Scary Tales

So tonight I will be doing Scary Tales at Crowne Plaza, Williamsburg, VA, 8:30 - 9:30 pm. This is a program done as a trade. Quick sidenote for business: Sometimes trade is good. You and whom you trade with get exposure from audiences you may not regularly meet. Meeting an new audience has great marketing potential. Trade also means saving money for both sides. Make sure your trade has a real market value. For instance, I am trading the cost of the meeting room for the cost of my performance. They actually get the better deal, however, keeping extra money in my pocket is great as well.

Telling Scary Stories is not my thing. I don't really like doing it and it doesn't feel comfortable to me. I get too carried away trying to make the "effect" of the story happen, rather than telling the story. This is actually a crazy thought, since I really don't like movies that focus more on the "effects" and "gore" than on the substance of the story, which, if done well, makes you think it "could" happen.

Tonight I'll be telling "Little Johnny Eight" (see Virginia Hamiliton's "And the People Could Fly"), "The Potato Story, or Voices in the Graveyard (see Zora Neale Hurston's "Mules and Men"), "Mr. Fox" (I have forgotten who wrote that, but I think it's Grimms) and "The Charnel Ship" (which I learned years ago at Colonial Williamsburg and although it was approved for telling, I still can't find documentation of it being told in the 18th-century.)

What are your favorite scary stories to tell? and to hear?