IT seemingly appeared overnight, a fully-formed three-storey hotel on the side of the Pavilion Dance building in the lower gardens.

The star attraction of the Daily Echo backed Bournemouth Arts festival proved to be just as surreal as the earlier Grand Grotesque Parade that sombrely drifted through the gardens.

Equipped with headphones, we sat in silence and gawped through the windows at the guests moving behind the windows of the mysterious Electric Hotel.

Without headphones, passers-by could only guess at what was going on.

Each neon-lit window, played out an odd scene – a woman taking a dip in the rooftop pool, a man dancing in his room, a maid cleaning.

They seemed stuck in a loop, repeating their motions over and over, oblivious to what was going on next door.

The effect was mesmerising and humorous at first, but the repetition cleverly built to a tense climax.

There was a creepy sense of menace when a masked man entered the building to deliver a glowing parcel.

Quite what was happening was impossible to fathom.

But it was not a happy place to check-in, more like the Overlook Hotel from The Shining.

With axemen stalking the halls and something lurking in the cleaning cupboard.

The headphone experience made the audience seemed as trapped as the hotel inhabitants, doomed to watch without being able to affect a change.

Voyeuristic, darkly funny and even nightmarish. This chilling spectacle was an inspired booking for the Bournemouth Arts Festival.