Graveyard On The Twelfth Stroke
An American man gets an unsigned letter telling him to go to the local graveyard at midnight. He does not generally pay attention to such things, but complies out of curiosity.
The night is deathly still; a thin crescent moon hangs in the sky. The man stations himself in front of his family's ancestral crypt. He is about to leave when he hears scraping footsteps. He yells out, but no one answers.
The next morning, the caretaker finds the man dead in front of the crypt, a hideous grin on his face.
Question: Did the man vote for Dwight Eisenhower in the 1956 U.S presidential election?
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1 solution
The answer is no, the man did not vote for Eisenhower.
The solution depends on realizing that the aforesaid crescent moon cannot be seen in the middle of the night. A crescent moon is only possible when the Moon is at an angle to the Sun less than 90 degrees. When it is midnight, the Sun is 90 degrees below both the horizon measuring both east and west, so if the phase of the Moon was crescent at that time, it would be below the horizon and you wouldn't be able to see it.
The exception is in the polar regions, where the sun and crescent moon are visible throughout the whole day. Therefore, if the man even lives in the United States, he must live in Alaska, near or above the Arctic Circle.
Finally, Alaska only became a state in 1960, qualifying its citizens to vote in the 1960 election (Kennedy vs. Nixon). Since, in 1956, the citizens of Alaska were not permitted to vote for President, the man did not vote for Eisenhower, whatever his politics.
Note: The man was a citizen of Alaska because we know that he went to his local graveyard and because his family's ancestral crypt was located there.