol and a spanner, and through there is the conservatory where ... oh, hello Miss Scarlett, I didn't know you were still here ..."
-- 8th of 7, May 31 2018


Psssst. ' Cleary' sp.. Ha
-- xenzag, May 31 2018


Also, correction: it is possible to buy rugs with a corpse chalk outline pattern... (see link)
-- hippo, Jun 01 2018


I did one of these figure outlines when I was at college and added an extra arm growing out of the side of one of the legs.
-- xenzag, Jun 01 2018


Lovely
-- Voice, Jun 01 2018


An interesting way to get some open house traffic for a slow-selling place, that's for sure.
-- RayfordSteele, Jun 01 2018


// added an extra arm growing out of the side of one of the legs //

And after that, you have the unmitigated gall to crticize those lovely altruistic people from Monsanto ? Physician, heal thyself ...
-- 8th of 7, Jun 01 2018


[xenzag, oops, thanks!]

Some sort of Escape Room .. Escape Open House? staging could become a thing as well.
-- jutta, Jun 01 2018


Each house should have a children's room containing a special doll's house. You know the rest.
-- xenzag, Jun 01 2018


Sounds interesting. I just wonder about the Venn diagram of Crime puzzlers and money bags wanting homes. Don't Realtors target their market, if their worth their salt?

In a similar vein, wouldn't staging something different, maybe a Damien Hirst, spread a wider net?
-- wjt, Jun 01 2018



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