Lyndhurst Mansion in Tarrytown is swapping its usual historic-house tours for a feverish masquerade this month, transforming into Prince Prospero's Abbey for an immersive staging of Edgar Allan Poe's “The Masque of the Red Death.” The production runs on select evenings from October 15 through October 30, with performances between 6 and 9 p.m., putting visitors inside the gilded, doomed party at the center of Poe's 1842 story.
The experience is performed and produced by the Irvington Shakespeare Company, which stages the tale inside what lyndhurst.org describes as “the Gothic halls of our 1842 historic home.” Rather than watching from a seat, guests take on the role of Prospero's invited guests, moving from room to room as the story unfolds around them — what the venue calls walking “with delight and dread” through the feverish masquerade.
As Time Out notes, Lyndhurst sits in Tarrytown, right next to Sleepy Hollow country, giving the production a built-in sense of place for a region already steeped in Gothic lore every October. The mansion's own events page separately describes the staged portion as a discreetly staged 40-minute experience, even as organizers recommend setting aside roughly an hour on the property overall.
How the Performance Moves Through the Mansion
Small groups step off every 20 minutes, a staggered schedule meant to keep each walk-through feeling private rather than like a crowded tour. General admission runs $45 plus service fees, per visitsleepyhollow.com, and the same listing recommends the experience for guests ages 12 and up. Because each performance has limited capacity, organizers are advising visitors to book ahead rather than show up hoping to walk in.
Lyndhurst's own event page lays out several ground rules for anyone attending: the mansion has no elevator, so the night involves standing and climbing flights of stairs. Photography, video, and audio recording are forbidden once the performance is underway, and the venue states that all ticket purchases are non-refundable and non-exchangeable. Large bags, backpacks, and strollers aren't permitted inside the mansion either, according to the same visitsleepyhollow.com listing.
A Sweet Stop Before — or After — the Masquerade
For anyone looking to extend the evening, Geordanes of Irvington will be on-site selling sweet treats, giving the event a bit of a local-market feel alongside the theatrics. It's a small touch, but one that fits the broader trend of historic houses leaning into immersive, after-dark programming built around Poe's work — a format also seen this fall at Andalusia Historic House in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where organizers built after-dark tours around the author's writing, according to WHYY.
The idea of blurring the line between audience and participant isn't new to stagings of this particular Poe tale, either. A 2007 review in The Guardian described an earlier immersive production of “The Masque of the Red Death” as having a kind of duality, letting attendees be “both spectator and participant simultaneously” — a description that lines up with how Lyndhurst is framing its own version nearly two decades later.
