THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, October 26, 1995 TAG: 9510260072
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 95 lines
IT'S DECISION time.
A rich couple has hired you to investigate the origin of a ``vile, oily stench'' emanating from a decaying Victorian mansion high up in the Rocky Mountains. You're alone. There are creaking floorboards and squeaking vermin underfoot. The creepy quotient is way, way high.
You've got several choices.
Do you go inside, or retreat to civilization? Once inside, do you step into the parlor, or head up the stairs? Check inside the bell tower, or behind Door No. 2? Stick around, or try to return to town?
You get to choose with a click of your computer mouse. ``Halloween - A Text Adventure on the Web'' is an interactive thriller on the Internet's World Wide Web. You decide where you - and the story - go next, although the tale's multiple dead ends presumably direct you to its preferred conclusion. The unnerving narrative can be found at http://www.dash.com/netro/fun/ hol/hlw.html.
Find out what they mean by ``try to return to town.''
The story is one of many Halloween-themed features on the Web. (This one inexplicably is included under something called ``Welcome to Beethoven's Bathroom.'') If computers don't already scare the heck out of you, maybe checking out some of these sites will help put you in the Halloween spirit if you've got some time to, uh, kill before Tuesday.
Just type ``Halloween'' into your favorite online search engine. We tried WebCrawler and came up with 224 hits.
OK, most weren't truly Halloween-type sites - we're still wondering why ``Connecticut College Women's Rowing'' made it - but with some poking around, you'll find things like ``The Ooga Booga Page'' at http://star06.atklab.Yorku.ca/(tilda) peterpan/index.html.
The site includes a bunch of horror ``facts'' and trivia, such as a section on ``lycanthropy,'' the folklore of werewolves. You can learn, for instance, that the incidence of humans turning into werewolves always is worse in February - good thing it's a short month - and that some of the symptoms are fearing clear water, long thumbnails and eyebrows that meet. Some of the cures: drawing blood until the drawee faints, rolling in the morning dew or lopping off the penis.
Given the choices, that dew thing doesn't look so bad.
Seeking a more-virtual thrill, you can take a trip through the 22-year-old ``Halloween Haunt'' at Knott's Berry Farm in California, with text and pictures by a guy who used to play one of the attraction's more than 700 ``monsters.'' It's at http://lucky.biomol.uci.edu.
Grim reality pops back up on the ``Dark Side of the Web,'' at http://www.cascade.net/darkweb.html, which advertises more than 350 related links. It's got history from the Highgate Cemetery near London, the preferred burial place for the Victorian-era English, including Charles Dickens and Karl Marx. OK, Marx wasn't English, but he's there. It's also got excerpts from a book about the deaths of famous rock stars.
It's also got un-grim, unreal stuff: comics such as ``The Afterlife of Bob'' and tasteless jokes such as ``30 Ways to be Offensive at a Funeral.'' Way No. 3: ``Punch the body and tell people he hit you first.''
Funnier is a site called ``Vampyres Only'' at http://www.vampyre.wis.net/vampyre/index.html. It includes ``The Vampyre Probability Test,'' 100 questions more or less designed to help you figure out if you're ``of the night.'' Sample: ``Does garlic bother you in any way?''
If rubber suits are more your thing, there's the ``Godzilla'' page. Set up by a fan of the Japanese horror-movie legend, it ponders plot lines for upcoming movies, including an American-made version, and lists and rates all the Godzilla epics and not-so-epics. See where television's Perry Mason and Star Trek's Mr. Sulu got their starts. The site is at http://www.ama.caltech.edu/ (tilda) mrm/godzilla.html.
Speaking of dressing up, that's what Halloween is about, for adults as much as for children these days, and several Web sites are online catalogs for costume shops. It's a little late to order for this year, but you might pick up some ideas.
One of the more extensive is the ``Nightmare Factory'' out of Austin, Texas, found at http://www.io.com/(tilda)nightime/hallown.html. You're greeted by a picture of a skull and invited to ``poke the empty eye socket to enter the Factory!''
You can order costumes, props and makeup for wounds, scars and big noses - ``Buy your blood here!'' the site urges. There are full-body ``Walking Illusions'' costumes where, for $1,225 - $775 for the ``economy'' model - you can look like you're carrying yourself around in a cage, and famous-people masks. At $22.50, Barbara Bush's costs $5 more than husband ex-President Bush's. Go figure.
For more of a mood-setter, turn out the lights and gather the kids around the spooky glow of the computer monitor to read them one man's story about the origin of ``Jack O'Lanterns,'' an old-fashioned tale from Newfoundland. It's at http://www.ips.ca/ibp/neat(under-line)things/jack.html.
By the way, the interactive story we mentioned earlier, about the mysterious malodorous mansion, was so involved, with so many choices, that we didn't follow it through to the end, so we couldn't spoil it for you if we wanted to. But fair warning:
There's a ghost involved. And watch out for the bat guano. by CNB