Spooky Stories, Digital Campfire
Building Community One Event at a Time
The Hunter’s Moon is the scariest of the Full Moons. Trees have lost their leaves and the landscape is stark. The days are getting shorter. Time is running out and there is nowhere to hide.
When we tell spooky stories together in late October, we are the Hunters, because we survived and we’re here to tell our stories. We are also the Hunted because we don’t understand the stories we tell, some of the things we have seen.
Do you have a strange story?
A place you know with a room no one will enter, where things happen that are hard to explain? Have you seen figures in the night, just for a second, even less?
Some people know they committed murder in another time. They can picture it and track it back to the scene a hundred years earlier.
How do these stories that we know but we don’t know sit still inside us, right next to facts and things we think we know for sure? When we talk about the strange ones, people come at us, trying to find the hole. Trying to make ghosts go away.
We need permission, an event for sharing scary things we’re not sure about. Where people come wanting to listen, not to defend what makes sense.
There is a special place for spooky stories — outside, around a campfire. Problem is most people can’t just go outside and build a campfire and have lots of people come. It tends to be prohibited in urban areas, for good reasons.
But anybody with a VR Headset can easily get together with friends from anywhere, as well as folks they haven’t even met yet. Set up a World with a Campfire. Set up an Event in the evening. It’s late October. People will get it.
They did.
Fifty-four people attended the Spooky Storytelling in AltspaceVR Friday night, organized by the EvolVR community and hosted by Rattles, a non-stop source of unusual takes on life in general.
Here’s what it was not: Cozy. We were not huddled together against the darkness. Instead, we had unusual freedom to find our place in the storytelling world, wherever that was — front and center or behind a boulder, near the fire or up in the air looking down.
It wasn’t obvious how to begin, so a good storyteller in the crowd started off with a classic.
The Monkey’s Paw.
Written by W.W. Jacobs and published in 1902, the story dramatizes ‘civilized’ England’s mixture of skepticism and fascination with strange new supernatural forces emanating from the East.
Nothing is asserted, nothing is claimed as fact in the story. One holder of The Monkey’s Paw asked for death as his third wish, we are told.
Frightening things do happen, but what caused them or what they mean is unclear. The story has been told and retold in movies and television, on radio and the stage. It is a human story, not a story of magic. The arrogance of the son and the mother’s grief that becomes madness have to be felt. The conclusion pits a father’s fumbling attempts to do something right against pure horror.
It helped create the way Tales of the Unknown have been told ever since.
You’d think one of the classics might be a tough act to follow, but it seemed to prime people’s pumps.
We had just barely banished the fears and expectations of The Monkey’s Paw, when people were raising their avatar hands ready to tell something. Rattles called on one of them and we were off on what turned out to be well over an hour of non-stop stories.
People’s own stories. No more classics. People talked about things they knew that didn’t make them Believers, but also didn’t fit with what we are told to Believe. They didn’t quite know what to make of these stories.
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One was a regional story about a long-dead Ship’s Captain whose spirit was well-known to appear and warn folks about any hurricanes approaching that part of the South Carolina coast. What do you do with that when you’re a young child growing up there and adults tell you they saw the Captain?
Or when you’re in high school, as one young man recalled, and the ghost of a young woman left standing at the altar in their small town would come after you on Homecoming Night unless you drove backwards around her church.
Later on, when we’re young and independent there’s always the time a bunch of you are together in a big old house with That Room, the one no one goes into. Something wrong about it and we just don’t go there.
Until someone at the Campfire told us about the time he did.
He told it well. Told us he was warned and warned again, they always are. But slowly, he went up the creaky stairs, his girlfriend nervously clutching his hand. He reached for the doorknob. He turned it.
It turned back against his turn!
He was startled. He waited and turned it again. It turned back again!
He made a doorknob that seemed to oppose him into a force of evil, in our minds.
He stepped back and regrouped. Drank something probably, then performed a funky, mid-1990s-style exorcism.
When the ritual was complete … he reached for the doorknob again … he turned it and … the doorknob did not oppose him and turn back!
The door swung easily open and no one was sucked into a primal vortex, (as of this writing).
That led to the spooky room-in-the-ICU-Wing story. The room that had once been a psychiatric lock-down area in a whole other pre-renovation era. Creepy things happened there. Every shift nurse knew and no one wanted that assignment. The feeling that someone is right behind you. Things falling off the shelf with no one nearby. Noises. Shadows.
Spooky hospital stories build on an ocean of anxiety already making waves inside before Scary even comes into the picture. We are at our most vulnerable in a hospital. Scary loves that. I will need to ask the staff about my room’s back story next time I’m in a healing institution.
Socializing in virtual reality opens us up to different stories because it opens us up to different people, not just the ones we tend to hang out with at home. It allows us to break out of cultural silos and out of age silos.
There was a nine year old at the campfire. He was there with his mom, who knew other people there and knew it was safe for her son. There was also at least one seventy year old, and someone from every decade of the human life span in between nine and seventy.
The nine year old, named McDude, told his story in a confident young voice, describing something he saw and felt. A dark presence in his bedroom. It would come a little closer, then go back. Just slight glimpses is all he could see. Forward toward him, then back.
He didn’t scream. He didn’t even say he was frightened when he told us what he saw. He was completely sure he saw it.
I haven’t been nine for a long time but the things in my bedroom at night when I was are still there in my dreams.
There were professionals in the group. D. interprets dreams, reads Tarot cards. His everyday life has aspects of a spooky story. He told us a few good ones, like the time a film crew came to his home.
One morning the cameraman came downstairs and told everyone about the sweet conversation he’d just had with D.’s young daughter. I have no daughter, said D. The cameraman started to describe her in detail when the crew’s Director said, Oh I talked with her down at the pond yesterday afternoon. Someone else chimed in that he’d seen her too.
Yes, said D., that girl died here over 150 years ago.
D. is from Glasgow. When he delivers that line in Glaswegian, it gets your attention in any reality.
It was a good lead-in for a long Ouija Board story. Is there another kind of Ouija Board story?
It had all the elements of every spooky tale — disbelief and then a kind of acceptance; grief and death, maybe. His Ouija Board story featured long hours of questions and answers that seemed to make sense. He said he believed, but then he put the device aside, threw it in the back of his car.
Someone would always discover it and a new round of exploration would begin. It always seemed to give right answers to reasonable questions.
The last time someone brought the Board from its backseat exile was an attempt to contact the dead, a young man who had committed suicide. The young woman who had requested the session was very emotional and deeply affected.
He has not used the Ouija Board since and it is no longer in his car.
Maybe it’s wherever The Monkey’s Paw ended up in that story, which never ends. The best ones don’t.
