The End of Spooky Stories

Posted by brilokuloj on Jan 10, 2025

Spooky Stories was a short-lived bot that lived in the Eggware.XYZ Discord server for the month of October 2024 and dispensed some absolutely terrible generated stories. Just some of the foulest things imaginable.

In November, I set it to rest and eventually catalogued all 190 stories it dispensed in its time alive. For this article, I’ll be talking about its creation.

Every October, I try to get into the spooky season in whatever way I can. It was actually my plan in 2024 that I would play scary Nintendo games, but it’s January 2025 now and I’m still working through Ocarina of Time, so that obviously didn’t work out. With my primary plan gone, and knowing that the election season would have me too stressed to watch scary movies, I decided to try an all-new tactic.

In previous years, I would waste hours reading r/nosleep stories, but ever since 2020 I’ve found the scaries there to be a bit stale. Maybe living through a pandemic traumatized me - who would have thunk? Still, I got to thinking… what if I could have my own stories?

In the Eggware.XYZ Discord server, I run King St. Bee Bot, a bot with some toy functionality and a very basic “chat” system. Her ability to chat with others is based on Markov chains, a technology that’s been around for longer than you’ve been alive, and which I’ve been playing with myself since my IRC days. Her vocabulary is composed of every article published on this website and the script of every movie we’ve watched, which means she is obsessed with chicken sandwiches and dinosaurs. Her average message looks like this:

Wtf I Was Stranded On An Island, With The Only Quantifiable Differences Being The Spice Proportions And The Lack Of Updates Lately.

Running her has taught me a lot about bot maintenance, namely that it’s darkly compelling and fun. I could make a lot of bots.

The idea hit me like a flash of lightning: I could make a bot that tells campfire stories. I would just have to train it on as much stupid horror as possible. And what greater source of garbage than Reddit?

The only problem with this was that I didn’t want to use Nosleep data. It’s too lengthy, it won’t form a coherent narrative, and the content of Nosleep actually is arguably artistic in merit, especially with the authors behind stories like Penpal and Borrasca going on to become published. No, I wanted genuine garbage.

The plan

This was when I settled on Two Sentence Horror, a subreddit with a perfectly simple format: what’s the scariest story you can come up with in only two sentences?

Two Sentence Horror has been a years-long beloved go-to for me when I want to gross out my friends or ruin a conversation as quickly as possible, as its laconic nature leads itself to frequent absurdity. There’s no better example of this than the saga of the Eggnog Creature, an attempt to tell a spooky story that accidentally(?) veered straight into the fetishistic. I pissed off my friends - and my Twitch chat, when that was a thing - so, so many times by making them think I was going to tell a story, and then ending it with a Creature.

That’s the nature of Two Sentence Horror that makes it so fucking funny. I really do admire their dedication to the art, but also, their stories are structured exactly like knock-knock jokes.

This also, I realized, would make for a perfect bot. Instead of your typical Markov bot that spits out one incoherently mangled run-on sentence… I could make one that spits out two.

Here’s a super basic rundown of how I made it:

Then I hooked this up to a Discord bot, which would spit out a First and Second sentence - both randomly chosen independently from each other.

The results

Spooky Stories (also known as Spooky Stories from the Screaming Skull, or for a brief period, Spooky Stories to Tell Your Friends) was a beloved bot, and I really do think it was one of my best. It seemed to bring my friends a great deal of amusement to pull a story first thing in the morning.

Since the sentences were generated individually, it was always entertaining when they almost converged onto a common theme:

I can’t fall asleep due to the haunting screams of my family in my burning house. As I now spend my last few seconds in the vacuum of space, no one would be able to hear me scream.

Unfortunately, Spooky Stories had a worrying fixation on topics like pregnancy, animal death, and rape. This is to be expected, as it was trained on the writing of Redditors.

I was playing Cocoa Springs, Draculas revenge I find it strange that my wife never ate much while pregnant with twins. Today, I woke up to her standing stark still at the end of my bed, I might be able to do it again next year.

Its faults came with some amusing upsides, however. Since Spooky Stories was not writing any kind of linear narrative, it would frequently introduce a character as “wife” or “brother”, then follow up with an unexpected set of pronouns. In this way, Spooky Stories as a character in our chat (as all Markov bots become) did not seem problematic or ill-meaning as much as it felt like an incoherent fever dream.

Coffin With the last of my strength I pulled up to the house, I heard the bloodcurdling scream of my wife. His reply: what ambient sounds bro? xd But then I realized it was always there right in corner of my eye.

In closing

Spooky Stories was a good bot. I still miss it sometimes, but it was its time to rest. I don’t think it would have been funny this far into January - maybe I’ll bring it back this October, maybe I’ll come up with something even funnier.

When I think about it, I think the most about its final story. It perfectly summarizes everything about the subreddit, and everything that the bot symbolized.

His grip on my shoulder under my sweater tightened as I stared at my wife’s dead body, grief filled my soul. Can’t write more than two sentences so tried to fit as much as I could as they ran for the exits.

Categories: horror

Tagged: halloween