Bath will claim another world-first visitor experience when Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein, which commemorates the life of the female novelist and her now legendary creation, opens on Monday.
It is the first time that the author will have her own dedicated permanent attraction.
Mary Shelley wrote the majority of the classic novel while living in lodgings in Bath’s Abbey Churchyard in 1816 – the site now occupied by the city’s iconic Pump Room.
Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein on Gay Street retraces her tragic and often untold life events. Visitors will confront the 8ft formidable creature, pictured below, as Mary really imagined it, with a world-first recreation forming the centrepiece of the attraction.
Blurring the lines between museum and immersive experience, the attraction will celebrate the legacy of Mary’s work across four atmospheric floors.
It retraces the author’s complex past, tragic life events and radical scientific thinking that fermented in Mary’s imagination before her trip to the Villa Diodati near Geneva, where she conjured the first fragments of her monstrous creation in her infamous ‘waking dream’.
It also explores Frankenstein in popular culture. Visitors will experience all things Frankenstein and his ‘monster’ in the attraction’s Popular Culture rooms featuring vintage memorabilia, props, posters and bizarre collector items.
Visitors will also venture down into the dank foreboding basement, with a dark and disorientating walkthrough experience revealing the unhallowed practices of a deranged scientist.
The team behind the much-anticipated attraction promise a “scarily immersive, unnervingly thrilling and visceral experience”.
Each room will feature bespoke scents to heighten the senses to heighten the experience, and create a sense of time, place and emotional context.
There will also be ominous music and unsettling soundscapes, temperature control, lighting and special effects, electric shocks, projections, props, unusual artefacts and vintage items throughout the building.
For the attraction’s gothic-themed gift shop Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein has teamed up with a number of Bath suppliers, including beauty and home products Planty Kate, to create candles that capture the essence of the attraction’s central characters, Mary and her radical poet husband Percy Shelley.
The building will also include Victor’s Lair, a miserable attic-cum-escape room that can be booked separately.
Visitors will have just one hour to unravel the ramblings of his deranged mind using clues hidden among the insane equations, strange artefacts and miscellaneous body parts strewn around the attic and find their way out.
