I am a fan of all things Harry Potter. I mean, what self-respecting millennial isn’t? Back in the good old days (aka three weeks ago), when none of us knew that we would be quarantined indefinitely due to COVID-19, I turned 30 – which naturally meant I wanted to celebrate with a Harry Potter-themed murder mystery party. We’ve gotten a lot of questions about how we did it, so I’m sharing all the details on today’s blog.
-Decorate
We made use of free printables online, and covered our house with editions of ‘The Daily Prophet’, and ‘Azkaban Wanted Posters’. We found floating candles, which we hung with fishing wire from the ceiling, on Amazon. We also found Hogwarts Acceptance Letters on Amazon, which we taped to make it look like they were flying out of the mailbox. We also made sure to use small touches, like red lipstick on the bathroom mirror saying that ‘The Chamber of Secrets has been open – enemies of the heir beware’.
-Have on theme food
We chose to have the food of our party go along with the Harry Potter theme. My birthday cake was the iconic pink cake that Hagrid brought Harry the first time they met. We created a Polyjuice Punch using smoking dry ice as well.
-Have the story figured out
The hardest part of throwing a murder mystery is having the story in place – for ours, David came up with the story (which was loosely based on a Hogwarts Reunion, where someone ends up dead because of a secret Death Eater). Place clues around the house, and assign everyone identifies. For our party, we were put on teams, such as Hogwarts Professors, Order of the Phoenix, Students, and the Ministry of Magic. We all spend time collecting clues, and then had a big ‘Mafia’ style discussion, to vote for who we thought the secret Death Eater was. We had about 30 people there, which was the perfect number for a murder mystery.
