Divination Games for Halloween

Ritual creepypasta's ancient roots, and some updates for the spookiest of months!

Hello, monsters! I hope this pumpkin-spiced season has treated you well. I’d love to say that I’ve spent the month indulging in horrifying pastimes, but sadly this October has been a bit of a non-starter for me. I frankly don’t know where all the time has gone; I feel like I blinked on September 1 and landed here, befuddled and lost in time.

I’m still working on that tulpa story, although it’s not looking like it will be shareable this month, unless a burst of energy comes my way. By the way, does anybody have any hot leads on bursts of energy?

A few notes and announcements…

• This Halloween, I’ll be a guest on Moths to the Flame podcast. I’ll keep you updated when the episode is live, but for now, go subscribe - and give a listen to the episode with my pal Elford Alley while you’re there!

• The audiobook of Hailey Piper’s Even The Worm Will Turn comes out this Halloween, so be sure to give that a listen as well.

• In November, I’ll be participating in WritersCONNx, a virtual convention by writers, for writers. Tickets are super affordable and on sale now. Pick yours up today and come visit me in my booth all weekend!

• If you haven’t picked up your copies of Atomic Carnival’s horror anthologies Greater Than His Nature and Open All Night, what are you doing with your life?

I’ve likely missed some big news - drop me a line and tell me what you’re up to this Halloween!

What are your plans for this All Hallow’s Eve? Will you perhaps bundle up the family youngsters in costumes and take them door to door (or trunk to trunk, in some necks of the woods)? Plan to piece together a delectable spread of treats and watch scary movies?

Maybe you’re planning to tap into the spirit realm and conjure a powerful entity who will tell your future and/or dismantle you limb from limb?

…Wait, what was that last one?

Let’s Play a Game…

If you’ve spent any time at all on the internet, you’ve probably encountered an item of “ritual creepypasta” or two — things like The Midnight Man, Three Kings, and One-Player Hide-and-Seek can be found copied across the web, catalogued in creepypasta archives, reposted to Wattpad, breathlessly shared on Reddit, and so forth. Some of the most famous have even been adapted (with varying levels of success) into videogames and even films.

If you’re unfamiliar, here’s the format: the reader is provided with a laundry list of materials and specific instructions for performing some type of ritual, generally for the purpose of invoking a non-human entity. Sometimes the purpose of this invocation is unclear (beyond a test of bravery and bragging rights that you did it) but sometimes the express purpose is divination — seeking answers beyond your mortal knowledge from a powerful entity.

Many of these rituals are shared with ambiguous (and almost certainly fabricated) origins, oftentimes with claims of their being very old and/or drawing from far-off traditions. You’d be forgiven for assuming that they’re all made up and the product of internet-addled youths having a bit of fun.

Well. You might be right about the first part. But while any specific ritual may not be ancient, the concept itself is quite old, and has always been popular with youngsters — particularly young women.

Divination Games

The best-known example that might come to mind is Bloody Mary. Even if you never played it yourself, you’re probably familiar with the idea: you stand in a dark room in front of a mirror, maybe with a candle or flashlight handy, and say “Bloody Mary” three times. Maybe she’ll appear behind you! Maybe she’ll burst through the mirror and kill you! Maybe you’ll see the face of your future love! Either way, you have to be brave enough to stand there and find out.

Bloody Mary has been around since at least the 1800s, but that’s not the only game from that era with a similar flavor.

Here’s one: On Halloween night, sit in front of a mirror with an apple, a candle, and a knife. Light the candle and cut the apple into nine pieces. Eat eight and offer the last one to the mirror. The face of your future husband will appear before you.

Here’s another: Walk blindfolded backward into a field and pull up a kale stalk. Its size, shape, and other characteristics will reflect your future husband.

This site has many more of these listed, with some sources, and it’s quite enjoyable reading.

There’s also a Dead Meat Podcast episode on the topic that’s well worth a listen as well.

A lot of these games are interested particularly in matters of marriage and romance, in part because that makes for a fun party game and in part because, in a time when women didn’t have a ton of personal autonomy in their love lives, turning to divination for some answers about their future husband must have been mighty appealing.

Game or Ritual?

Something I find interesting to note is that, throughout history, the border between game and divination magic is mighty thin. We all know of course that the Ouija Board is sold in toy shops as a board game, and tarot cards were originally used as playing cards in Italy for games like Tarocchini (see the Mexican Loteria game for a similar concept).

It goes back even further than that, though. Knucklebones from sheep and other livestock were carved, weighted, and thrown as dice in the Hellenic era of Greece and the Middle East. Sometimes throwing bones was a way of divining the future (like casting runes), sometimes it was a child’s game (similar to jacks), sometimes a gambling game.

I think it is very human of us to seek meaning, to search for signal in noise. I think it’s also very human for us to ascribe grand and even spooky significance to randomness. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that divination — which is all about seeing through the uncertain future — goes hand-in-hand with games of luck. One visit to a casino will show you that the superstitions of pattern recognition and ritual are alive and well.

Why Do These Rituals Make Such Compelling Reading?

But okay. Let’s circle back to those ritual creepypastas. Unlike the party games of the 19th century (and older), something unique to this crop of rituals is that by and large they are produced as written entertainment. Most people consume them eagerly as stories but do not necessarily attempt to play them (and for that matter, a great many of them would be extremely difficult to actually play). So what’s the deal with that? Why is it fun to sit and read a list of instructions?

I think, as an art form, the ritual creepypasta is actually quite clever. The best of them are adept at playing on the reader’s imagination, leaving them to do the work of filling in the more horrifying gaps themselves. To do this, they rely on a careful balance of specificity and ambiguity, effectively tricking the imagination into a suggestible state.

It does not work to be vague in your instructions when it comes to writing a ritual. Specificity is key — from the exact time something has to happen, to the color and shape of materials used, to the specific order of operations. Detailing a highly specific set of rules immediately raises the question: What if I don’t follow them? It also makes the reader think: If I go through all this trouble, it must pay off somehow…

In effect, specificity buys credibility. It makes it seem more likely that it will work.

In contrast, the effects are left ambiguous. It’s rarely explained what, precisely, will happen to you if you succeed or fail. It’s often not even entirely clear what the purpose of the ritual even is. That ambiguity creates curiosity, an almost itchy desire to go try it just to see what will happen.

It works pretty much exactly like clickbait: “I took red thread, a cup of salt water, and a doll stuffed with rice into my bathroom. You won’t believe what happened next!”

We need to know. It’s too weird, too incongruous, too familiar-yet-foreign, to leave alone.

In this way, as art, ritual creepypasta taps into exactly the same human impulses as drive divination, superstition, and gambling — the agonizing discomfort of uncertainty, the burning need to resolve patterns.

They’re addictive, is what I’m saying.

So don’t blame me if you stay up way too late reading them…

Play At Home…If You Dare

This Halloween, perhaps you might entertain your guests with a game. Maybe they’ll tap into great and mighty powers! Maybe something dreadful will happen. Probably nothing will happen at all. Probably.

If you’d like to take the risk yourself, here’s a whole stack of rituals to peruse.

There’s also an entire subreddit devoted to supposedly true stories of people attempting these rituals themselves, although the tell-all reddit format is a type of fiction in its own right these days.

Decide for yourself what you believe.

And tell me below if YOU have ever attempted a divination game or creepy ritual, and how it turned out for you.

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