I just got done playing the most terrifying game of Vincent Baker’s Murderous Ghosts. My daughter was the ghost. We didn’t play out of the books but it was most definitely, recognizably the same game.
Our house is the ghost factory (her invention, I didn’t prompt, ditto everything else here). She and I are fellow ghosts but she didn’t reveal I was dead until we were a ways into the game. Yikes!
Downstairs is where the good ghosts are, but they stay invisible to be safe. Upstairs…We don’t talk about upstairs. That’s where the bad ghosts are. They have blood red holes in place of their eyes, and rotten brown teeth. What the actual fuck, kid?
So good ghost life turns out to have some very precise rules: the girls wear clothes but the boys are naked. They’re not allowed to share classrooms. When there’s a conflict, it’s the naked boys who get sent upstairs. Not clear what happens to them up there but there’s no beating the bad ghosts.
Why is everyone in the factory a ghost?, I ask her. A huge fire (a house a couple lots away burned to the ground while we watched and it made a powerful impression) burned the factory down. The invisible good ghosts? Embarrassed about looking all burned up. And the upstairs bad ghosts like the way they smell (like bacon). (Holy shit.)
I asked her if there’s any way out of the factory. That’s when I found out I was newly dead. What a twist!
Then she locked herself in her (upstairs) bedroom and quietly put on her dress from a wedding last weekend. She walked out with her eyes pinched shut and whispered you’d better go downstairs to me.
I’ve got no horror chops compared to this monster. May start napping downstairs.
Went into the twins’ bedroom the other night after they had been put to bed to ask them to keep it down. They were talking and laughing a little loudly and I didn’t want them to wake up their little sister. My daughter laughingly informed me, from the other side of a darkened bedroom, that they were talking about what would happen if their mom and I died. I paused, thought about how much they had been laughing, and just shut the door. KIDS ARE THE CREEPIEST!
well….bacon isn’t a bad smell… O.o
You’d better go downstairs.
Love that game. Played it yesterday, too.