‘Super fun and slightly nutty’: Conjuring booze and the undead at The Seance Room

He slaps the table three times — thwack! thwack! thwack! — the palm of his right hand akin to a typewriter banging out exclamation points, punctuating his words.

“Life! After! Death!” he thunders, evidence of which he swears is forthcoming. “That, I promise, I will provide.”

But first, a little music for what just may be the world’s first Thomas Edison-inspired seance.

“Nothing sets the mood to conjure spirits quite like ancient tunes,” our medium explains, producing one of said inventor’s most famous creations: an antique phonograph, which he places atop a large circular wooden table glowing with light bulbs.

He cranks to life the device that played the very first recorded sounds, a man’s sonorous singing voice filling the dimly lit space as a result.

“In a moment, we will be asking the spirits — any spirit in the room — to communicate to me your secrets,” he says, clad in a dark blazer that sometimes makes him nearly indivisible from all the shadows here.

There are plenty of spirits in said room — we are in a distillery, after all.

‘Super fun — and slightly nutty’

On a recent Thursday night, the new The Seance Room experience at Lost Spirits Distillery is underway, and things are about to get weird — or weirder, to put it more accurately.

The medium grasps a piece of paper from a bowl on the table, each one inscribed with an audience member’s initials and a secret that they have written down before entering the chamber.

“There’s something here about health,” he announces. “There was a surgery; there’s cutting. Who is this?”

A woman named Ashley stands up.

“Tell us what Ashley is asking of us,” the medium commands. “The question is almost always something to do with health, wealth or love — this is a health thing. What did I have done? What did I donate?”

“Replaced,” Ashley answers.

“What did she get replaced?” he asks. “Was it a kidney?”

“Yes, it was,” she acknowledges, to the crowd’s amusement.

The show continues with more spirit-conjuring and another artifact, a hundred-year-old doll with real human hair and a seriously creepy recorded speaking voice, culminating in an otherworldly ending we won’t reveal here.

Taking everything in alongside his guests: Lost Spirits co-founder Bryan Davis, who eyes said doll with a grin.

“It’s super fun,” he says, “and slightly nutty.”

The same could be said of The Seance Room itself, launched in March. The experience can be booked as an upgrade to the Lost Spirits evening show or purchased separately.

When Lost Spirits opened at Area15 in the summer of 2021, it was more of a guided-tour plunge down a rum rabbit hole, where guests could marvel at the novel way that spirits are made here via a Davis-invented device, the Thea One Reactor, which essentially mimics the aging process, producing high-end alcohol in a few days that could take 20 years to manufacture using traditional techniques.

The experience has since been enhanced with myriad entertainers — 44 resident performers in all — on multiple stages, from aerialists to magicians to the first woman to earn a green card based on her work as a burlesque dancer and pinup model. (That would be Canada native Bettina May.)

Also: a jazz band, some tango dancing, a magic mystery cat, etc.

As the Vegas entertainment landscape has shifted from an emphasis on top-dollar production shows to music residencies and festivals — Wynn Las Vegas’ “Awakening” being a notable recent exception — this is a forward-thinking throwback, with old-school performers starring in a decidedly nouveau setting.

“I love all the things that make Vegas, Vegas — but they exist,” Davis explains. “So, how do you add to that narrative, how do you do something different, how do you make it relevant?

“As soon as I started adding these guys in, it became this moment of, I have never — outside of a movie — found myself in that kind of environment,” he continues. “It’s like going to a Guillermo del Toro set and hanging out for the day. It was like, ‘OK, I can get really into this.’ ”

‘A night that you can’t get in real life’

And now, a moderately snarky, disembodied head inside a giant crystal ball.

“Yo, what up? I’m from the spirit world,” it says — “it” being a dude with a headset mic, only his cranium visible from within a large see-through sphere atop a table.

“What’s the meaning of life?” a guy in the crowd yells.

Fair question.

“A little hard to tell about life when I’m dead,” he retorts.

Fair answer.

The crowd laughs — and Davis just might be chuckling the hardest, which is frequently the case on this night.

“I would have 1,000 percent quit, like, years and years ago, the minute I’m not having fun,” he explains as he leads a tour of what is basically some of the wildest, most untamed stretches of his imagination brought to life.

Davis is a hands-on kind of guy: He created his first homemade still when he was just 16, using — among other things — a hot plate and an empty bottle of booze lifted from his father’s liquor cabinet. After attending college as an art major with an emphasis on sculpture, he designed amusement park rides for a time before getting into the spirits business with his partner Joanne Haruta. They had just $80,000 in seed money, less than the cost of a single commercial still — and so again, Davis designed his own.

They opened Lost Spirits in Los Angeles in 2016, and it became a popular attraction thanks to an amusement-park-with-booze vibe and award-winning hooch. They did the same in Vegas five years later.

But their success here came with an unexpected dilemma: The place would get so busy, there’d be moments of human gridlock as guests clustered around various spots on the tour.

“I had a couple of out-of-work entertainers who were working for me as tour guides,” Davis recalls. “And we kept having a couple of traffic jams, so I was like, ‘Hey, can you do some juggling and shtick to get this group out of here so the new one can pull in behind them?’

“And it was like, ‘Wow, that worked. What if we lean into this?’ ” he continues. “Sometimes it’s the most practical thing ever to stick a fire under you to do something.”

Around this time, Cirque du Soleil’s “Zumanity” closed, making a bevy of talent available.

So, what began as a way of keeping visitors moving forward through this maze of 105-proof whiskey and aquatic-themed lounges snowballed into something else entirely.

By July, Davis had become intent on creating a world-class showroom along with his booze Disneyland.

“I’m kind of a person of extremes,” he says. “I don’t really do things halfway, just by nature.

“And so it kind of became like, ‘OK, I think I’m going to turn this up more,’ ” he continues. “It just became a game of crafting a night that you can’t get in real life.”

Booze and beyond — way beyond

The reptile is within arm’s length, a scaly necklace slithering upon a tattooed woman’s shoulders.

“I have never been this close to a snake charmer before,” Davis notes.

He’s probably not alone.

While the types of performers featured in The Seance Room aren’t new to Vegas — you might even have seen some of the magicians and aerialists in other shows around town — it’s the in-your-face setting that distinguishes the experience.

To use a musical analogy, it’s like seeing a band in a dive bar, elbow to elbow with everyone else, little to no barrier between artist and audience, as opposed to a big theater where the stage comes up to your shoulders.

“You get closer here,” Davis says. “The intensity level that you get from it is something you can’t really get in a giant venue.”

As such, there’s an immersive, almost punk rock atmosphere here: Around this corner, a trapeze artist corkscrews herself to the rafters right above your head; around another, a contortionist folds herself up like an ironing board about to be stashed back into a utility closet, one of her ankles extending half a foot behind her head. At eye level with the crowd: a jazz band performing a finger-snapping take on Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.”

“There’s a long industry tradition of playing music for yeast, and supposedly they make better booze,” Davis explains. “I’m pretty sure that’s 99 percent horse——, but we figured that maybe we should put a band in the fermentation room.”

That room has been plenty busy since Lost Spirits opened a Vegas branch: Davis says that they produce about 100,000 bottles here annually, all of which are consumed or sold on the premises.

“It’s just for this place,” he says, “which is nuts.”

Davis is off the clock now, which means he can indulge in the fruits of his labor, demonstrating the best way to enjoy the 122-proof rum.

“It’ll have a distinct beginning, middle and end,” he explains, “like a play if you could compress a play into your taste buds.”

Then he takes a sip, drinking in the spirits and his surroundings in unison — which is the whole point of this experience.

“It’s still a distillery,” he says. “It’s still, in a weird way, about the booze.”

Again, that laugh.

“At least kind of.”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jbracelin76 on Instagram.