Or perhaps diamonds if she’s in the mood on October 31 when the tills never stop ringing. But Pattaya’s ghouls and ghosts look a bit different this year. Central Festival’s retail Spooktacular lasts the whole of October and will awaken the “dark knight” in you by transferring the mall into Gotham City. The team at Mason private villas, Na Jomtien, will dress up in eerie costumes and serve you “mummy” hot dogs and egg custard in Halloween-friendly pumpkins. The Royal Cliff is offering terror-ific sea monsters from the depths, softened somewhat by glittering mermaids and intriguingly-named glowing jellyfish.
Terminal 21 boasts promises a haunted house – Pattaya has always been short of them – with free admittance if you produce a mall sales receipt for 1,000 baht. There’s also the unique attraction of pumpkin mini-golf. Sexy Soi 6 leads the gruesome bars league with Foxy Bar, Where Angels Play and Passion Bar (amongst others) variously promising the zombie spooks. Even a Jomtien market is joining in this year with Goosebump thrills at the vegetable stall and suggestions about what husband and wife should put on their tombstones: “You’re a goner and now I’m a goner”.
Pattaya was the first Thai resort to promote Halloween. Walking Street was offering Dracula cocktails, mostly tomato sauce, as early as 1998 according to Nightmarch author Duncan Stearn, now sadly deceased. Cafe Royale promised bed and then full English breakfast for two with a terrible waiter. This turned out to be a Boris Karloff dressed as the Mummy who, of course, played his favorite genre of music with your bacon and eggs: it was wrap of course. I don’t give a hoot scrivener Bernard Trink, something of a sociologist, wrote that it was ok for children to wear horror costumes at Halloween to make them less afraid of the dark.
The covid tsunami turned Pattaya into a city of the undead practically overnight. City Hall banned all Halloween celebrations in 2021, although the 24-hour convenience stores were allowed to open even as the bars and clubs remained padlocked. None the less, police were called to Naklua town center after a figure in a white shroud was seen lurking in the shadows and assumed to be a Halloween reveler. But he turned out to be a hospital patient on the run. If you are not going out on the evening of October 31 this year, take heart. Cable TV is offering probably the best horror picture ever made: The Bride of Frankenstein 1935.
