Hubert Trojanowski
When I was a child, I was afraid of a lot of things. If I had to use the bathroom at night, I’d sprint there from my room not to be in the dark for too long. In that bathroom, however, there were two mirrors hanging on the opposite walls, and if I stared too long into one, I’d imagine strange shapes drawing nearer and nearer from the further reflections, and I had to run back to the safety of my bed. Relative safety, of course, because there definitely were shadowy monsters underneath it, waiting for me to fall asleep. Rinse and repeat every night. Can I get a ‘me too’? Woo!
Later in life, though, I fell in love with creepy stories like these. There’s something empowering in turning one’s childhood fear into a narrative they can control, and something endearing in finding the magical (if unsettling) in the mundane. Some of the greatest works of art have been inspired by the experiences of the artist, so why not write about an unsettling toy or a place that used to give you the heebie-jeebies.
Here's where the SCP Foundation comes in. It is an online community project which collects fictional accounts of the supernatural. In the SCP universe, the eponymous foundation is a government entity tasked with investigating and securing the paranormal so that it does not affect the general public. As the project is run as open source, anybody can write their own entry, and the current collection totals over 7000 articles.
In late April, I encouraged our students to reflect on their own childhood fears and give their best writing their own SCP entries. Here are some of the best submissions I’ve received. Please enjoy the scare.
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