ANNIE AND THE HALLOWEEN STORYTELLING NIGHT 2014

By Rita Grimaldi

Preface

Annie is a fictional character. She explores truth by way of fiction. The Peterborough Storytellers’ October storytelling gathering did happen just as Annie describes it.

The Story

In the early morning, Annie woke up. Uke her cat had jumped onto her bed and was purring. Uke always started her day this way. Always purring in the morning. Annie began to think about the storytelling meeting the night before.

Robert had done the program. He had advertised it as a night of ‘creepy scary stories’. After a tiny introduction, he began to tell stories. His first two stories where not like the usual fairy and folk tales in which the hero always triumphs. These stories both ended badly for the hero.

First, Robert told a Roald Dahl story called ‘Pig’. This story ended with the hero being slaughtered like a pig himself. Then he told a Dickens’ story in which the hero is chopped into pieces and ends up being put into a meat pie and eaten.

Annie thought about the other stories told last night. In fact, many of these stories ended badly for the heroes. In the Duppy tale – Rita’s story – the little boy hero explodes at the end of the story. In Peter’s story, the woman heroine is forced into a coffin with the ancient Egyptian king.

Annie was thinking about the audience which consisted of twenty people including one child about ten years old. It seemed to Annie that the audience felt the ends of these stories deep in their guts. They felt the unpleasant demise of the heroes in a personal way – with shock and maybe even loathing. But also in some way, the audience as a group, as one being, accepted the creepy horror of these stories.

Betty introduced her story by reporting a child’s comment when she told it at the children’s storytelling session at the library last year. After telling her story, she asked the children if the story had been too scary. One child answered “No, because we know it’s only a story.” 

Nowadays, the world has horrible endings for some heroes. Heroes are decapitated and cut into pieces. The pictures end up on the evening news. These are not only stories. They are true happenings.

Still, Annie felt that the creepy scary stories help us to cope with the horrible, true happenings on the nightly news. The audience’s feelings of fear, surprise, discomfort and loathing gave the deep and perhaps unconscious gift of truth.

And that truth was that in life here on this planet the hero sometimes loses.

Creepy scary things sometime happen to a hero and when they do, all of us feel creepy scary and loathing about these things. We feel this way together.

Maybe that is what Halloween storytelling is all about. Looking into the window of this truth.