I Went on LA’s Weirdest Underground Scavenger Hunt

I ducked out of the rain into the Los Angeles Chinatown dive bar where I’d been told to meet, ordered a whiskey, and waited. For what, exactly, I wasn’t sure, although I had been informed in no uncertain terms that tonight would be like “nothing I’ve ever experienced.”

It was a Saturday night and I wasn’t quite sure what I’d gotten myself into. The only information I had about the evening ahead came from a video I’d been sent about something called Rabbit Hole—a sort-of multimedia underground urban scavenger hunt experience. The footage, from a previous hunt, and was dark, mildly foreboding, and didn’t really provide much intel beyond the fact that this was going to be really weird and that someone might be filming it with a very shaky camera to make a video of later.

I was secretly hoping that Rabbit Hole would be a lot like that Michael Douglas movie The Game: some sort of deeply-conceived, convoluted conspiracy that would slowly unravel, blurring the lines between reality and artifice, gaining a dark, irrevocable momentum all its own that churned toward an unsettling denouement, clouding my judgement and senses with creepy clowns and Sean Penn.

I finished my drink just as people started to filter in, and I began shaking hands and exchanging small talk with the group I was going to spend the next three hours with. They seemed like a solid crew, mostly. There were 14 of us in total, all assembled in the bar, buying drinks, introducing themselves, and speculating on the nature of what would soon befall us. Christina and Zack, the couple who had arranged all of this, were friendly and engaging, encouraging us to have a drink and assuring us that things would begin shortly.

And so they did. We were led upstairs, into a cramped room above the dive bar, where we found a briefcase on a table, a large screen and projector, and a heavyset man wearing sunglasses and a lab coat. Other men in white coats stood off to the side, watching us.

One guy in our group, who I will describe charitably as “probably owning a lot of polo shirts,” seemed destined to take a leadership role, seemingly by virtue of his overall volume and authoritatively shiny shoes. He wasted no time in opening the briefcase, which held various items with every group member’s name on them: I got a thumb drive, someone got keys, someone got a book with drawings in it, and, mercifully, one girl got a flask that had instructions on it to share among the group.

As we debated the merits and functions of our find, a video began to play on the screen. It was accompanied by strange music and whirling lights, and it soon became apparent that the video featured us as its subject. Images from our lives flickered before us, and one by one the people in the group saw their memories and photos play out across the room. Although easily accomplished with a bit of Facebook snooping, the effect was immediate and unsettling, and everyone quieted down and listened.

The images came faster, jumping from one life to another, until finally they became a jumble of light and sound; an alarm sounded and smoke rose. Something was amiss. One of the “scientists” in lab coats, well cast with his long white hair and spectacles, stepped from the back of the room and consulted with the heavy set man at the controls. He spoke into his radio hurriedly: “It’s happening again.” Then he turned to us.

“This project was created with the purpose of allowing people to re-live their memories. The best, most beautiful moments of your life can be experienced, in real time, again and again—that was our goal. And it almost worked. But something has gone wrong.” The project, he said, hinged on a synthetic memory implantation program called Zacteena, which was able to digitally synthesize memories and store them in its database.

“Tight,” said shiny shoes.

We followed the head “scientist” downstairs and out into the evening chill as he explained to us that the supercomputer would get stuck on various events, unable to fully process them, leading to a calamitous malfunction and the creation of false and confused memories, a fractured timeline of intermingled events. By this point, I had befriended the girl with the flask, and told her that with such an uncertain future facing the group, now would probably be a good time to start passing that whiskey around.

We sipped from the flask and listened to the scientist, who told us to be careful, and to use the book of sketches we had been given to guide us. With the machine behaving as it was, all of our accumulated memories were at stake and could be manipulated. He was then engulfed in a strategically placed cloud of mist from a smoke machine and we became aware that another scene was playing out before us.

A girl with sad eyes looked longingly at a man in a trench coat who stood near us. He didn’t see her though—he was looking at a sheet of music in his hand, humming it, seemingly committing it to memory. When their eyes met, he smiled, and she ran to him. They embraced, and she began to sob. Smoke machines, real tears; I hit the flask and nodded my approval at the solid production values so far.

“I don’t need this anymore,” the man said gleefully, brandishing the sheet music. He pointed to his head: “It’s all up here!” He then produced a lighter and burned the composition, smiling at his lover as the flames curled over the staves. Another puff of mist and the couple disappeared, another lost memory.

That was our cue to begin the elaborately prefaced scavenger hunt. We set off into the cold Chinatown night, armed only with our items from the briefcase and the flask of warm whiskey. We still had no idea what was in store, but we knew we’d be getting free food at the after-party.

Our first stop we got from the book of sketches that had been in the briefcase, it had an address and a picture of an old Asian man, so we reasonably assumed we should go to said address and locate said man. The problem was, once we got there we were faced with a locked door. We tried the keys we had been given, to no avail. At this point, our group dynamic, which was still in its fragile, nascent stage, began to break down rapidly. Some people wanted to simply push on to the next clue in the book, some insisted we were missing something, and some just took the flask and sat under a nearby tree and wrote in a notebook about how the group was turning on each other and how this was nothing like that movie The Game.

Shiny shoes decided we should push onward to the second location, which turned out to be a plaza with a rock and waterfall fountain that was covered in coins. One guy had gotten a bag of 14 pennies from the briefcase, so we deduced that this would be an opportune time to use them. After all 14 had been thrown into the fountain, a woman dressed in red and black caught our attention. We began asking her questions all at once, but she only smiled demurely and remained quiet. Finally, she stood, walked to the fountain, and began to speak. She went through the group one by one, and told us things about our lives, our memories. She brought up past loves and siblings, parents and life events. Did she get all of this from Facebook stalking us, too? At one point she also produced a hula hoop that glowed and hula-ed while she talked. It was pretty impressive overall. She then told us to follow her.

From there the hunt zigzagged all over Chinatown, Little Tokyo, and Downtown LA. We were led into restaurants with secret codes in our fortune cookies; we rode the metro to a karaoke studio that contained copious alcohol and messages only readable with a UV flashlight we’d been given; we ate New Orleans king cake in a po boy shop to find a bunny figurine inside. At each point, there were encounters with more memories from our past revealed by strange figures like a rabbit-masked man in a suit leading us through rainy downtown alleys, a homeless shaman who used his lighter to burn away certain words written in flammable ink in our book to show the next step, and a quartet of masked men serenading us on the street. There were copious drinks, Uber rides in a black Suburban, and many hidden keys. Eventually, in the commotion, shiny shoes and his friend got lost and we never saw them again. Nobody was really that bummed about it.

Eventually, we saw the man in the trench coat—the one who had burned up his sheet music—but now he was older. He sat alone in a cavernous, ornate abandoned theater, and told us he had forgotten the melody he wrote and burned all those years ago, forgotten his love for her. Since this was a scavenger hunt, we happened to have a scroll with holes punched in it that we had procured along the way, and he put it in a music box he had and turned the crank.

As the lost song played his face came alive and his eyes welled with tears. “That’s it,” he said, remembering.

It might have been the beer and whiskey from the karaoke place making us overly emotional, but we were all pretty caught up in the moment. I even felt touched. As he lost himself in the tune, a string quartet in masks filed in and began to play the now-remembered song, the music soaring beautifully through the crumbling glory of the massive space, and up in the balcony we saw him as a younger man, re-united with his love. The old man smiled and the couple above us began dancing together, and as the music swelled, they kissed.

And then, it was over. The head scientist from the beginning walked in and thanked us all for helping to navigate this labyrinth of lost memory, and told us that there were cars outside waiting to take us to the after-party, which was in a very nice loft nearby. Despite the fact that this had been merely an elaborately planned and well-acted production, I felt genuinely moved by all of it.

At the after party, next to the open bar, I got a chance to talk with Zack and Christina, the architects of Rabbit Hole. They said they wanted to create a totally unique experience that only happened once, and that each hunt that they put on would be a singular event, with music and performances crafted specifically for one night, never to be repeated. For them, it was a labor of love, arising from a desire to entertain and engage their friends with scenarios both strange and fantastical. With this mysterious fusion of scavenger hunt, performance art, team problem-solving, science-fiction narrative, and drunken karaoke, they had certainly succeeded.

As we drank craft cocktails with all the actors who had taken part in the night, and availed ourselves of free pecan pie and po boy sandwiches, I realized this was just like the final scene of The Game, where Michael Douglas falls into that party and everyone from all that he has experienced is there, laughing and drinking. I toasted the rabbit-mask guy and the mysterious lady in red, got myself another slice of pie and reflected that despite its utter lack of creepy clowns and/or Sean Penn, this certainly had been like nothing I’d ever experienced.

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