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Mutual Aid and Human-Centered Learning for Neurodivergent and Disabled People

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Infodumplings: Halloween Hootenanny in the Haunted House

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Home » Blog » Events » Infodumplings: Halloween Hootenanny in the Haunted House

For me, haunted houses bring together themes of the horror of existence, the inevitability of death, remembrance of ancestors, DIY, making, creativity, thresholds, liminality, and seasonal rest.

Ryan Boren, the brief for The Haunted House on Stimpunks.World

Death, divergence, and whimsy.

Gather ‘Round Creeps: Happy Halloween from the Black Leather Lagoon, Stimpunks, 2024

For Infodumplings this week, we’re having a spooky show-and-tell in our Haunted House room at Stimpunks.World. We’ll be dressing our avatars for the season and bringing our chimeras to the room.

The Haunted House is turning 09 off The Outskirts: an empty warehouse at the end of the road, with a house built inside it out of plywood flats. The only light is the work lights behind the set, coming through the seams. Somebody in our community asked for it in the suggestion box, and it opened on October 28.

So bring something haunted. Something spooky you made, or something spooky you love. A drawing, a story, a song, a photo of your porch, a link to the film that scared you at nine. Your avatar in bat wings. Your chimera in the attic. Then the floor is yours: show us your haunted thing, and tell us what it is and whose.

Or bring nothing, and wander the house while other people show theirs. Lurking is a real and honored way to show up.

This one is for community members only. If you want to join our community, visit our community page and fill in a brief form. We’ll reply with an invite to Stimpunks.World.

Date and Time: Thursday, October 29 at 7PM Central

Where: The Haunted House, on Stimpunks.World

The House

Inside the warehouse, somebody built a house: plywood flats screwed to timber, gaffer tape over the joins, and walls painted by people who had never painted a wall to look old before and did it anyway. You never see the work lights from inside. You see only where their light gets through — the seams where two flats do not quite meet, the gap under a door, the cracks between the boards over a window.

Things are hidden in the house: spooky things from our own street and our own pages, and haunted things our community has made and loves. There are two ways through it.

  • Lights down is a hunt. Go room by room — the porch, the hall, the parlour, the stairs, the attic, the cellar, and behind the set — and look in places. Lift the doormat. Turn over the cards on the table. Wind up the gramophone. Whatever is hidden there turns up where you looked.
  • Lights up lays everything out in one list you can scroll, with where each thing hides.

Nothing is spoiled here, but you will find some old friends in it: our Weird page, the Black Leather Lagoon, Gustave Doré’s engraving for The Raven, the Mopery, Chimera Obscura, and our Gather ‘Round Creeps playlist. And an old iron key on the warehouse floor, for anybody doing jobs for the Adventurer’s Guild.

The house has a soundtrack. Hallowscenes is twelve pieces made by Enigma, who is in our community, with Suno. It is the one thing in the house that makes a sound, and only when you press play. Nothing starts when you walk in, and nothing plays the next piece by itself.

The house is also full of history, and that history is worth reading before Thursday:

  • Samhain and the thin places. Halloween sits on top of Samhain, the end of the harvest, when the light half of the year turned into the dark half and the veil between the living and the dead was thought to wear thin.
  • The basement parties. The first Halloween haunted houses were American, from the Great Depression — families decorated their cellars scene by scene, and children went from house to house through them. A 1937 pamphlet has raw liver on the walls and a black cardboard cat outlined in luminous paint at the end.
  • The volunteers. For years haunted houses were built by whoever turned up, often in empty warehouses on the outskirts of town. Then the professional houses came, and a fire in New Jersey killed eight teenagers who could not get out. That fire is why every room in this house has its way out written in it.
  • Eldritch. An old Scots word for unearthly, from Robert Burns’s witches, brought back into fashion by H. P. Lovecraft — much of whose horror was his fear of people unlike himself.

Getting Dressed

Behind the Dopamine Dress-Up Den, through a curtain, is Fantasy Fancy Dress. It is Helen Edgar’s idea, and she chose its name. Since October 28 it has Halloween rails, asked for at Halloween:

  • Suits: mummy, skeleton, ghost, pumpkin, bat, clown, pirate, and vampire.
  • Face paint and fangs: clown, whiskers, and a skull, all water based, and fangs that do not get in the way of talking.
  • Something to hold: a staff, a broom, a wand, a lantern, or a treat bucket.
  • Bat wings, wolf and bat ears, a wolf’s tail and claws, neck bolts, a spiderweb choker, and spider rings.
  • Prints and colourways: bats, spiderwebs, and pumpkins, in pumpkin and black, candy corn, bone and black, slime and violet, and plum and black.

And, since the same evening, the chimera onesie. Another request from our community: a onesie made after one of your chimeras, in its own colours, with its ears on the hood, its tail at the back, and its markings down the front. Choose Bearmouse, Pandillo, Bunnybadger, or the otteraccoon, or make your own in Chimera Obscura and press Wear it as a onesie.

Everything in the shop goes on your bodymind — the one you drew at the Bodymind Booth — as it is, on its feet or sitting down. Then take it back through to the Dress-Up Den and press Keep, and it is your avatar on the CB.

Then bring your familiar. A chimera you took with you from Chimera Obscura follows you from room to room, and it can follow you into the house. Turn on Bring my familiar on the radio, and the people seen in the house with you will see it walking about. It is off until you switch it on.

The Stimpunks Frame

Thin places, and a way out of every room

The house is built out of thresholds. Every wall is a flat, and every seam is a threshold with the light on the other side of it. The page names where the word liminal comes from — the Latin limen, the strip of floor in a doorway between one room and the next — and Arnold van Gennep’s use of it for the middle of a rite of passage. Left one state, not yet arrived in the next. A doorway, dusk, the turn of the year.

For a lot of us, a doorway is not a metaphor. Our glossary entry on threshold anxiety says it plainly:

The feeling arrives before the crossing. The doorway, the first day, the ceremony is not here yet — and already the body is braced.

Threshold Anxiety, Stimpunks

A monotropic mind pays for every transition. And a haunted house, built the usual way, is a building made of nothing but transitions you cannot see coming — a dark corridor, a door that will not say what is behind it, somebody in a mask who jumps.

So this house does it differently, on purpose. Nothing jumps out. Nothing moves at any setting. Every room ends with the way out — back to the road, or the lights up — and it is never called a chicken exit. Leaving early is a real way through the house.

That is the same argument our glossary makes: broken thresholds, not broken people. A haunted house is allowed to frighten you. This one does it slowly, and you can always see the light.

Nobody is the monster

Halloween has an old, cheap trick, and the house names it: make the frightening thing somebody who is different. Disabled bodies, minds that work differently, queer people, and strangers have all been made into the monster, and the freak show charged admission for it. Last week, at Every Chimera Is Whole, we heard it happen in a seven-minute video about monsters.

So the house has a rule: no madness, no asylum, no Disabled body, and no difference is the scare in here. And Fantasy Fancy Dress has the same rule, worn. There is no peg leg, hand hook, or eye patch on its rails, on purpose:

A prosthetic leg, a prosthetic arm and an eye patch are things somebody always has with them, chosen at the Bodymind Booth as part of their bodymind, and not a joke for a pirate.

Fantasy Fancy Dress, Stimpunks.World

A pirate in that shop is the hat, the shirt, the sash, and the breeches. A cane, crutches, a walker, an AAC device, or a fidget stays where it is, and the broom goes in your other hand. Face paint goes under your glasses, your mask, or your cannula, never over them. That is disability justice as a costume rail: dressing up never takes away anything a body always has with it.

Here is the position. Halloween is the one night the world lets everybody wear the strange. That is lovely, and it is also how weirdwashing works — the surface of strangeness, for one night, without room for the real thing the other 364. Our Weird page quotes Weird Pride Day on exactly this:

Every day should be a Weird Pride Day, but for until that’s possible for everyone, at least we have the 4th of March.

What is Weird Pride?, Weird Pride Day

Every day should be Halloween, then, in the one way that matters. A costume is a mask you chose, for fun, for a night, and took off. Masking is the one the world makes us wear every other day, and it is exhausting. So on Thursday, wear the bat wings. Wear the chimera onesie. And know that in this house, the different are not the scare. We are the ones who built the place.

Built by whoever turned up

Ryan remembers the haunted houses on the outskirts of town, in warehouses that were usually empty:

I recall being impressed by the DIY spirit of some of them. Folks put a lot of work into making a compelling experience. They poured craft into the effort.

Ryan Boren, the brief for The Haunted House

This house is a set and does not hide it. You can see the screws in the flats, the timber jacks, and the tape on the seams. That is the frightening part and the good part at once: a few people with no budget made you feel something in the dark, and you can see exactly how they did it. It is what Show Your Work has always argued, and what the Show Your Work garage on the street is for — show the work while it is still being made.

And look at who made this one. A community member asked for the house. Enigma made its soundtrack and asked for it to be in there. Helen Edgar dreamed up the shop. Somebody asked for chimera onesies for Halloween, and now they are on the rails. Every haunted thing that goes into the house for good goes in with its maker’s name on it, the way they want to be named, and comes out the moment they ask.

That is the volunteer haunted house, rebuilt on a street of our own. Not a scene with one genius in it. A scene everybody can add a flat to — and the play of it is the point.

The darker half of the year

Samhain closed the harvest and opened the dark half of the year, when the fields rest. The house quotes Hannah Daisy on what that can be: “a time of introspection, rest and spiritual renewal.”

Ryan’s brief names remembrance of ancestors too. The people we have lost are part of why a thin veil is a lovely idea rather than a frightening one. The house is careful here, and so are we: other peoples keep their own days for their dead, in their own ways, and this house does not borrow them.

On this street, rest is owed, not earned — that is the Healing Checkpoint’s whole argument. The house stays up all year. There is no hurry, and nothing counts what you find. If the dark half is for sleeping, come back in the spring.

Join Us

Infodumplings happens every Thursday at 7PM Central. Most weeks that is in the Stimpunks Learning Space. This week it is in The Haunted House on Stimpunks.World, and it is for community members.

Sign on to the CB, walk down The Outskirts to turning 09, and tune the radio to This room. Switch on Be seen here if you want the people in the house to see your avatar, and Join this room’s call to talk. Or keep to the house’s channel and type.

Bring your haunted thing to the house’s channel — a picture, or a link, and a line saying what it is and whose. Something you love that somebody else made goes in as a link with their name on it. If it has blood, a jump, or a flash in it, say so first, so somebody can choose before they press.

  • Cameras optional. Chat-only participation fully valid.
  • Stims, movement, and fidget tools encouraged.
  • No one will be called on. Silence is participation.
  • No costume needed. Dressing your avatar is an invitation, not a dress code — and so is bringing a chimera.
  • Nothing in the house jumps out, and nothing makes a sound until you press it.
  • Leaving early is a real way through the house. Every room has its way out.
  • Screen sharing available if you want to show us your haunted thing.
  • Five minutes is plenty. You don’t need a whole segment.

Not a community member yet? Visit our community page and fill in the brief form. We’ll reply with an invite to Stimpunks.World. Getting started, at the Community Center, has every step written down after that.

🎃 Into The Haunted House →

🦇 Get dressed at Fantasy Fancy Dress →

🐾 Make a chimera in Chimera Obscura →

Want to curate a future session? Get in touch →

How the Hour Goes

TimeWhat’s happening
7:00 PM👋 Welcome & housekeeping — signing on, tuning the radio to the house, and joining the call
7:05 PM🕯️ Lights down — a walk through the house on a shared screen, room by room, lifting the doormat and winding the gramophone. Follow along, or hunt on your own
~7:15 PM🦇 Getting dressed — Fantasy Fancy Dress, the Halloween rails, and chimera onesies. Dress your bodymind, keep it, and come back to the house wearing it
~7:25 PM🐾 Familiars — Bring my familiar, and let them wander the house
~7:35 PM🧠 Bodymind break — 5 minutes, do whatever you need. Hallowscenes is there if you want it
~7:40 PM🎤 Open floor: spooky show-and-tell. Show us your haunted thing, and tell us what it is and whose
8:00 PM✨ Cozy overflow + next week’s reveal

Sessions run approximately one hour with cozy overflow after. Camera optional, chat always open, safe foods and stimming always welcome.

Reflection Questions

On haunted things

  • What is the spookiest thing you have ever made? What is the spookiest thing you love?
  • What scared you as a kid that you love now?
  • If you could hide one thing in the house for good, what would it be, and which room would it hide in?

On thresholds

  • What doorways do you brace for, before you even reach them?
  • What would a way out, written into every room, change for you?
  • Which in-between times — dusk, the turn of the year, the hour before something starts — feel like thin places to you?

On wearing the strange

  • What is the difference, for you, between a costume and a mask?
  • Who first called you weird? Who first made it feel like a good thing?
  • What would every day being Halloween look like, in the one way that matters?

On the dark half of the year

  • Who would you want to remember on a night when the veil is thin?
  • What does your bodymind want from the dark half of the year?

Resources

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Part of Stimpunks Recurring Events. See also: Solidarity Sesh and Watering Hole Hangs.

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Ryan Boren

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