I make it no secret how afraid of the dark and of ghosts I am. And I mean it’s to the point where I refuse to do certain things simply as a joke. For example if I’m in a room with a reflective surface and someone starts to do the Bloody Mary chant as a joke I freak out and start yelling at them to stop otherwise I’m leaving the room. The majority of me knows that this probably isn’t real, but there’s that TINY part of me that says what if you can conjure a spirit this way?

I mean the entire argument surrounding demons is that you should never say the demons name. Saying its name allows it to draw power by your acknowledgement and it also draws itself closer to you as it now sees you as a believer. So if there is a demon who can be known as Bloody Mary, why wouldn’t she be drawn to your chants?

Don’t even get me started on the Bloody Mary scene from Paranormal Activity 3

 

But this extends beyond the simple Blood Mary chant. This goes to séances, Ouiji Boards, The Mirror Game and everything inbetween. I have been caught in numerous situations where someone wanted to try something like this to “try and do something scary”. I’m all for doing scary stuff, telling ghost stories, watching horror movies or reading a scary book aloud. But I will literally never take part in any sort of conjuring.

THAT BEING SAID…..

I recently came upon a new way of conjuring spirits that I won’t lie, intrigued me beyond anything that’s captured my attention lately.

The One Hundred Candles Game.

Do I recommend you play it? No. Am I guilty of inceptioning you with this game and making you want to play it? Yes.

This game serves as a way to not only scare people – which I’ll get to in a minute – but also as a means of storytelling. Here’s how it works.

You organize a group of people. Once organized you sit in a room and light 100 candles. Each person has to be prepared to tell some scary stories. As an individual your role is to prepare enough scary stories so that you can equally contribute to the group’s number as 99 have to be told in total. But not only do you have to have these stories prepared, you have to be able to determine which ones are your least to most scary. The reason for this is that as each story is told you blow out one candle, until you get to the later stages when there’s only about 10-20 candles. The darker it gets the scarier the stories are supposed to be. You don’t want to waste your best one on a well-lit room while everyone is still giggling and talking through the stories.

Once you finish telling 99 stories there will be 1 candle left. As a group you are to fall silent and wait. If there is a spirit there then the last candle will blow out by itself.

So imagine after telling 99 ghost stories and sitting in an increasingly dark room to have the final source of light blown out by an apparent spirit. Even if you don’t believe in ghosts or scare easy you have to admit you’d be pretty terrified!

HOWEVER, I strongly suggest you don’t try it. Aside from the fact that conjuring spirits should literally never be done, one theory is that if you don’t finish telling the stories then the ghost remains in limbo and can remain around after the game is done. It won’t have served its purpose of blowing out the candle to warn you of its existence. Instead it just waits and waits and may eventually grow agitated or show up when you don’t want it to. It can catch people who don’t have 99 ghost stories to tell and having people with no knowledge or experience with ghosts can be a terrible result.

Why am I telling you this if I’m basically telling you to never do it? Why even put it out there if it’s something no one should know?

Because the first time I heard this it was presented as a party game and nothing more. They left out the last part of the game where the spirit is meant to blow out the final candle and show you that it’s present. I had heard it in passing and immediately I was looking for people I knew who either knew existing ghost stories, or would be able to come up with a bunch off the top of their head. It wasn’t until I did more research that I realized it’s true purpose and that it’s just as bad as an Ouiji Board.

But perhaps the thing that’s most interesting/terrifying to me is this. At least every person reading this – or close to it – will remember a time when they sat around with their friends as children and told ghost stories. Me and one of my best friends growing up did this literally EVERY time we slept over at each other’s houses. We’d either be in the basement or our rooms – the basement was the scariest room in both of our houses – and we’d try to scare each other either with stories we had heard, or real life encounters we had heard other people tell.

To me this was always just an innocent pass time that children do. It’s almost a rite of passage for a child the first time they spend a night away from home. Anyone who went camping or had a sleep over has probably told or listened to ghost stories. Typically this was done with the old flashlight under the chin trick.

Or with exploding sand

 

How could I have known that I was doing something that had once been derived as a means of conjuring spirits! Because that’s the thing about this, it isn’t some new thing that’s just started happening. Apparently the Japanese invented this game around the 1600’s, the entire concept of telling ghost stories to try and scare one another came from them and their creepy way of conjuring spirits. Fast forward a few hundred years and it’s turned into a game played at sleepovers and around camp fires.

 

Imagine if you found out there was some innocent way children were playing with the form on an Ouiji Board. Sure they weren’t playing with the real thing but it’s still terrifying.

The worst part of this entire thing is that I can’t stop thinking about it. Not for the reason of the ghost conjuring, that I REALLY DON’T want to do. But the whole idea of getting a group of ghost enthusiasts and story tellers together to try and see if you could tell 100 stories over the span of a night with each one scarier than the last is such a cool idea. Normally I just have one or two in reserve – which I think I’m going to write up on here later on – and then I have some true stories that I’ve had told to me from other people. So I’d almost see this as a personal challenge!

However, as I said before, I won’t touch anything that even resembles conjuring spirits. THAT being said I did have an interesting thought. What if I try (over the span of many, many, MANY months) to retell 100 ghost stories on here. It’s a fun way of trying to recreate this without the hazards of conjuring spirits. I’ll give credit where credit is due, and always cite my sources. Some of them may be short stories I read years ago that I can recreate for you, and some will be stories told to me by friends, family and colleagues. If you have any stories you want me to tell then send them my way! I can use your real, or a fake name and change the name of anything else you’d like me to change (city, friends, street names etc.). I have quite a few I’ll start off with and once I start to get them from other people I’ll start including them!

I’m really excited to do this, but just no that at no point in time will a candle be lit or blown out at the end of any of these stories. I’m going to call it my 100 candle challenge, but I’m certainly not taking it literally. I hope I can scare you with some of these stories and hopefully you read one that you submitted to me on here soon enough!