The Half Nelson has teamed up with the Quad-City Spiritualist Society to bring “Beyond the Crimson Veil,” a special pop-up Halloween cocktail experience in Downtown Davenport, Tuesday through Saturday, Oct. 27-31.
Half Nelson Chef Connor Larson has crafted a menu of cocktails and mocktails imbued with ingredients tied to traditional divinatory practices and a selection of small bites inspired by the ancestral cuisine of a forgotten Davenport industrialist whose tragic loss fueled a paranormal obsession.
The experience begins with a history presentation by representatives from the Quad City Spiritualist Society followed by an outline of the main course: a séance. Can participants make contact with the spirit of August Ferdinand (A.F.) von Rantzau in a recreation of his Victorian séance parlor?
“Beyond the Crimson Veil” combines local history, occult gastronomy, and spiritualist practice into what organizers call “an unforgettable Halloween experience” at 321 E. Second Street. The séance and cocktail experience will start at 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. each of the five nights, and added 10 p.m. performances on Friday and Saturday (Oct. 30-31).
Von Rantzau (a Davenport industrialist) suffered a tragic loss of his wife and child from the 1898 sinking of an ocean liner, as they were traveling back to Europe to see family.
Von Rantzau immigrated to Davenport in 1895 and had a lifelong fascination with spirit contact, which was a popular practice in the 19th century, according to the QC Spiritualist Society. This led him to the Mississippi Valley Spiritualists Association in Clinton.
After tragically losing his wife, Marguerite, and nine-year-old son, Fritz, in the 1898 wreck of the SS La Bourgogne, von Rantzau devoted the remainder of his life to spiritualism, desperately seeking contact with his deceased family.
During the outbreak of World War I, von Rantzau was a recluse, hardly ever leaving his home. In autumn 1918, he was found deceased beside his prayer desk, with a spirit trumpet nearby. His mysterious death and lifelong search for proof of the afterlife remain central to his haunting legacy in the area, the QCSS says.
On July 4, 1898, the SS La Bourgogne collided with the sailing ship Cromartyshire while the two ships were in thick fog off Newfoundland, and Cromartyshire had reduced speed, but La Bourgogne was steaming at high speed. The La Bourgogne sank 40 minutes after the collision, killing 562 of the 725 people aboard. It was, at the time, one of the worst maritime disasters in history.
“It's fascinating,” Matt Osborn, owner of The Half Nelson, said Monday. “So many people are familiar with this obelisk downtown that is dedicated to John Dillon, but there is an even taller obelisk in Oakdale Cemetery that has the Dillon name on it, that is part of the family gravesite there, but was actually commissioned before Judge Dillon died -- in memorial to his wife and daughter who were killed in the sinking of the SS La Bourgogne, which, like I said, von Rantzau also experienced the loss of his son and wife in the same shipwreck.
“It was probably the most notorious commercial North Atlantic maritime disaster up until the Titanic sank (in 1912),” he added.
“It was actually not that hard to find a lot of prominent names in Davenport history that do have historical ties to spiritualism and spiritualist tendencies,” Osborn said, noting main ones are D.D. Palmer (1845-1913), founder of chiropractic medicine, and John Forrest Dillon (1831-1914), an Iowa Supreme Court judge who became a federal judge.
Dillon Memorial Fountain (at the foot of South Main Street) memorializes Dillon, who was a Davenport attorney, state Supreme Court Justice and a judge on the United States Circuit Court. A bequest after his death on May 6, 1914, specified the construction and location of the fountain.
“From our perspective in the modern era, it's really hard to wrap our minds around why spiritualism as a movement was so profound in Europe and the United States during the turn of the last century,” Osborn said. “From basically the post-Civil War and up until World War I, spiritualism and ghost summoning and séances were a very popular form of entertainment, not only in Europe but also in the United States.”
“We don't live in a culture of such profound morbidity as the Victorians did, or especially in the United States post-Civil War, where everybody had lost somebody,” he added. Seances and spiritualism attempted to make sense of those losses, due to war and disease.
“At the end of the 19th century is really this means of a group cathartic searching for answers that everybody wants to know in the face of such tragedy and loss of human life,” Osborn said. “Well, how can I accept this? How can I bear this? How can I grieve all these people that were lost?”
He said Palmer communicated with “spectral remains” of a deceased doctor, as the inspiration for chiropractic, which he invented in Davenport in 1895.
“In many ways, in this room, my goal was to kind of, as much as possible, approximate ‘A Little Bit of Heaven’ in the Palmer residence and all of the esotericism which D.D. was very famously prone to collect,” Osborn said of “Beyond the Crimson Veil.”
Von Rantzau held seances in an attempt to communicate with his dead family.
“That's like the cruelest part of a loss of somebody at sea,” Osborn said. “There is not that closure of their remains or any of that. John Forrest Dillon, in fact, with several other wealthy people who lost people, chartered a boat out to those waters and tried to personally attempt to find some wreckage or evidence or whatever.”
Séance in former Bootleg Hill space
The Half Nelson séance (in newly furnished space next door to the restaurant, formerly occupied by Bootleg Hill Honey Meads) will try and contact either August Ferdinand himself or his wife or son.
“That is our goal for the séance, is the only people we are specifically looking to target or communicate with in the séance,” Osborn noted. “The séance is not an open invitation to anybody to come in and make communication with whomever they want, because neither I nor anybody else on the staff, I think, are capable of doing that amount of psychological counseling.”
The events will be 90 minutes each, and can be purchased separate from a five-course, Halloween-themed dinner.
“If a person wanted on Friday and Saturday to join us both for the dinner and one of the séances, they can,” Osborn said.
The special Halloween dinner will only be offered on Oct. 30 and 31. Fixed price is $111 a person, which doesn't include drinks, tip or tax.
“They can come before or after, but you don't need to participate in the séance to enjoy the dinner on Friday and Saturday. You don't need to enjoy dinner at all on any day of the week to participate in the séance," Osborn added. "The two things are ticketed entirely separately.”
“I think that creating a very, very unique opportunity on Halloween for a night's entertainment, that's how the Victorians saw it,” he said. “We did it last night and it was very breathtakingly eerie at times. And what's nice about it is that you never know what's going to happen on any given evening. There is a great element of chance when we leave so much of the evening up to forces beyond our own control.”
Osborn is having lots of fun setting this up, since he’s a history buff. Their restaurant building dates from 1929.
“As just like a Davenport history geek, and to find all these little tie-ins that I was otherwise unaware of,” he said, noting the tall memorial at Oakdale Cemetery.
“It’s like, oh my God, this shipwreck happens some 1,700 miles away from Davenport. And how strange it is to just walk through the cemetery one day and discover this towering thing and be like, oh, I mean, yeah,” Osborn said. “That's why anybody gets into history, or especially like local history, is because you just find that one little thing that interests you, and then from there you just follow it down the rabbit hole and just all the ways that things connect.”
A number of the old furniture pieces in the room, evoking the Victorian era, actually trace their lineage back to the old Jumer's Castle Lodge in Bettendorf, he noted.
“Otherwise, a lot of this has been just selectively thrifted or, it's funny, you put out in the ether to your people and your surrounding acquaintances, I'm looking for this and this and this and this, and the amount of people that'll come out of the woodwork and be like, oh, I've got this, do you want it?” Osborn said. “So a lot of this has been graciously borrowed from a lot of like-minded individuals.”
The set of dining room chairs came from a neighbor’s garage sale, he said.
Spiritualist Society gets more visible
P. William Beaudoin, director of cultural and esoteric programs for QCSS, will lead the seances.
His role in the Society is as a guide into the realm of spirit contact. “Whether participants are well learned in divination, or simply interested in witnessing the rich history of Spiritualism in the area, it is my pleasure to educate people on the long-held traditions of those who want to feel the beyond,” he said Monday.
“October is a special time for bringing together people to rejoice in the unexplained, and it’s my honor to be at the forefront of providing such an engaging experience to the region.”
The Half Nelson venue has been made to resemble the historic residence of A.F. von Rantzau. At the event, guests will be taught the history of local seekers, then treated to a live séance led by Beaudoin or another member of the QCSS. Guests will be served cocktails and libations courtesy of Chef Connor before and after the presentation.
This is the third year Half Nelson has done a special Halloween dinner, but the first with this new program, Osborn said Monday.
“Every year that we do any event, I think there's always this natural inclination to kind of like, all right, and then what, and then what, and kind of add on to it. So that's how this started this year, with this idea that like, we have this space next door that is otherwise just gonna sit there, and how can we utilize it for Halloween?” he asked. “And it has sort of sort of mushroomed and ballooned since there.”
The space was formerly occupied by Bootleg Hill Honey Meads, which moved in September 2025 to 226 W. 3rd St., Davenport.
The Half Nelson’s five-course Halloween dinner in 2024 was loosely themed around horror films or short stories. And then last year it was more specifically based on Edgar Allan Poe themes, Osborn said. “This year, Connor has also kind of got his own general Halloween theme going for that dinner. We decorate for that dinner. We turn the lights down real low. It's all candlelit. We especially soundtrack it. So we'll still do that this year, but then this is kind of its own separate experience that has all of those things and more.”
The room will accommodate up to 20 guests, he noted, starting with a cocktail half hour where they'll be presented with a menu that features custom dishes, and drinks that are specifically themed to the story in this room, as well as some small shareable plates that are also themed to the time period of the room.
“And people will be presented with some historical materials, old newspaper clippings, along with the menu, that kind of give them some context as to what the general story is going to be in here,” Osborn said. “With a couple members of the Spiritualist Society circulating the room to kind of facilitate that conversation.
"And then after that cocktail portion of the evening has passed, we'll transition to the main experiments, which will consist of a member of the Spiritualist Society leading people sitting at that table in a séance, but then everybody also sitting kind of in the parlor to observe is also very much involved as well and very much asked to meditate along with everybody and experience everything.”
“The Quad City Spiritualist Society isn't necessarily new, but we're just now starting to host events and have more of a public-facing aspect to it,” Beaudoin said Monday, “For the longest time, it's just been strictly historical.
“We have nine members and we've just been researching things that go back to historical figures like D.D. Palmer in the Quad Cities, as well as the Mississippi Valley Spiritualist Camp that was in Clinton, Iowa, not too far from here -- that D.D. Palmer actually attended on many occasions,” he added.
“Spiritualism as a whole actually used to be a very popular thing in the 19th century. Even in America, Victorian citizens practiced things like séances and divination really frequently,” Beaudoin said. “Even Mary Todd Lincoln had a séance in the White House.”
Illusionist Harry Houdini (1874-1926) also was a strong proponent of spiritualism and séances, he said, working to debunk tricksters and frauds.
“Houdini was a huge believer in spirit contact and the idea that a part of your personality remains after somebody dies,” Beaudoin said. “Houdini only disproved a lot of the parlor tricks because he wanted people to focus on what he believed to be real in the whole thing. So Houdini was a huge advocate for spirit contact.”
“I've just been really interested since a little bit before the pandemic,” he added. “I’ve been interested in the occult and contacting spirits since around 2018.”
Beaudoin credited Adam Hurlburt (a QCSS historical researcher who's cofounder of the QC alternative event collective Void Church) with putting this special event together. Osborn reached out to Hurlburt to help organize.
“A lot of people have maybe been to a concert or a dance event held by Void Church. There's actually going to be a Void Church DJ'd dance next door at Raccoon Motel on Halloween night,” Beaudoin said, noting that will be 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. “Adam knows a lot of people in the area, and eventually the folks at the Half Nelson reached out to him to see if there was anything interesting to do on Halloween. And they had this open parlor space just next to the restaurant.”
“Matt from the Half Nelson has put in a lot of work alongside us to create the look of a 19th-century Victorian séance parlor,” he said, noting it’s modeled after von Rantzau’s Davenport parlor.
“He lived in Davenport and had died during what people think is a séance,” Beaudoin said, noting the official cause of death was influenza, but he was holding a spirit trumpet, which is a tool usually used in séances.
The Half Nelson also has a couple artifacts owned by von Rantzau – a prayer desk and a pocket watch. “That’s the most exciting piece for me, is a few actual old séance items from his Davenport residence,” Beaudoin said.
What’s next?
So what happens to the “Crimson Veil” space come November and after? A bar or event space could be options.
“I think that that's an opportunity in this room. I think that there's other special event opportunities in this room,” Osborn said. “But especially this week after seeing just how this kind of like very non-traditional piece of dining entertainment does, I think it'll give us a good sense of, maybe there's something— things that we can do in this room.”
“This wouldn't be our third year doing the Halloween dinner if people didn't respond really well to it. And I think we've always been really lucky for the past several years to be— to find that if you put a creative experience or a creative idea in front of the Quad Cities, that there are people that are very hungry for that and very supportive of that,” he added.
“It's a very unique community in that respect, and it's really cool to have. a kind of supportive built-in audience at all times,” Osborn said, “People really have an appetite and people are really supportive of a lot of the stuff we do. So I'm hoping that after this week, I'll just think of more creative ideas and people will continue to be supportive of it.”
For this week, Chef Conner has prepared a special, seasonal menu of tricks and treats, both savory and sweet. Tickets ($35 a person) include one complimentary cocktail (or N/A alternative); other items sold à la carte.
Once the presentation has begun, there can be no exiting and re-entry of the space. There is absolutely NO photography or phone use allowed. Devices are best left OFF or in the car.
Tickets for the presentation can be reserved HERE.
The six seats at the séance table are sold out (except for Oct. 28 and 31), but tickets are available for other areas of the room (which will hold up to 20 total).
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