Spooky Stories, Digital Campfire

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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Source: https://arvrjourney.com/spooky-stories-digital-campfire-689fd7aa2efd?source=rss—-d01820283d6d—4