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A 1912 Titanic séance for your dinner party

First class, April 1912. The band, the wireless room, and a Morse key that starts tapping on its own.

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For five days in April 1912, this was the most interesting room in the world

Forget the movie for a minute. The Titanic was 882 feet of Edwardian high society floating on the Atlantic, and the people who booked passage on it were fascinating.

Wallace Hartley and seven musicians who had memorized 352 songs between them. Jack Phillips and Harold Bride in the wireless room, running a brand‑new technology, buried under passenger telegrams about absolutely nothing. The Astors, the Guggenheims, the Strauses. A first‑class dinner menu that still exists — oysters, filet mignon Lili, punch romaine, roast squab and cress — and it exists because somebody folded it into a pocket.

That's what your evening is about.

Front page of The World, New York, 16 April 1912, headlined Great Titanic Sinks; More Than 1,500 Lost

Why a séance, specifically

Because they would have.

In 1912, a séance was a fashionable after-dinner amusement for exactly this crowd. Well‑dressed guests did this after dinner, took it entirely seriously for an hour, and then went back to their drinks.

So holding one at your table is about the most historically accurate thing you could do after dinner in 1912.

This is not a memorial and I don't run it like one. It's a night in 1912 — and 1912 was a tremendous amount of fun if you were in first class.

What comes out of the box

The evening arrives in a solid oak case with a period sleeve — the sort of thing a first-class passenger might have left in their cabin. Inside:

  • Twelve cabinet cards, in the style of the period, each one a passenger who was aboard
  • Six objects, museum‑tagged — a bosun's whistle, a 1912 English penny, a fountain pen, a wooden yo‑yo, a locket and a key. Several are real pieces from the era
  • A Morse tapper, built to the pattern of the period, with the code printed plainly beside it
A period photograph of the Titanic under way, four funnels against a pale sky

What your guests experience

The cards go round the table and everybody settles on a passenger. Then it turns out the whole room settled on the same one — and nobody said it out loud.

Two guests choose among the objects. One chooses carefully. One chooses without thinking about it. They match.

The key turns over inside a closed hand. The locket, hung as a pendulum, finds the person it belongs to. So does the yo‑yo, which is somehow worse.

Then the lights come down and the Morse tapper is set on the table, untouched, and it starts tapping. The code is right there in front of your guests, so they do the decoding — letter by letter, out loud, arguing about it — which is why the message lands the way it does.

No one is asked to play a character or read from anything. Your guests stay themselves all evening. They just stop being comfortable.

The details

Guests
8–25 around one table
Run time
20–75 minutes. You choose the length
Large parties
I run several short séances across the evening
Setup
60 minutes · in‑home short version, about 10
Pack-up
30 minutes after the show
The room
A room that dims, and a table. Works beautifully at an actual dinner table
What I need
Floor space, one outlet, the table
Pairs with
A period menu, if you're that sort of host. I'll send you the real one
Where
Based in Niagara Falls. Buffalo, Rochester and all of Western New York, plus Pennsylvania and Ohio
Ages
16+

Right for

  • Edwardian and Gilded Age themed dinners
  • Guests who read history for fun
  • April 14 — and yes, people book the date
  • Historical societies, museum member evenings, library after‑hours
  • Book clubs, and any room with opinions about the movie

Wrong for

  • Anyone wanting a solemn remembrance evening — that's a different thing and I'm not the right person for it
  • Groups over twenty-five at one time
  • A room that wants to be talked at rather than handed objects
  • Anyone under sixteen

Is your date open?

Tell me when, roughly how many, and where. You'll get an answer and an exact price the same day.

Check your date or call (716) 940‑8963
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