More by chance than by design (as we’d initially planned to go last week) I found myself attending the Halloween version of Jurassic Lounge, a sort of cabaret nightclub event held at the Australian Museum in Sydney. For someone who loves both horror and natural history institutions, it doesn’t get much better than this! Wandering the transformed corridors and galleries of this venerable building was an experience both surreal and unpredictable (as well as slightly shambolic at times, it must be said), especially when a muttaburrasaurus ran through the crowd. Or when two random, very convincing zombies shambled by at close quarters. I was surprised to find myself shrinking away from the smaller one, so creepy was she.
It was these theatrical interventions, these ‘ghost train’ moments—which fooled us into believing what we saw, even while we knew it was a pretence—that were the high point of the night for me, best capturing the imminent sense of magic that accompanies Halloween.