A Halloween Story That Won't Stop Ticking: Last Contact | Solitaire Clash Spookitaire Cold Case

Some mysteries go quiet. But this one kept ticking. Ten years ago, on the Day of the Dead, four people walked into the mountains and never came back. Then, this year, a watch turned up on their memorial. Its second hand was still moving. That's how this Halloween story begins.

Welcome back, detective!

This is Case File #03: Last Contact, the third and last mystery case in Spookitaire: Cold Case, part of Solitaire Clash Halloween 2026 from AviaGames. It's where solitaire games meet a spooky Halloween mystery, with nine clues to follow and one big secret to uncover. Whether you love detective games or cracking mystery case files, you're in the right place.

If you've been following along on the Solitaire Clash Facebook page, you've had a week to study the clues and pick your suspect. Haven't seen them yet? Take a quick look first, then come back. We'll wait.

When you have your suspect, good! Let's find out if you are right.

Few mysterious disappearances are stranger than this one, so let's go back to the Day of the Dead, ten years ago. Four members of a survey team vanished in the mountains, and their names are carved into the town's memorial:

• Eleanor Ward: The team leader, with twenty years in the mountains and nobody ever lost
• Miriam Cole: The cartographer, who drew the team's maps
• Tess Shaw: The youngest member and the team's geologist, on her first big expedition
• Owen Price: The radio operator, whose watch the whole team set their clocks by

There's one more name at the base of the stone: Roland Sloane, the backer who paid for the expedition, built the memorial, and started a fund in the team's honor.

Heavy rain triggered landslides, and Owen's last message reached the ranger station: the team was trapped on the north ridge. Nine days of searching turned up only an empty camp and a ruined map. The four were declared dead in a mountain accident.

This year, the town's star detective visited the memorial with the explorer who knows that mountain best. Before a single candle was lit, he spotted a watch at the base of the stone, engraved O. P., its second hand still moving.

Four names. One ticking watch. And one question: Whose watch is this?

That's where the mystery begins, so here's the full story of what really happened on that mountain.

Ten years earlier, in the autumn, Roland Sloane paid for a four-person survey team to map the north ridge.

Eleanor Ward led the team. Miriam Cole drew the maps. Tess Shaw, the youngest, studied the rocks. And Owen Price ran the radio. He was the oldest of the four, and the one everybody trusted.

For three days, the north ridge gave them nothing. On the fourth morning, Eleanor moved the team to the south side. On the fifth day, Tess walked into a cave and didn't come out for twenty minutes. When she finally called the others down, they found a wall of pale gold imperial topaz, with more running deep into the rock, further than their lamps could reach.

Everyone was thrilled. But Owen was thinking about the contract.

Under Sloane's terms, anything the team found belonged to the backer. The team would get credit and a bonus. Standing there in the cold, Owen did the math. A wall of gemstones would shrink into one line in a report with four names on it.

That night, he didn't make the call.

On the sixth day, the storm hit. Landslides crashed down all over the range, and thunder rolled nonstop. While Eleanor, Miriam and Tess went back into the cave to finish sampling, Owen said he'd grab supplies from camp. He never went to camp. Instead, he took the team's only set of blasting charges and set them at the mouth of the cave.

At 17:40, he picked up the radio and said the words everyone would believe for ten years: the team was on the north ridge, there had been a slide, everyone was trapped. In that same second, he pressed the detonator. The storm swallowed the sound, and the ranger station logged the muffled thud as thunder.

Then Owen smashed the radio, packed the stones, and tore one page out of Miriam's route map, the page that showed the team's turn to the south. He walked away by a different route.

Search teams spent nine days exactly where Owen said the team would be. They found the first camp, empty. Nobody thought to ask whether the team had moved south, because the one page that could have told them was gone. The town built a memorial.

Owen Price became Oscar Pike, a radio repairman at the far end of the state. A year later, a parcel of imperial topaz rough showed up on the private market.

Meanwhile, Roland Sloane held a press conference on the third day of the search and announced a memorial fund. He came to the stone every Day of the Dead with reporters. Six months after the disaster, he bought the mineral rights to the north ridge and started digging at the coordinates Owen had given. Ten years. Three contractors. Nothing.

Then, two weeks before this year's Day of the Dead, Oscar Pike died at fifty-two. Before the end, he gave his daughter his watch and asked her to leave it on the memorial in Black Hollow. She had no idea why. She did it anyway.

The detective found the watch before the candles were lit, and once he pulled that thread, the whole story started to unravel. An obituary search turned up exactly one match. A trip up the north ridge with the explorer proved the radio call couldn't have come from there. A close look at the distress recording changed what that thud meant. And among Oscar's belongings, his daughter found three pages torn from a field notebook, signed by Tess Shaw, describing a vein of rock and a set of coordinates on the south side.

In the second week of November, the explorer led a recovery team up the mountain and followed those coordinates. The cave mouth had been blown in from the outside. Inside were Eleanor Ward, Miriam Cole and Tess Shaw.

On the Day of the Dead, they say the dead come home.

This year, they did.

Now for the evidence. Nine clues pointed to the truth. Some exposed a faked death, and others pointed suspicion at the wrong man for a while. How many did you catch?

Here are the nine clues that cracked the case:

1. A Watch That Shouldn't Be Ticking: A self-winding watch runs off the swing of a wrist. Take it off, and it stops within a couple of days. This one was still running, so somebody had been wearing it until very recently.
2. One Name in Two Weeks of Obituaries: If the owner had just died, there would be an obituary with the initials O. P. The detective searched two weeks of them and found exactly one: Oscar Pike, 52, a lifelong radio repairman. His age and trade matched Owen Price ten years later, and so did the photo.
3. The Contract: Roland Sloane funded the expedition, and his contract said anything the team found belonged to him. The team only got credit and a bonus. That put Roland in the spotlight early, and it showed what a big discovery would really mean for the team: almost nothing.

Nine clues. One faked death. And a killer who spent ten years living under another name.

Owen Price.

It all started in a cave on the south side of the mountain. The team found imperial topaz, and under the contract, everything a team finds belongs to the person who paid for it. The team gets credit and a bonus. That's it.

If the team reported it, the topaz belonged to nobody on the team. If nobody reported it, it belonged to the one person who knew where it was.

Owen ran the radio. He controlled what the outside world heard, including where the team was. So he let a mountain accident tell his story for him.

Owen's plan worked because everything looked like a tragedy. That's how four people became one of those mysterious disappearances people talk about for years. If cracking a case like this is your idea of the best things to do on Halloween, here's how he pulled it off:

1. He gave a false position. Owen said the team was on the north ridge when they were on the south side, so searchers spent nine days in the wrong place.
2. He hid the blast inside a storm. He called in the slide and set off the charges at the same moment, and the ranger station logged the sound as thunder.
3. He removed the key page. Owen tore the page showing the team's turn south out of Miriam's map, and the rain did the rest.
4. He disappeared in plain sight. As Oscar Pike, he lived in the same state for ten years, working the trade his hands already knew.

But what about Roland Sloane? He had the contract, the money, and a claim to everything the team found. Yet he spent ten years digging the north ridge, the spot Owen named. A man who knew where the stones were would never dig the wrong mountain. The final twist? Roland was fooled by the same false position as everyone else.

Owen's alibi was his own death. It was held for ten years, until a watch that should have stopped kept on ticking.

So that wraps up Case File #03: Last Contact. What started with a ticking watch on a memorial ended with an obituary, a radio shadow, a blast hidden inside a storm, and three pages signed by Tess Shaw.

The line went dead, the ridge went white,

But time kept ticking through the night.

One watch, one stone, one truth to find,

Some secrets leave a mark behind.

Missed the earlier mystery stories? Go back to Case File #01: The Show Went On, where a Halloween concert at Ashgrove Concert Hall took a deadly turn, and Case File #02: The Party of the Year, where a Sleepy Hollow party at Doyle House ended in tragedy.

Follow the Solitaire Clash Official Facebook page for more spooky stories, hidden clues, and community investigations, and check out the full Spookitaire: Cold Case campaign. For fans of true crime stories, there's more to explore. Think you can solve it before the truth comes out?

Turns out, there's more to this solitaire game app than cards. Download Solitaire Clash from the App Store or Samsung Galaxy Store, open the Halloween Case Files, and follow the evidence. Turn over the cards. Uncover the truth.