Spend this Halloween in a hotel haunted by a giant sea beast
The Averard Hotel in Lancaster Gate is perhaps the first such venue to guarantee a sleepless night. The pop-up hotel in the Grade II listed former home of a doctor, architect and two Liberal MPs is hosting a pre-Halloween “Kraken Dread And Breakfast”, offering the chance to join the Leagues of Darkness.
The brainchild of spiced black rum brand Kraken, it’s an immersive horror experience and the centrepiece of the brand’s annual ‘Screamfest’, now in its fifth year.
Guests will be scared speechless and kept awake by ghosts, monsters, ghouls, wobbly ectoplasms, sudden cold draughts, blood-curling screams, bestial howling and lots of sudden, unexplained banging, crashing and rustling of chains. There will be a lot of indoor fog, too.
For three nights from October 28-30, the derelict building – which opened as a 42-room hotel in 1925 and still retains its Arts Deco interiors – will play host to the restless souls of mariners who survived the terrifying, insatiable Kraken sea beast, who now prowls the hotel’s ornately decorated corridors. No one and nowhere is safe, especially the bar and ballroom.
“Every guest who spends a night at the Dread & Breakfast will take on the role of the Kraken Hunter’s assistant and make it their aim to discover the Beast’s last known whereabouts, putting themselves through a heart-stopping evening of close encounters of the dead kind,” explains the hotel’s receptionist.
Each evening 140 people will be invited to visit the hotel and welcomed with “liquids of unparalleled darkness” in the form of cocktails, including the “Krakhattans” and “Sea Prince of Deaths”. They will also be entertained by the house band, who go by the rather unsubtle name Thankful We Are Dead.
While for most the evening will end at 11pm, some residents will be invited to spend the night. According to the night manager, “Only those with nerves of steel and hearts of gold will make the grade.” We’re still unsure exactly what that means.
The night porter is equally portentious: “The heinous Kraken was thought to dwell in the blackest depths of the sea, surfacing only to devour ships whole. It was every sailor’s living nightmare. Now it has come ashore and spread its tentacles inland. It must be stopped before Hyde Park and the Serpentine become its latest place to wreak its unique brand of havoc.”
Hell is not a human construct invented to impose an artificial moral order on a fundamentally chaotic existence – it is a living reality and can be found at the end of October in London W2.
Book tickets here.