SALT LAKE CITY — Hidden underground downtown somewhere near the corner of 300 South and West Temple is a mysterious lair that seemingly transports visitors to another time and another place reminiscent of a train station located halfway around the world.
Himitsu Station, 110 W. Broadway, is billed by its creators as an escape room “experience” with a twist.
“It’s more like an interactive, live video game,” co-owner/creator Destiny Batchelor said during an interview with KSL. “The goal isn’t necessarily to escape. It’s to collect as many points as possible throughout the experience as you can.”
Destiny Batchelor is pictured. (Andrew Adams, KSL)
From the 1980s Japanese underground design to the originally created synth soundtrack, the space feels like the work of a sophisticated production company.
“This is the show control tower — this is actually what controls all the audio, lighting and visuals,” said co-owner/creator Jaysen Batchelor as he showed off some of the technology behind Himitsu Station. “This is actually the same technology a theme park would use.”
However, perhaps the most surprising twist of all is that Himitsu Station is simply a mom-and-pop — the dream of a husband-and-wife team who simply wanted to leave their creative mark on the world.
“Me and my husband, Jaysen, have been into the entertainment industry as long as we can remember, as long as the beginning of our marriage — it’s something we just really connected on,” Destiny Batchelor explained. “We were, like, always dissatisfied after leaving escape rooms, so we were just kind of like, ‘What would we want in an escape room?’”
The couple said they hatched their idea in October 2023, and they have been busy bringing their vision of a mythical Japanese train station to life ever since.
“The reason why Japan is we were trying to think of an idea that wouldn’t be as expensive to pull off but would still feel interesting and maybe exotic to people,” Jaysen Batchelor said. “I was watching a video about a place called Akihabara Station, which is a marketplace that exists underneath a Japanese train station where they sell a bunch of vintage electronics and used items and stuff like that, and they’re just in these little tiny stalls and so I thought that was, like, extremely charming that each shop stall — it was just kind of like its own little world that the shopkeeper had built, and so we kind of started with that idea and just kind of built off of that one idea and it became Himitsu Station.”
While Jaysen Batchelor said he was an artist with experience at an animation studio and with a local, live production company, he and his wife essentially learned on-the-fly as they made their dream a reality.
“Honestly, most of this is just self-taught,” he admitted. “I actually just cracked open textbooks and just started reading them and teaching myself.”
Destiny Batchelor said she came into the process with a background in real estate, which helped the couple secure their location beneath The Peery Salt Lake City Downtown.
“I, before this project, wouldn’t have been able to even build a box, and now I feel confident building absolutely anything,” she said. “There is a very strong sense of pride. I never thought in a million years I would have been able to pull anything like this off, and so now that it is here, I feel a lot of pride in it, and proud of myself even for being able to learn as many skills as I had to learn to make something like this possible.”
The couple has shared their adventures through the Himitsu Station Instagram page, and they said it was a massive risk to go “all-in” with their house and money to get to where they are today.
“(It) definitely was a gamble,” Jaysen Batchelor said. “In fact, the closer we got to opening, the more we became, like, nervous — like, ‘Did we just make a terrible decision with our lives and our money?’”
The couple said Himitsu Station had so far been well-received by the public, and they said they eventually planned to evolve the space with roughly 3,000 square feet still to expand.
They said they hoped the station challenged others to ‘level up’ the entertainment offerings in Salt Lake City and beyond.
“People are playing it too safe and not taking risks,” Destiny Batchelor said. “I would just want people to just be inspired to just, ‘Let’s create something new, let’s create something original,’ and bring more of that back.”
