House of Spirits Closes Out Halloween in Style

Anyone in the Seattle area with an Instagram may have seen ads in the last few weeks for House of Spirits: Tale of Vaughan Mansion, a Haunted Cocktail Soirée.

Prepped for a Haunting / The Evergreen Echo

Intrigued by the images of a candlelit, creepy costume ball, my friends and I got tickets for Halloween night. In our finest macabre attire, we trudged through the rain over wet red and brown leaves plastered to cobblestones, our heels clacking through puddles, to the historic Rainier Chapter House in Capitol Hill, a recreation of George Washington’s Mount Vernon.

Once inside, the writer in me couldn’t help but feel transported to a haunted Victorian party. A tall man who looked exactly like Gary Oldman’s Dracula, complete with the long hair, dark sunglasses, top hat and trench coat, walked by. A group of brides in gowns dripping with blood and rotting veils ascended the staircase. We got cocktails in the corner, and then participated in a mutual friend’s magic demonstration.

Upstairs, a burlesque performance acted out a witch burning on stage, complete with one dancer dressed as a raven. On the other side of a room, another dancer did a routine suspended in the air using a hanging hoop.

There were also spookier elements to the event. To the right of the main hall, we took our turn in the séance room, where we gathered with a group around a table littered in body parts, and a demonic fairy who resembled a goth Chappell Roan conjured a dark entity before urging us to flee the room before it was too late.

A room at the soirée / The Evergreen Echo

Downstairs in the basement, we participated in a mystery challenge where we had to collect doll heads and eyes from buckets guarded by eerie monsters. One, a sort of Krampus creature with very long claws, genuinely terrified me with laughter as he chased us out of the room. In the final room, a life-size figure I was convinced was a doll sat on the floor with many tentacle-like legs. It was completely still, but I was wary. As my friends and I walked past the figure, clutching each other, it jumped out at us, and I must admit that I screamed!

House of Spirits, which is organized by Meyer2Meyer Entertainment and presented by Fever, also had San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Dallas iterations this year, after launching in Los Angeles in 2019. Over the course of two hours, a crew of actors, musicians, burlesque and circus performers, and magicians entertained a massive crowd of Seattle weirdos with the tale of the mystery of Vaughan mansion, a story loosely based on the Irish legend of the haunting of Loftus Hall. 

Ouija Board wall / The Evergreen Echo

Among highlights of the night, I saw Art the Clown, Sabrina Carpenter, and a woman whose boyfriend had made her a Corpse Bride dress 17 years ago that she revived again 17 years later. One of the bartenders helped my friend fix her Elvira wig when it started to slip back. With anxiety running high in the week leading up to the election, House of Spirits provided a much-needed moment of fantastical escapism to send out the Halloween season in style.