A personal story from Annie Rose, co-owner of REACT Premium Escape Rooms

How Connecticut History Family Roots Brought Me Home Without Knowing It

I know how this sounds. Bear with me.

I grew up in Minnesota. Flat, cold, landlocked Minnesota — about as far from the rocky hills and river valleys of New England as you can get while still being in the continental United States. I had no ties to Connecticut. No family stories about New England. No reason to end up here. And yet about eleven years ago I did — I moved to Connecticut, built a life here, and eventually built REACT Premium Escape Rooms in Windsor Locks, right in the heart of the Connecticut River Valley.

It felt right in a way I couldn’t explain. I just thought that was one of those things. Some places feel like home and some don’t.

It turns out there was a reason.

It Started With a Trivia Question

About five years ago I was playing a trivia game. A question came up about Cotton Mather — the Puritan minister, the Salem witch trials, colonial New England history. I recognized the name. Not from a history class, not from a book I’d read recently. I just recognized it in the way you recognize something that belongs to you without knowing why.

I started digging.

What I found over the weeks and months that followed sent me down a rabbit hole that I genuinely did not expect to come out of the same person who went in.

Who Was Cotton Mather?

Cotton Mather entered Harvard at age eleven — the youngest student ever admitted in the institution’s history. He published more than 400 works over his lifetime, wrote fluently in seven languages, mastered the Iroquois language, and was elected to the Royal Society of London alongside the greatest scientific minds of his age. He corresponded regularly with Robert Boyle. He advocated smallpox inoculation decades before it was accepted practice, nearly losing his life to a bomb thrown through his window by neighbors who thought him a heretic for it. He outlined an early form of germ theory. He wrote the first comprehensive medical manual in colonial America.

Benjamin Franklin acknowledged his influence. Nathaniel Hawthorne drew from his Magnalia Christi Americana. Harriet Beecher Stowe did too. Jonathan Edwards regarded him as a towering figure. Historians place him alongside Franklin and Edwards as one of the three great transitional minds of early America — the man who stood at the crossroads of Puritan theology and Enlightenment science and tried to hold both worlds together with sheer force of intellect.

He was the most learned man in America. The intellectual godfather of a nation that didn’t yet know it was becoming one.

History has not been entirely kind to him. His role in the Salem witch trials of 1692 — his defense of spectral evidence, his documentation of the proceedings, his complicated silence when he might have spoken against them — cast a long shadow over everything else. He is a figure of genuine moral complexity, which is to say he was fully human in an age that demanded something closer to sainthood from its leaders.

He is also my first cousin twelve times removed.

The Other Side of the Family Tree

Here is where it gets strange.

While tracing my connection to Cotton Mather I discovered something that stopped me cold. On another branch of my family tree — the Smith line — I found Lieutenant Philip A. Smith.

Philip Smith was born in Suffolk, England in 1632. He came to New England as an infant with his family, eventually settling in Hadley, Massachusetts. By the time of his death he was a respected man — a lieutenant, a deacon of the church, a justice of the County Court, a selectman. By every account a man of integrity and community standing.

He died on January 10, 1685. He was 52 years old.

And Cotton Mather — my first cousin twelve times removed — wrote about his death in the Magnalia Christi Americana.

Here is what he wrote, and I want you to read this carefully:

“Mr. Philip Smith, aged about 50 years, a son of eminently virtuous parents, a deacon of a church in Hadley, a member of the General Court, a justice in the County Court, a selectman for the affairs of the town, a Lieutenant of the troop, and which crowns all, a man for devotion, sanctity, gravity, and all that was honest, exceeding exemplary. Such a man was in the winter of the year 1684, murdered with an hideous witchcraft, that filled all those parts of New England with astonishment.”

Philip Smith — my 9th great-grandfather — was documented by Cotton Mather — my first cousin twelve times removed — as a victim of witchcraft. The prosecutor and the victim. The writer and the written about. Both in my family tree. On different branches that somehow grew from the same roots.

The Marriage That Tied It Together

This is the part that I keep coming back to because it feels almost impossible.

Sometime in the mid 1700s — about a century after Philip Smith’s death — something quietly extraordinary happened. Susannah Smith, a descendant of Philip Smith, had a daughter. That daughter was named Sarah Cotton.

Sarah Cotton. The daughter of Philip Smith’s lineage, named Cotton. Whether that was intentional, symbolic, or simply unremarkable to people who had long moved past the events of 1685 — I will never know for certain. But the two families that Cotton Mather’s pen had forever linked — the minister and the man he documented as a witchcraft victim — reconciled somewhere in the Connecticut River Valley in the mid 1700s. And the child born of that reconciliation carried both names.

That detail is the one that keeps me up at night.

Coming Home To A Place I Had Never Been Before

Philip Smith’s family came to Wethersfield, Connecticut in 1635. Wethersfield is a few miles from Windsor Locks, where REACT Premium Escape Rooms sits today.

I moved to Connecticut from Minnesota eleven years ago without knowing any of this. I built an escape room business in the Connecticut River Valley — the same valley my ancestors settled nearly 400 years ago — without knowing any of this. I wrote escape room adventures rooted in Connecticut history — real places, real legends, real colonial New England — without knowing any of this.

And I found out because of a trivia question.

I can drive to Hadley Cemetery in Massachusetts and find my family’s headstones. Philip Smith is buried there. His name is in history books. Cotton Mather wrote about him in 1702 and that account has been cited by historians for more than three centuries. My family didn’t just live in this region — they helped shape it during some of its most formative and turbulent years.

I grew up in Minnesota with no connection to New England. No family stories. No reason to end up here. And yet here I am — in the backyard of my ancestors, sowing seeds in the same soil they tilled, without ever being told to come home.

It’s the strangest and most beautiful thing I have ever discovered about myself.

Why This Matters to REACT

When Jack and I built REACT Premium Escape Rooms we wanted to create experiences rooted in real history, real stories, and real places. Raiders II and the Rooms of Doom is built around the legend of Dutch pirate David Marteen and a treasure buried somewhere along the Farmington River — real Connecticut history woven into an immersive adventure. The Haunted Mansion: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery draws on gothic mystery and the kind of dark New England atmosphere that this region has carried in its bones since the 1600s.

I didn’t know when we built those rooms that my own family’s story was woven into the same historical fabric. I didn’t know that the mystery and the darkness and the colonial New England atmosphere we were trying to capture had a personal dimension I hadn’t discovered yet.

I know now. And it changes everything about why we do this — and what comes next.

Jack and I are currently writing a novel tied to the Raiders II experience — a historically grounded adventure built around David Marteen’s legend and the real landmarks of the Connecticut River Valley. It will be the first in a series of books, each tied to a REACT escape room experience, each rooted in the real history of this region.

The second book will be tied to The Haunted Mansion. It will be monster-driven. It will be set against the backdrop of the Salem witch trials. And it will be informed by a family connection to that history that no other author writing about Salem can claim.

Philip Smith is my 9th great-grandfather. Cotton Mather is my first cousin twelve times removed. And somewhere in the mid 1700s their descendants married each other and named their daughter Sarah Cotton.

That story deserves to be told. We’re going to tell it.

When you walk through our doors, you’re not just playing an escape room. You’re stepping into a place built by someone who came home without knowing she was lost — and who found her family’s fingerprints in the soil beneath it.

— Annie Rose Co-owner, REACT Premium Escape Rooms Windsor Locks, Connecticut