Kings Island has tied its newest attraction to coffee. The park said in a Facebook video posted May 12 that the in-park Starbucks is serving two secret menu drinks inspired by Phantom Theater: Opening Nightmare, the new ride that opened at the start of the 2026 season.
The two drinks are a Raspberry Iced White Mocha with lavender cream cold foam and a Lavender Cream Frappuccino with strawberry purée. Their purple color scheme matches shades used in Phantom Theater, giving the drinks a direct visual link to the haunted-show theme the park is pushing across the attraction.
The move folds the ride’s story into a menu item visitors can carry with them. Phantom Theater: Opening Nightmare is a reboot of the original Phantom Theater that ran at Kings Island from 1992 to 2002, and this version blends the haunted theater idea with the interactive style of Boo Blasters, which it is replacing. In the ride’s story, guests join No Legs Larry’s team on a dark and stormy night, where a lightning strike unleashes the ghost notes from Maestro’s pipe organ. Riders travel in enchanted opera boxes through backstage areas, haunted hallways, dressing rooms and a fiery boiler room, using spellbound flashlights to return the ghost notes to the organ.
That broader reboot is what makes the coffee tie-in work. The park described the drinks as themed nicely to pair with Phantom Theater, and the attraction itself brings back characters from the original while adding new ones. Maestro and head usher No Legs Larry return in more detailed and expressive animatronic form, while the 2026 version also adds Arpeggio, Maestro’s furry feline friend. The Phantom Theater crew includes Houdelini, The Great Garbonzo, Hilda Bovine and Lionel Burymore.
There is a catch, and it matters to anyone hunting for the drinks. Secret menu items are not official recipes; they are custom creations or common substitutions built from existing menu items, often by baristas rather than by the chain itself. That means the Phantom Theater drinks are part of the park’s promotional storytelling, not a standard Starbucks release with a fixed nationwide recipe.
That distinction matters because secret menus have become a familiar part of fast-food and coffee culture, from Starbucks to McDonald’s and beyond. But Kings Island is using the idea in a specific way: to turn a new ride launch into something guests can also taste. The result is a small but fitting extension of a major change at the park, where a familiar property has been reshaped into a more elaborate, story-driven attraction. As Jeff Suess wrote, it is “a significant upgrade from the original. The basic premise is the same but with more of an emphasis on story and theming.”
For now, the answer to why this matters today is simple. Kings Island opened Phantom Theater: Opening Nightmare at the start of the 2026 season, and the park is already using its Starbucks counter to keep that launch in front of visitors. The drinks are not the headline attraction, but they are the kind of detail that tells you how far the park is leaning into the new Phantom Theater world.
