While the origin of the unexpected hanging paradox is disputed, it is common knowledge that John O’Connor first released its details in text in the Mind Journal in 1948. The prompt is as follows: Sentencing a man on Friday, a judge says: ‘You will be hanged at noon on a day next week, but you will not know which day it is until the morning of the fateful day.’ The prisoner reasons that he cannot be hanged next Saturday, because by Friday afternoon he would know that he was to be hanged the next day, and that he cannot be hanged on Friday because, with Saturday ruled out, by Thursday afternoon he would know that he was to be hanged on Friday, and that all the other days of the week can be excluded by the same argument, so he concludes with relief that he cannot be hanged on any day next week and that therefore the judge's sentence cannot be correctly carried out. The crux of the matter lies in the hanging: However, if he is hanged on Wednesday, the judge's sentence is correctly carried out, because the hanging would indeed be a surprise, given the prisoner's reasoning, because he appears to have ruled out every day including Wednesday. In this paper, the author attempts to logically resolve the hanging paradox (sometimes presented as the surprise test paradox) by considering the elements constituting a ‘surprise’ in the context of the prompt, while incorporating certainty and logical flow to arrive at an answer.1