10/10/2026
OLD TITUS: A LOVECRAFTIAN COCKTAIL 🥃
Titus Crow is an occultist and paranormal investigator from the Cthulhu Cycle Deities series by British author Brian Lumley. Crow, aka ‘Old Titus’, appears in six novels and eleven short stories published between 1974 and 1987. While Lumley has long denied basing the character on any specific person or being inspired by another fictional character, he did once admit that he had a soft spot for Abraham van Helsing from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”. Lumley also differentiated his characters from those in H.P. Lovecraft’s original Cthulhu Mythos works by giving them more agency. They actively fought back against the nameless horrors from beyond space and time.
Titus Crow would have hated the Kingsport expansion to the original Arkham Horror board game, so it’s a good thing he’s not actually one of the available characters. If you’re playing with the Kingsport expansion, one player has to commit to travelling there and wandering about town, having encounters wherever it looks like a strange portal might be opening. If no one goes to Kingsport and too many portals open, you lose. Unfortunately, unlike the encounters occurring elsewhere on the board, which typically involve gangs of bootleggers, cultists, monsters, and mysterious places, the Kingsport encounters almost always involve sitting in a pub, diner, retirement home, café, or park listening to senior citizens telling tall tales.
Titus Crow is old. He’s not sure how many years he has left, and he’s been fighting the Great Old Ones, their cultists, and their other allies for most of his adult life. He can feel it in his bones that the Stars are Right, that the Sunken City of R’lyeh is rising, and that the Great Cthulhu is stirring in his sleep. He knows humanity is doomed and he’s not sure if he has anything left to give, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to go down without a fight.
As a cocktail, the Old Titus is an interesting take on the classic Bourbon Mule, incorporating elderflower liqueur (“Thanks, Elder Sign!”), lemon juice, grenadine, and bitters.
INGREDIENTS
- 1.25 oz Old Crow Kentucky Straight Bourbon (in the very unlikely event you can find it; even before the trade war, I’d never seen it for sale in Canada; North of 7's Traditional Cask or any of Barnburner’s “Kentucky Distilled Whiskey” are bourbon-like products from Canadian distilleries you can use if you don’t have any bourbon on hand)
- 0.75 oz St-Germain Elderflower Liqueur
- 3–4 oz ginger b**r
- 0.5 oz lemon juice
- 8–10 dashes of aromatic bitters (Angostura, Peychaud’s, or whatever your preference; I used six dashes of Kensington Aromatic Bitters and four dashes of Tawse Cherry Bark Bitters)
- 0.5 oz grenadine
DIRECTIONS
- Fill a tall glass with ice (spooky ice if you have some Halloween-themed ice trays).
- Add the wh**ky (bourbon or otherwise) and elderflower liqueur to the glass, then top with the ginger b**r and stir very gently to mix.
- Add the lemon juice, bitters, and grenadine to a separate mixing glass and stir well. Pour slowly over the bourbon, elderflower, and ginger b**r mixture. Do not stir the two mixtures together (“the bourbon lies beneath”).
Enjoy while reading Brian Lumley’s “The Burrowers Beneath” (or Robert Price’s short story “The Burrower Beneath”, which is also a Cthulhu Mythos story; that’s not confusing at all, is it?), or while playing the Arkham Horror or Eldritch Horror board games.
Every Friday in October, The Haunted Walk’s Halloween mixologist conjures up a new creepy cocktail.
