Lateral Thinking Puzzles

Lateral Thinking Puzzles

~1. In the middle of the ocean is a yacht. Several corpses are floating in the water nearby.

~2. Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice all live in the same house. Bob and Carol go out to a movie, and when they return, Alice is lying dead on the floor in a puddle of water and glass. It is obvious that Ted killed her but Ted is not prosecuted or severely punished.

~3. A woman comes home with a bag of groceries, gets the mail, and walks into the house. On the way to the kitchen, she goes through the living room and looks at her husband, who had blown his brains out. She then continues to the kitchen, puts away the groceries, and makes dinner.

~4. A body is discovered in a park in Chicago in the middle of summer. It has a fractured skull and many other broken bones, but the cause of death was hypothermia.

~5. A man lives on the twelfth floor of an apartment building. Every morning he wakes up, gets dressed, eats, goes to the elevator, takes it down to the lobby, and leaves the building for work. In the evening, he goes through the lobby to the elevator, and, if there is someone else in the elevator (or if it was raining that day) he goes back to his floor directly. However, if there is nobody else in the elevator and it hasn't rained, he goes to the 10th floor and walks up two flights of stairs to his room.

~6. A woman has incontrovertible proof in court that her husband was murdered by her sister. The judge declares, "This is the strangest case I've ever seen. Though it's a cut-and-dried case, this murderess cannot be punished."

~7. A man walks into a bar and asks for a drink. The bartender pulls out a gun and points it at him. The man says, "Thank you," and walks out.

~8. A man is in a returning from Switzerland by train. If he had been in a non-smoking car he would have died.

~9. Music stops and a woman dies.

~10. A man goes into a restaurant, orders abalone, eats one bite, and kills himself.

~11. A man is found hanging in a locked room with no furniture and a puddle of water under his feet.

~12. A man is dead in a puddle of blood and water on the floor of a locked room.

~13. A man is lying, dead, face down in the desert wearing a backpack.

~14. A man is lying face down, dead, in the desert, with a match near his outstretched hand. He is nude.

~15. A man is driving his car. He turns on the radio, listens for five minutes, turns around, goes home, and shoots his wife.

~16. A man driving his car turns on the radio. He then pulls over to the side of the road and shoots himself.

~17. A man is dead in a room with a small pile of pieces of wood and sawdust in one corner.

~18. A pile of sawdust, no net, a man dies.

~19. A rope breaks. A bell rings. A man dies.

~20. A man sitting on a park bench reads a newspaper article headlined "Death at Sea" and says, "A murder has been committed!"

~21. A man is riding a subway. He meets a one-armed man, who pulls out a gun and shoots him.

~22. Two women are talking. One goes into the bathroom, comes out five minutes later, and kills the other.

~23. A man is sitting in bed. He makes a phone call, says nothing, then goes to sleep.

~24. A man kills his wife, then goes inside his house and kills himself.

~25. Abel walks out of the ocean. Cain asks him who he is, and Abel answers. Cain kills Abel.

~26. Two men, one big and burly and the other short and thin, enter a bar. They both order identical drinks. The big one gulps his down and leaves; the other sips his slowly, then dies.

~27. Joe leaves his house, wearing a mask and carrying an empty sack. An hour later he returns. The sack is now full. He goes into a room and turns out the lights.

~28. A man takes a two week cruise to Mexico from the U.S. Shortly after he gets back, he takes a three day cruise which doesn't stop at any other ports. He stays in his cabin all the time on both cruises. As a result, he makes $250,000.

~29. Hans and Fritz are German spies during World War II. They try to enter America, posing as returning tourists. Hans is immediately arrested.

~30. Tim and Greg were talking. Tim said "The terror of flight". Greg said "The gloom of the grave". Greg was arrested.

~31. A man is found dead in his parked car. Tire tracks lead up to the car and away.

~32. A man dies in his own home.

~33. A woman in Paris in 1895 is waiting for her husband to come home. When he arrives, the house has burned to the ground and she's dead.

~34. A man gets onto an elevator. When the elevator stops, he knows his wife is dead.

~35. A policeman follows a burglar into a bar. When he enters the bar he finds a set of identical twins, dressed the same, with the loot between them. After several minutes he arrests one of the twins.

~36. She lost her job when she invited them to dinner.

~37. He couldn't find a chair, so he died.

~38. A car without a driver moves; a man dies.

~39. As I drive to work on my motorcycle, there is one corner which I go around at a certain speed whether it's rainy or sunny. If it's cloudy but not raining, however, I usually go faster.

~40. A woman throws something out a window and dies.

~1. A bunch of people are on an ocean voyage in a yacht. One afternoon, they all decide to go swimming, so they put on swimsuits and dive off the side into the water. Unfortunately, they forget to set up a ladder on the side of the boat, so there's no way for them to climb back in, and they drown.

~2. Alice is a goldfish; Ted is a cat.

~3. The husband killed himself a while ago; it's his ashes in an urn on the mantelpiece that the wife looks at.

~4. A poor peasant from somewhere in Europe wants desperately to get to the U.S. Not having money for airfare, he stows away in the landing gear compartment of a jet. He dies of hypothermia in mid-flight, and falls out when the landing gear compartment opens as the plane makes its final approach.

~5. The man is a midget. He can't reach the upper elevator buttons, but he can ask people to push them for him. He can also push them with his umbrella.

~6. The sisters are Siamese twins.

~7. The man has hiccups; the bartender scares them away by pulling a gun.

~8. The man used to be blind; he's now returning from an eye operation which restored his sight. He's spent all his money on the operation, so when the train goes through a tunnel he at first thinks he's gone blind again and almost decides to kill himself. Fortunately, the light of the cigarettes people are smoking convinces him that he can still see.

~9. The woman is a tightrope walker in a circus. Her act consists of walking the rope blindfolded, accompanied by music. The musician (organist, or calliopist, or pianist, or whatever) is supposed to stop playing when she reaches the end of the rope, telling her that it's safe to step off onto the platform. For unknown reasons (but with murderous intent), he stops the music early, and she steps off the rope to her death.

~10. The man was in a ship that was wrecked on a desert island. When there was no food left, another passenger brought what he said was abalone but was really part of the man's wife (who had died in the wreck). The man suspects something fishy, so when they finally return to civilization, he orders abalone, realizes that what he ate before was his wife, and kills himself.

~11. He stood on a block of ice to hang himself.

~12. He stabbed himself with an icicle.

~13. He jumped out of an airplane, but his parachute failed to open.

~14. He was with several others in a hot air balloon crossing the desert. The balloon was punctured and they began to lose altitude. They tossed all their non-essentials overboard, then their clothing and food, but were still going to crash in the middle of the desert. Finally, they drew matches to see who would jump over the side and save the others; this man lost.

~15. The radio program is one of the call-up-somebody-and-ask-them-a- question contest shows; the announcer gives the phone number of the man's bedroom phone, and a male voice answers.

~16. He worked as a DJ at a radio station. He decided to kill his wife, and so he put on a long record and quickly drove home and killed her, figuring he had a perfect alibi; he'd been at work. On the way back he turned on his show, only to discover that the record was skipping.

~17. The man is a blind midget. For various reasons too complicated to go into, someone else has been sawing small pieces off of his cane every night, so that every day he thinks he's taller. Since his only income is from being a circus midget, he decides to kill himself when he gets too tall. (Variant answer: instead of sawing pieces off of his cane, someone has sawed the legs off of his bed. He wakes up, stands up, and thinks he's grown during the night.)

~18. A midget is jealous of the clown who walks on stilts. He saws partway through the stilts; the clown walks along and falls and dies when they break.

~19. A blind man enjoyed walking near a cliff, and used the sound of a buoy to gauge his distance from the edge. One day the buoy's anchor rope broke, allowing the buoy to drift away from the shore, and the man walked over the edge of the cliff.

~20. The man is a travel agent. He had sold someone two tickets for an ocean voyage, one round-trip and one one-way. The last name of the man who bought the tickets is the same as the last name of the woman who "fell" overboard and drowned on the same voyage, which is the subject of the article he's reading.

~21. Several men were shipwrecked together. They agreed to survive by eating each other a piece at a time. Each of them in turn gives up an arm, but before they get to the last one, they're rescued. They all demand that the last man live up to his end of the deal. Instead, he kills a bum and sends the bum's arm to the others in a box to demonstrate that he fulfilled the bargain. Later, one of them sees him on the subway, holding onto the overhead rings with the arm he supposedly cut off, realizes he cheated, and kills him.

~22. Both women are white and single. A black male friend of the one who goes into the bathroom was recently killed, reportedly by the KKK. The woman who goes into the bathroom discovers a bloodstained KKK robe in the other's laundry hamper, picks up a nail file from the medicine cabinet, and goes out and kills the other.

~23. He is in a hotel, and is unable to sleep because the man in the adjacent room is snoring. He calls the room next door (from his own number he can easily figure out his neighbor's, and from the room number, the telephone number). The snorer wakes up, answers the phone. The first man hangs up without saying anything and goes to sleep before the snorer gets back to sleep and starts snoring again.

~24. It's the man's fiftieth birthday, and in celebration of this he plans to kill his wife, then take the money he's embezzled and move on to a new life in another state. His wife takes him out to dinner; afterward, on their front step, he kills her. He opens the door, dragging her body in with him, and all the lights suddenly turn on and a group of his friends shout "Surprise!" He kills himself. (Note that the whole first part, including the motive, isn't really necessary; it was just part of the original story.)

~25. Abel is a prince of the island nation that he landed on. A cruel and warlike prince, he waged many land and naval battles along with his father the king. In one naval encounter, their ship sank, the king died, and the prince swam to a deserted island where he spent several months. In the mean time, a regent was appointed to the island nation, and he brought peace and prosperity. When Prince Abel returned to his kingdom, Cain (a native fisherman) realized that the peace of the land would only be maintained if Abel did not reascend to his throne.

~26. The drinks contained poisoned ice cubes; the man who drank slowly gave them time to melt, while the other didn't.

~27. Joe is a kid who goes trick-or-treating for Halloween.

~28. He's a smuggler. On the first cruise, someone brings the contraband to his cabin, and he hides it in an air conditioning duct. Returning to the U.S., he leaves without the contraband, and so passes through customs with no trouble. On the second trip, he has the same cabin of the same ship. Because it doesn't stop anywhere, he doesn't have to go through customs when he returns, so he gets the contraband off safely.

~29. Hans and Fritz do everything right up until they're filling out a personal-information form and have to write down their birthdays. Fritz' birthday is, say, July 7, so he writes down 7/7/15. Hans, however, was born on, say, June 20, so he writes down 20/6/18 instead of what an American would write, 6/20/18.

~30. Another WWII story. Greg is a German spy. His friend Tim is suspicious, so he plays a word-association game with him. When Tim says "The land of the free", Greg responds with "The home of the brave". Then Tim says "The terror of flight", and Greg says "The gloom of the grave". Any U.S. citizen knows the first verse of the national anthem, but only a spy would have memorized all four verses.

~31. The dead man was the driver in a hit-and-run acccident which paralyzed its victim. The victim did manage to get the license plate number of the car; now in a wheelchair, he eventually tracked down the driver and killed him.

~32. His home is a houseboat and he has run out of water while on an extended cruise.

~33. I'm told this is a true story. Windows in Paris at that time were apparently imperfectly flat; they could act as lenses. One particularly hot day, the sun shining in through such a window caused a woman's lingerie (which she was wearing at the time, awaiting her husband's return) to catch fire, and eventually the entire house caught and burned.

~34. He's leaving a hospital after visiting his wife, who's on heavy life-support. When the power goes out, he knows she can't live without the life-support systems (he assumes that if the emergency backup generator were working, the elevator wouldn't lose power).

~35. Both twins were wearing glasses. The burglar, however, was wearing photosensitive sunglasses; the policeman noticed them changing shade and realized the man must have just entered.

~36. Let's say "she" is named Suzy, and "they" are named Harry and Jane. Harry is an elderly archaeologist who has found a very old skeleton, which he's dubbed "Jane" (like "Lucy"). Suzy is a buyer for a museum; she's supposed to make some sort of purchase from Harry, so she invites him to have a business dinner with her (at a restaurant). When she calls to invite him, he keeps talking about "Jane," so Suzy assumes that Jane is his wife and says to bring her along. Harry, offended, calls Suzy's boss and complains; since Suzy should've known who Jane was, she gets fired.

~37. The man was a lion tamer.

~38. The murderer set the car on a slope above the hot dog stand where the victim works. He then wedged an ice block in the car to keep the brake pedal down, and put the car in neutral. The murderer then flew to another city to avoid suspicion. It was a rainy day but warm enough for the ice to melt. When the ice melted, the car rolled down the hill and struck the hot dog man at his roadside stand, killing him.

~39. There's a car wash on that corner. On rainy days, the rain reduces traction. On sunny days, water from the car wash has the same effect. If rain is threatening, though, the car wash gets little business and thus doesn't make the road wet, so I can take the corner faster.

~40. The object she threw was a boomerang. It flew out, looped around, and came back and hit her in the head, killing her.