So I fired up Zork 1. Blind playthrough. :) It was spectacular. The game was made a couple years before I was born so it's a real treat to play something older than I am. I was doing fine until I made my way into a cellar in a white house. I went into an underground room near a river and dam and found a stray platinum bar and picked it up. Then...

Everything I typed was being echoed. I couldn't continue. I take it the bar was cursed and made me go crazy? Very weird XD

Oh, actually that's just one of those Infocom moments. Something so bizarrely obscure and obtuse that it was probably put in so you'd call an expensive hint line.

If everything was being echoed, it's a simple enough thing to resolve, but it requires some simple lateral thinking.