Club raises nation’s spirits at summer party

For reasons lost in the mists of the spirit world, the New Sheridan Club’s summer party took as its theme inter-war spiritualism and the occult—think divination, tarot, the golden age of stage magic (Harry Houdini, Thurston, Carter the Great, etc), ectoplasm, Nazi occult and hollow earth beliefs, Indiana Jones, H.P. Lovecraft and more. The venue was the Duke pub on Roger Street (off Gray’s Inn Road), which is a small but nicely preserved 1920s pub with Art Deco features (some original, some brought in to enhance the effect). We were in the basement function room, which was compact but just about big enough for our numbers, given that the rail strike meant some guests who would have liked to have come had to stay away.

In addition to the delight of each other’s company, guests had three other morsels of entertainment. Throughout the evening we were running a competition to design a new card for the tarot deck. (I’m always struck that seemingly all our members can draw.) Secondly, around 8pm we had another competition—remote- controlled ouija. Contestants were presented with a circle of wooden letters about three inches high. In the centre was a hand with a pointing finger, with which they had to knock over the letters that spelled the word “SHERIDAN”. For every correct letter struck the player won a point, but for every letter knocked over that was NOT in the word they lost a point. The hand was strapped to a remote-controlled toy car and players had to use the RC handset to direct the finger of fate. The car was quite boisterous (the instructions say it can achieve 20 mph), so controlling it to make small movements was not easy. At times the hand seemed more interested in running up people’s legs like some boisterous puppy. The winner was Stewart Lister Vickers, who coolly achieved the maximum possible score by knocking down all the letters in “SHERIDAN” and none that were not.

This was followed immediately by our other piece of entertainment, a performance by the Arkham Hillbilly himself. The AH started as a lockdown project for NSC member Darcy Sullivan, writing and singing country and western songs from the perspective of a somewhat naive character living in the world of the Cthulhu Mythos created by 1920s horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. To get an idea, see his Bandcamp page. He was joined for some songs by the Nashville Shamblers, Leroy and JT (in reality Darcy’s children Zoe and Finnian). In between numbers there was plenty of droll patter, much of it revolving around the Hillbilly’s producer/manager Colonel Hartley’s condescension towards his client.

The evening ended as ever with our Grand Raffle featuring a wealth of delicious prizes connected with the party’s theme. We were also treated to a complimentary buffet laid on by the venue, which was nice of them.

Some of our raffle prize winners (l–r): Luca wins a ouija board; Tim gets some divining rods; Priya wins the Holy Grail (modelled on the one in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade); Craigoh wins a bottle of “Genuine Ectoplasm”. It may look like sand but it’s definitely ectoplasm.

Did we evoke any spirits or draw the attention of ancient slumbering gods? Well, early on one of the glass candle holders spontaneously cracked. And our initial attempts to run the ouija game were stymied when the RC car wouldn’t work—this turned out to be because the handset batteries had gone flat (after only about five minutes of use since being installed two days earlier? Clearly the work of eldritch forces). And interestingly our presence was noted by a couple of actual cultists who happened to be in the pub and came down to join us. (In fairness they probably don’t describe themselves as cultists, but I think they were pagans. In fact one of them was and the other revealed she was actually the pagans’ house DJ.)

Many thanks to all who braved the rail strikes to come along and make for a convivial, ethereal knees-up.

You can see many more photos from the event in this album on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/sheridanclub/albums/72177720300145763

Some of the entries in our Design a New Tarot Card game