I can’t believe this is my last blog post! Blogging about criminology and psychology has been super interesting and thank you to those who have commented on my site this semester. I hope you found my posts to be interesting too! As a way to end my blogging this semester, I’ve created a choose your own adventure game with a scary twist, which relates to what I’ve been blogging about all semester. I hope you enjoy and let me know in the comment section what your fate was!

Last night, your friend invited you to a party over the weekend. The party is at your friend’s cabin and only your closest friends plan on going. After a bustling week of college, you decide that going to this party would be a lot of fun and you let your friend know that you’ll be there. The weekend arrives and you drive to your friend’s cabin. Your friend told you to park at the bottom of the driveway and walk up the path to the cabin, since there is no room for parking up there. As you’re walking, you can’t shake the feeling that someone is watching you. It is a foggy day as well, so that does not make the situation any better. All of a sudden, you hear leaves crunching behind you. You quickly whip around, but the crunching immediately stops and nothing is there. Do you laugh if off and assume it’s just a squirrel thrashing around in the woods (1) or do you decide to tell your friends what happened (2)?

(1) You brush off the incident like nothing happened and find the cabin. You walk inside and the party is wild. Your friends are excited to see you and you start having the time of your life. (2) If you chose to remember the incident, you arrive at the party as well and tell your friends what happened almost immediately. Your friends tell you that it was nothing and you all start having a great time, but you can’t shake the uneasiness for some reason.

As you and your friends are having a blast, you hear a noise coming from upstairs. If you chose to forget about your earlier incident, the noise does not unsettle you as much as it does for those who chose to not forget about what happened in the woods. At this point, do you choose to continue partying (1) or do you decide to ask your friend who owns the cabin about the noise from upstairs (2)?

(1) If you chose not to do anything, you continue living it up with your friends. (2) However, if you chose to tell your one friend about the noise upstairs, the friend tells you that no noises should be coming from up there and teases you about your imagination. After talking with your friend, do you choose to go upstairs to investigate (1) or do you choose to stay with your friends because you feel like your one friend is right, you’re simply imagining things (2)?

(1) If you chose to stay with your friends, your in the same boat as the person who chose not to say anything in the first place and you continue to enjoy the party. (2) If you chose to go upstairs to investigate, you do so unnoticed by your friends. The stairs lead you to a door, which you push open ever so slightly. You peer inside and see what looks to be a guest bedroom…

If you chose not to go upstairs, you are living your best life, but some of you still feel unsettled. As evening approaches, you happen to glance out the window and notice what looks to be something walking in the woods. What is that? At this moment, do you choose to freak out (1) or remain calm and convince yourself that it is all your imagination (2)?

(1) If you chose to tell all your friends about it, they all agree that you should leave the party early because you’re clearly unsettled. All your friends even agree to walk you back to your car. Before nightfall, you make it back safely to your car, say your goodbyes, and drive back home…

(2) If you chose to stick it out and to live your life to the fullest, you end up staying with your friends at the cabin for a sleepover. Shortly after midnight, all of you are passed out on the living room couches. At some point in the middle of the night, you wake up to get a glass of water. As you make your way to the kitchen, you stumble over something. When you look back to see what you tripped over, you scream in horror because your friend is laying on the floor with wide eyes, pale blue lips, and a lifeless body. Before you can move any further, someone comes up behind you and stabs you in the back repeatedly. You fall to the ground and the light fades to darkness. The next day, missing persons reports for you and your friends are announced and the police arrive at the cabin. They discover that you and your friends had all been murdered with no trace of the murderer himself.

Now back to earlier in the story for those who chose to go upstairs. You decide to enter the room and sneakily creep around to make sure that the noise was nothing, but all of a sudden you hear a small creak behind you. You slowly turn around and before you can let out a scream, a strange man with a maniacal smile grabs your throat and violently chokes you. None of your friends can hear what’s going on because of the loud music downstairs and sadly you crumple to the floor with no pulse. Since you were unable to warn your friends of the danger, the serial killer was able to kill all of your friends by the end of the night as well.

For those of you who luckily made it back home safely, you are informed of your friends’ deaths the next day after the police visit your house to deliver the news. Guilt, depression, and anger overwhelms you and for the next few years you suffer from insomnia and hallucinations. Years of therapy eventually help you regain a normal lifestyle, but it is a long road to recovery.

Hope you enjoyed this choose your own adventure game! There was no easy ending, but at least one lets you live! Throughout this post, there are links to other choose your own adventure stories with a scary twist. I did get some inspiration from one of them, but all of the stories have completely different choices and completely different endings. Hopefully this was somewhat of a study break for you (the second link is a great choose your own adventure story)!

After Halloween’s famous trick-or-treating frenzy, I snuggled up with a cozy blanket and chose to end my spooky night with a horror movie. I ended up watching The Quiet Ones and it exceeded my spine-chilling expectations. The movie was not only frightening, but it was based on a true story about a psychological experiment! Crime was not involved, but the true story is super interesting and worth sharing with all of you.

The horror movie is a fictional version of the actual story, but the film does share minute similarities with the real events. The Quiet Ones is about a professor, Dr. Coupland, and a group of students at Oxford University studying a young girl, Jane Harper, who is mentally disturbed by a past she struggles to remember. Dr. Coupland believes that Harper’s mental disturbances are a form of energy that can be extracted and redirected into an object that can be purged, thus helping Harper escape from her hauntings forever. Coupland’s logic relates to the idea of surgically extracting a tumor to help remove cancer from a person. The group of students and Coupland periodically and thoroughly test Harper behind closed doors, but the study slowly takes a drastic and sinister turn once the past becomes more understood. I won’t reveal the ending of the movie in case you want to watch it for yourself, which I definitely recommend (I am not a huge movie critic, but I thought that the movie was a success). However, if you decide to not watch the movie and are curious about its ending, just let me know in the comment section and I’ll get back to you!

The true story is not about an experiment centered on harnessing negative energy from a demented teenage girl, but it did involve the influence of psychic energy on the supernatural. In 1972, Dr. Alan Robert George Owen and his wife, Iris Owen, began a study called the Philip Experiment in Toronto, Canada. The goal of the study was to prove that the supernatural is not controlled by sprits trapped in a dimension, but is controlled by the human mind. To accomplish the goal of the study, the couple and a group of volunteers created an intricate story about a person that has never existed.

The person’s name was Philip Aylesford and he had an unpleasant life story, like Jane Harper in The Quiet Ones. According to the experimenters, Philip was an “Englishman that lived in the 1600s,” held a reputable position in a court, and was married to a woman named Dorothea. As a young man, however, Philip committed infidelity with a gypsy named Margo and his wife reacted by accusing Margo of witchcraft. This false accusation caused Margo to receive intense backlash from the community and she was eventually burned alive at the stake. As a result of Margo’s death, Philip became severely grief-stricken and depressed, which influenced him to commit suicide.

After creating an extremely detailed life story for Philip, the experimenters agreed to whole-heartedly believe in Philip and held séances to try to connect with this figment of their imaginations. After several séances, the group of researchers collected evidence of a paranormal being that claimed to be Philip! This paranormal manifestation supposedly communicated with the experimenters by knocking on the table that the seances were held around and by moving the table as well. The researchers got “Philip” to knock once as a way to answer “yes” and to knock twice as a way to answer “no.” There is video evidence of the interactions with “Phillip,” which is quite mind-boggling because the group of people participating in the experiment were adamant that they were not responsible for any of the paranormal activity.

Based on the results of the study, Dr. Owen concluded that a connection between the paranormal and the human mind may exist. Over the course of time, Dr. Owen’s study has been replicated and those replications led to strangely similar results. So, what do you guys think about this story? Is it a hoax or is the human brain more powerful than what we realize?