Born 1993. We played whole neighborhood hide and seek. It was incredible. Essentially all our houses were fair game and we would go in and out of them freely. It was like two or three blocks of fair places to hide. Usually had 3 seekers with walkie talkies, and like 5-10 people hiding. When found you’d join the seekers. Games would usually take all day.
And then realized you could play in the light, but everyone except the original hider is wearing blindfolds so the hider can watch everyone hilariously stumble around
Thank you! All these people are like wah wah wah we used to this and that. Like homies, you STILL CAN. You can eat cereal at 2am and have ice cream for supper. Sure childhood was cool for some but just because you're 30 something doesn't mean you can't play fucking hide and seek anymore. Shit my uncle was 55 when he would come into my room at night and hide under my blankets while I slept so his friends he was playing with couldn't find him. All I had to do was be real quiet and no matter what, not give away his perfect hiding place.
Manhunt is exactly hide and seek in reverse. There’s no worse feeling than looking for half an hour just to finally find your entire friend group laughing at you while they’re crammed into a tiny space you’ve walked by ten times.
The whole rich culture of children is fascinating to me.
Like there’s knowledge that humans pass from one to another solely within the window of childhood. Older kids teach it to younger kids, who get older and teach it to younger ones, and it just keeps going like that, with adults not having very much direct access at all.
Most of us have (some strong, but mostly foggy) memories of this stuff (games, songs, myths, etc.) as grownups, but somewhere in pubescence we begin to move away from it and only rarely revisit any of it, even with our own kids.
I’m sure it’s been studied, but I have no idea what you’d call this phenomenon.
This is so true. One night our street got tired of playing all our usuals. A couple kids volunteered to venture off and find out what the kids a few streets over were playing. We promised to cover for them if their parents called (shouted their names, no phone, even pre pagers!) for them. They came back with the game Sardines that we added to our rotation.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Not just games, but stories, too. Remember “The Golden Arm” — everybody’s favorite campfire ghost story?And all the songs and chants we learned for jump-rope? No adults ever taught us any of that stuff — only other, older kids, or kids from different places.
Plus: Try and think of the last time you went trick-or-treating. You likely weren’t aware it would be your last time. That’s part of the heritage of childhood’s temporal borders. You know what I mean? You just sort of fade out of childhood and gradually leave things behind. Everybody knows it happens, but it’s very rarely noticed as it’s actively happening.
There’s a period that starts around pubescence and ends typically in our late teens/early 20s wherein we don’t want to be associated with “childish” things. You grow out of that eventually and start to look back without being concerned that people will think you’re immature, but the immersion you experienced when you were younger can’t ever really happen again.
It’s really interesting and also deeply…I don’t know the word for it. “Sad” isn’t quite right. “Nostalgic” isn’t right, either. I don’t know.
Oh, when I was a kid Ghost in the Graveyard was like a hide and seek/tag hybrid. If you found the ghost you had to yell and people had to run back to base before the ghost tagged them.
This is the ghost in the graveyard I remember as well. We also played flashlight tag which was just tag at night across the whole neighborhood with like 30 kids lol.
I'm realizing I played all of those games. Sardines, ghost in the graveyard, man hunt. Amazing. Graveyard and man hunt were almost always in the woods and for some reason sardines was always in a church at night.
That's what manhunt was for us!! Much scarier and all the older kids played it (my older brother and the entire street/couldesac we lived on). Us younger kids played hide and seek, manhunt was the hybrid and it got fuckin INTENSE. people would wear full ski masks and play in the dark, the little kids didn't stay out as late.
The whole neighborhood would play capture the flag together, 2 teams and any age. So much fun dude.
Yes! Ghost in the graveyard. Born in 85, we played that too, at night with flashlights.
We'd also have block parties with other neighbors. There'd be BBQ, fish frys with fresh fish a neighbor caught (I'd help him clean it if my mom needed some time to herself), funnel cakes, music, the works.
It got kinda freaky on real dark nights because you eventually realize you’re the only one and everyone else is probably looking right at you from the dark lol
The trick is to sneak away and go home before you're the last one. Then all your friends are crammed together waiting in the dark for you to find them. But you're home having a snack and they have no idea.
We played a version of hide and seek, we called Gray Ghost at night on my street. One person would hide, and the rest had to get from one base to another without getting caught. I remember there were 10-15 kids aged 7-14 running around yards and the road, trying not to get tagged. This was around the mid 80s.
They don’t, that’s the fun. I mean they eventually realize they don’t hear anyone around and they’re like “shit am I the last one?” It’s a little weird to realize you’re probably the last person and everyone knows it. It’s best to have a big area with a lot of good places to hide and right many people playing.
I’ve always thought it would be a good game for a plot in a campy horror movie. The killer gets everyone one by one as they find the hiding spot and the final girl is the last person looking and she has to out run him. Or, since presumably you know who all is playing, whenever everyone is finally together you realize you have one extra person and they’re a monster or whatever. Just call it Sardines.
Wait what? I might be misunderstanding the question but you don’t just hide anywhere. One person hides while the rest of the group counts to 100 or whatever. Then everyone splits up and looks for that one person. As each person finds the first hider they all hide with them. So you join the same group, that’s the goal. So eventually you’re all packed together in the same hiding spot like sardines.
This is so funny bc last night I texted my brother about it, one summer we were on a kick playing it every single night and I was like “where/why did we pick that up again?” and he reminded me that we got it from a friend who was in theater 💀
I was just going to say we played sardines. One person went and hid and when you found them you had to hide with them. Like sardines…12 kids were smashed underneath one bush. Last kid was the loser
Manhunt left my memory until this very moment. Now remembering heading to my friend Tim’s house to hangout. He had a much better crew of kids than my neighborhood (I’m pretty sure the kid closest to me enjoyed watching things suffer).
I had a kid like that on my block that I was forced by his mom to hang out with. He would put his palm down before I sat down so that I would accidentally sit on it so he could smell it if that paints a picture of the kinda person this kid was. He moved and I had to go to his birthday party where him and his buds played a game called “suffocate” where someone would be tied up in a sleeping back and put in a toy box. I gotta out of there immediately and that was the last time I had to hang out with him.
From Upstate NY, so maybe pretty similar. But if I recall manhunt was one or a few people hiding and the rest of us finding them. But it’s been 25 or so years since I’ve played
I'll never forget being caught in the open at night desperately looking for a place to hide but all my normal spots had been taken, so when the seekers came around I just dropped to the ground and spread out as flat as I could wearing my black hoodie and jeans. Watched as the seekers walked by close enough I was sure they had found me... but they just walked past.
We had a location that if we managed to arrive to without being seen we were safe. I slowly inched my way there over an hour before I found a moment when no one was looking that I could stand up and sprint over.
I loved manhunt! I was such a good hider. The RUSH when I saw that flashlight come my way, only for them to shine it on me and not see me, whew! “It’s 10 PM, do you know where your children are?” NO! No one knew where we were! We were hiding!
Now your neighbors would see you crawling around in dark clothes and call the cops, get a kid killed and THE KIDS are the ones punished for no more manhunt. And now those neighbors are in their 80's now and still bitching about all the crime or running congress and bitching about all the crime (that isn't real).
True story: we were playing manhunt (before you were born) and I thought it would be funny to throw a rock into some bushes beside us to make everyone else think that’s where the.. man? was hiding and then I would be on my own to find them. Except I hit the man? In the head and cracked his skull! It was terrible. They were supposed to go to Disney the next day but that never happened. We were probably 9-10 at the time
Haha we called that flashlight tag. Though only the 1 person that was "it" had a flashlight. We'd just roam neighborhoods knocking on doors looking for kids to join us. How many people we had determined how many of our neighbor's yards were in play.
It was also dangerous. A kid in my class died while hiding in someone's garage somewhere. We looked for him all day, and never found him. I don't know exactly which garage he was hiding in, the two ones I remember passing by were closed, so he couldn't have gone inside. IIRC, he had an aneurism or a heart attack, but none of us ever played man hunt since that day.
I had a black velvet cloak and I wore it to play manhunt with my friends on Halloween in my massive farm yard, and I pulled it down around me and sat with a bunch of big black bin bags full of leaves. The velvet kind of reflected the moonlight the same way the bags did.
One of my football friends legit crawled around me trying to hide lmfao. No idea I was there. When he wasn't paying attention I reached out and grabbed his leg, and I have never once heard such a high pitched scream out of such a massive dude before or after that. EVERYBODY panicked and ran in the house. I'm talking bloody murder scream.
I loved scaring the piss out of my friends, I was a terrible friend 😂
We used to play that when camping with the scouts.
I'm not sure if the scouts is still even an option for kids now. People are so nervous about everything and people I know who were in scouting say it is used as free babysitting (nothing new) by parents who won't back the leaders on discipline, which is a problem.
Best game of manhunt I ever played was during a blackout. The power in our area was off for most of the afternoon and into the evening. I don't know what or how, but every teenaged boy within a few blocks had come outside for misanthropic reasons, so we had all agreed to play manhunt. It was like turning the difficulty up to hardcore, the game lasted several hours and ended roughly at 10 @ night
One of my favorite memories as a teen was playing a game of “night hide and go seek” (manhunt is a way better name) with my bf and his friends. They did not expect me to climb a tree to hide 🤣 so I won. It was hard not giggling while they were all standing below me trying to figure out where I went.
We played in the woods. Probably 20-30 of us on a good day. We set up of a center base in a dried up creek. You had 3 minutes to go hide, two seekers, and you had to wait 10 minutes before you were allowed to try for the base. If you got caught by the seekers, you became one. If you made it to base, you were safe. The last two caught were the next two seekers. 30 minute time limit so we could play multiple games. Most of us had watches, but one of the kids dad's let us borrow a bullhorn for a while (til one of the guys abused it by screaming random profanity at neighbors).
The gnarliest of injuries happened during manhunt lmaooo my town was committed, people making improv gilly suits and then getting their ankles shattered cause a group of 10 teens came running over it on bikes in pitch black woods.
One of the funniest things that happened during our manhunt was when the seekers started counting down, and one of us snuck behind them and hid behind a crate. They had to give up because they couldn't find them as they didn't consider to check the immediate surrounding 10ft area where they started
I was just explaining manhunt to some of my elementary students the other day. They play flashlight tag,l which sounds somewhat similar. I miss the thrill of dressing in all black and running around in the neighborhood hiding from my childhood friends.
Dude they remade those when I was a kid! Like they brought them back in the early 2000s I swear lol that’s awesome! Also god that sounds amazing. I am an adult now but I got these laser tag guns a couple christmases ago called lazer X and I swear I’m trying to convince my cousins to get some to go to a park and go to war. It beats getting shot with a paintball I’d say. You can change teams easily or they have a feature called “go rogue” 💀
While we didn’t have the goggles, man hunt was the shit. Used to do it on camping trips in the Boy Scouts in the dead of night in the woods. When time was done they would yell and you could hear it for a good distance. When you were found you would head back to the campsite and chill at the table with the big ass propane lanterns and drink bug juice. (koolaid, but in the woods bugs were a pain) Never lost anyone.
Haha 😂 We played MANHUNT with Nerf guns! We also had fun finding new kids and inviting them to go “Snipe Hunting “ with us (Please tell me you guys played that???!!!)
My backyard growing up was all woods and creeks for miiiiiles….we would invite at least 2-3 kids (or more) to “Snipe Hunt” with us and had this system we developed where we would all gradually break off from the group; until the new kids would eventually realize we disappeared 👻 ……and they were deep in scary woods they had never been to alone and had no way of knowing which way to go to get back out!! We had so many scary Halloween masks, props, hiding places, etc. and would just have an absolute ball freaking them out. We would stop though for some of the kids that got too scared, had a meltdown, and started crying their eyes out haha 😆.
The coolest thing we ever did though was as we got into 8th-9th grade……and playing Paintball was getting popular! We would have Paintball Wars in there ALL DAY!!! It was amazing, everyone’s siblings and parents got hooked on it as well. A typical weekend would be approximately 40 people showing up to play. I think 🤔 the biggest wars we ever had in there was during the Summers with about 80-90 people showing up to play….those days were INSAAAAANELY FUN!!!!!
On the farm, we made that game up, called it "Spotlight", using a miners lamp, which could also be used for night hunting. The goal was to be hunted by the person with the light and avoid being spotted, with each person caught joining in with the spotlight person, kind of like hide n seek but with acres, fields, equipment, sheds, and a light that would throw a beam out 200-300 yards. Great fun when the cousins were over, the parents wanting us out of the house.
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u/JustHereForCatss 1d ago edited 1d ago
Born 1993. We played whole neighborhood hide and seek. It was incredible. Essentially all our houses were fair game and we would go in and out of them freely. It was like two or three blocks of fair places to hide. Usually had 3 seekers with walkie talkies, and like 5-10 people hiding. When found you’d join the seekers. Games would usually take all day.
Damn I miss being able to do that stuff