The Midnight Pub

The name “The Midnight Pub” was not its own but given by desperate hopefuls and the lucky few who claimed to step inside. Nestled, or rather hidden in Soho, London, the pub has been compared to Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011), for its share a strikingly similar, impossible premise. Yet this is not cinema. This is rumor, myth and obsession.

And, if you believe the stories, this is reality.

No one had The Midnight Pub on their 2025 bingo card. It doesn't appear on Google Maps. It has no phone number, no listed owner, no records in city planning. Its existence is carried entirely by whispers, social media threads, and late-night blogs that sound too strange to be true. As journalists, we know the danger of chasing factless rumors but when so many “credible” guests insisted, we had to investigate.

So what do we know? Allegedly, the pub is tucked at the end of a narrow alleyway. By day, it’s nothing but a brick wall and a couple of overflowing bins. By midnight, however, the wall vanishes, replaced by a dimly lit door. Step through it, and you’ll find yourself in a tavern packed not with ordinary patrons but with the dead. More specifically: dead authors.

Witnesses claim to have seen Charles Dickens stumbling out with a cigar, Virginia Woolf debating at the bar with Ernest Hemingway, and Oscar Wilde lounging near the piano, tossing barbed quips at anyone who dares speak too seriously.

When we visited the address ourselves, the alley was just as described: only bricks. But at exactly 12:00, the wall shimmered and there it was. A pub that hadn’t been there a moment before. Its windows were dark, but the murmur of voices and clink of glasses were unmistakable. When we tried to photograph it, the images showed only bricks.

We also attempted to enter but were stopped by a bouncer: a stern man in his fifties dressed in late-Victorian attire, the sort of person who looked like he’d read more books than most people had touched in their lives. He informed us, in no uncertain terms, that only those with potential to be great authors could be admitted. I’ll confess: my heart sank. But then he added something else. Potential could change. Dedication and time mattered. In other words: writers, keep at it. The Midnight Pub might yet open for you.

To learn more, we spoke with Joe Billings, 35, a fantasy author with three published novels, who claims to have been invited inside and was one of the few writers brave enough to share this secret online.

“It’s overwhelming.” Billings confessed, “I thought someone was pranking me.I went home after work one day—yes, I still work at the bank—and found this leather-bound letter sitting neatly in my mailbox. I tossed it away after reading it. Who in their right mind would believe that was real?” He laughed at the memory.

“Then it kept coming. Remember the scene when Uncle Vernon didn’t want Harry to go to Hogwarts, so he tried to burn all the letters until they came flooding in? That’s exactly what it felt like.”

Eventually, curiosity and boredom got the better of him.

“The pub is half modern, half vintage,” Billings explained. “The vibe is very contemporary, but the interior feels like the 19th century. I saw authors from all over the world speaking to the greats in their own languages and somehow, the greats spoke back. I don’t think Dickens knew Spanish when he was alive, but maybe he had time in the afterlife to pick it up.” He chuckled.

“You don’t just drink there; you learn. Wilde told me my prose was too stiff. Dickens gave me notes on character arcs. And guess what, Hemingway stole my whiskey. Classic Ernest. Yes, he allowed me to call him Ernest now, after four drinks in.”

When asked if he was invited back, Billings shook his head. “It was a one-time thing, and it was enough. I learned more in four hours than in my whole life so far. I know I can’t prove it. But it’s real. It feels like the place tests you. If you’re not ready, you’ll never believe it exists. If you are, you’ll keep writing until the door finally opens.”

We later spoke to another author who claimed the same experience, proving the bouncer’s promise may not have been just a rumor.

“I heard whispers about the pub in 2013, but I never believed it,” said Emily Bartlett, a poet from Columbus, Ohio. “For one, it sounded too surreal. And two, I wasn’t a very good writer.”

But in 2020, during the long months of Covid, Bartlett devoted herself to her craft. “I wrote every day. I poured every emotion, every event, into poetry. Then one afternoon in 2021, I came home from work and found the leather-bound letter waiting on my porch. At first, I thought it was a prank. But it kept coming, again and again, until I finally booked a ticket to London.”

There, she says, she met Emily Dickinson—her hero—alongside Edgar Allan Poe and Christina Rossetti. “We spent the night talking and drinking until dawn. When the first light came through, the authors ushered me out and bid farewell. I never saw them again.”

Both Bartlett and Billings’ accounts share striking similarities: the letter, the pub, the one-night limit, and the lessons learned from the dead. Neither Billings nor Barlett regrets being cast back into the ordinary world because for a brief, brilliant moment, they stepped into literature’s most secret after-hour society.

The pub remains a mystery to us all, but we believe countless authors around the world are receiving those elusive letters every day, granting entry to this exclusive club. So if you’re a writer, an author, a poet who thinks you may be no good—think again. Keep writing, because one day, if you hone your craft long and hard enough, you just might shake hands with a dead literary icon and share your work with them.

Until then, at least we have Midnight in Paris to fill the void.