Solution to Evan Birnholz’s Oct. 31 Post Magazine crossword, “The Haunted House”

You’ll also notice that four of the clues have asterisks at the beginning. If you look at the answers to those clues in grid order, they say SHUFFLE MISSING OPENING LETTERS. That’s an important hint to finding the room’s secret word. There are 19 different starting letters in this puzzle and the missing ones (in alphabetical order) are A, C, E, H, I, R, and V. Now, go back to the puzzle’s instructions. Remember how they showed you the sequence (1, 3, 7, 4, 5, 2, 6)? Take those seven letters and match them up with the numbers in the given order, so A = 1, C = 3, E = 7, H = 4, I = 5, R = 2, and V = 6. Now, rearrange the letters so that they proceed in numerical order: