Turn your home into a Haunted House (video)

You're home alone. It's the dead of night and all of the lights are off; you creep down the hallway with one hand dragging along the wall, your phone serving as a makeshift flashlight. You hear a young girl's voice whisper from the bedroom in front of you and the hair on the back of your neck stands up straight. You pause. Your heart pounds. A dull ringing assaults your ears. You creep forward, holding the phone higher, when suddenly -- a high-pitched shriek as your phone's light starts rapidly flashing and a deformed, undead monster barrels down the hallway directly toward you. You drop your phone. Game over.

That's basically the premise of Night Terrors, an in-development, augmented reality game for mobile devices that maps out the entirety of your house and fills it with terrifying creatures, turning a home into a real-life survival-horror game. It's currently looking for $70,000 on Indiegogo -- developers say they've already created a system that understands spatial elements such as walls and complex floorplans, and they're using physical special effects rather than CGI. It sounds like an innovative and truly horrifying project, even as its narrative plays off of an overused gaming conceit: Save the girl and be the hero. That's so close to being cliche, it's scary.

Read Full Story: Engadget

Ouija boards are the must-have gift this Christmas. "You know, for kids"

What better time to talk to dead people for fun than the festival to celebrate the birth of Jesus? Ouija boards are flying themselves off shelves and under trees this Christmas, according to trends data released by Google. The company has recorded a 300 per cent increase in searches for the spirit-bothering devices, fueled by a terrible movie that was effectively a feature-length ad for a board game, an appearance on The Archers, and the Victorian belief that if the dead could speak, they would use a plank of a wood and the alphabet.

Ouija, released in October in time for Halloween, was, by all accounts, a cliché-ridden turkey about a group of teenage girls who experiment with a board and get scared. It has a disastrous 7 per cent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the review aggregating site, but became an occult hit, to the delight of its backers. Hasbro, the toy company behind Monopoly, pushed for the revival of the film, which had stalled in development, and partnered with Universal to make it happen. Its Ouija Game, including a glow-in-the-dark version, is – sure enough – the biggest seller online.

All of which is appropriate, because the Ouija-board trend, circa 1890, was always about selling games. Spirit writing dates back much further. In 12th-century China, it was believed that spirits had the power to guide a "planchette" to write Chinese characters. In the late 19th century, when doubts about God inspired by Darwin's little birds led to a boom in spiritualism, planchettes became a novelty hit in the west. Elijah Bond, an American lawyer and inventor from Baltimore, devised and patented in 1891 "a toy or game by which two or more persons can amuse themselves by asking questions of any kind and having them answered by the device used and operated by the touch of the hand, so that the answers are designated by letters on a board".

Read Full Story: Independent UK

Deadly "Ghost Train" game kills two teens

Officer inspects tracks after deadly accident

ST. LOUIS (AP) — Two Missouri girls struck and killed by an Amtrak train were playing a deadly game, a coroner said Tuesday.

Butler County Coroner Jim Akers said the teens were playing a game called "Ghost Train," in which a car is parked on the tracks, purportedly awaiting the arrival of a "ghost train" involved in a fatal derailment many years ago. Occupants let the windows fog up in the scary setting. If a train approaches, they drive off.

But Akers said that as the Amtrak train neared the 1995 Jeep Grand Cherokee, the vehicle wouldn't start. Three teens got out but two panicked and couldn't unbuckle their seat belts. One returned and unbuckled the other girls and was still inside the Jeep when the train slammed into it.

"It's crazy," said Akers, who had never heard of the game before the accident. "It's horrible. I really don't have words yet. I wish I had some smart, poetic way of saying something to stop kids from doing things like this."

The accident happened at 12:30 a.m. Tuesday at a railroad crossing near Poplar Bluff in southeast Missouri. The Missouri State Highway Patrol identified the girls who died as Victoria Swanson, 15, and Haley Whitmer, 17, both of Poplar Bluff.