CARTER: OK, the final puzzle in this year's packet was called A Haunting Conclusion. And it was what we call a metapuzzle. You had to take some answers from prior puzzles to help you solve this puzzle here. Now, for this one, we had a little over a thousand submissions. 612 of those were correct, and 513 were not. So let's hear about the correct solution to our puzzle, A Haunting Conclusion. 

JAMES: So in A Haunting Conclusion, as Carter mentioned, this was a metapuzzle. So in order to solve it, we advise that you at least have six to eight of the feeder puzzle answers. And congratulations to those of you who've gotten this far in the hunt. And what you'll see if you start looking at this puzzle is that you're presented with a floor plan with a house with eight labeled rooms. 

And a lot of the puzzles that we've been solving have been kind of room-themed, and you can kind of read through each of these. And we've listed for each puzzle what the corresponding answer is to the puzzles in each of these rooms. But the puzzle answers don't necessarily fit the number of blanks that are listed in each of the rooms. So we're going to need to put something there in order to make this work. It's not guaranteed that you can just take each of the puzzle answers and fill them into the blanks and arrive at an answer. 

So one thing to notice about each of these words is that there is a ghost in front of each of the rooms. And there's a blank that occur right after the picture of the ghost. So it turns out that each of these answers, these puzzle answers, are in a category that could be put into a two-word phrase with the word ghost. 

So for example, Titanic is a type of ghost ship. And open shortest path first is a type of ghost protocol. George Orwell was a ghost writer. He was also a regular writer, but he was also famous as a ghost writer. Odyssey is a type of story-- Oh, I'm sorry George Orwell was not a ghost writer. George Orwell was just a writer, my bad. But Odyssey was a type of story, Orion was a hunter, Serrano was a pepper, et cetera. 

And because of that, you can match each of the puzzle answers with one of the rooms. Once you do that, you just take the words that are associated with the ghost words. So for example, for Maycomb, you take the word "town." And for "snowpiercer," you take the word "train." And you put them into the blanks. Once you do that, you can then take each of the indices that are listed below each of the brackets, and you'll end up with a phrase here, which is split the rent. 

So it turns out that the ghosts want us to split the rent with them because of escalating house prices. But that is the answer to A Haunting Conclusion.