It started during the pandemic. I was the director of a preschool and it was around the time of Halloween.
Halloween is usually a pretty big deal for children, but that year the world was at a standstill with a fog of worry that loomed over everything. People were worried and anxious about COVID-19. Preschoolers were playing “coronavirus” in school. They were hearing about it, thinking about it, and playing coronavirus again and again to process what was going on around us.
Halloween that year was essentially canceled and for the first time in my life there would be no trick-or-treating, costume parades, parties or gatherings.
Some young children didn’t know any different, but for other children this was a loss. For the adults, too, we felt robbed as well. Halloween is a family holiday, one that taps into everyone’s imagination and invites the participation of a community. Parents dressed up along with their children and carried on the traditions from their own childhood, adding a bit of excitement and imagination to a usually mundane and routine life.
That year, some families did their own thing at home to quietly celebrate. Others still decorated the outside of their homes and neighborhoods to keep the spirit alive. Everyone was trying to keep things as normal as possible.
The children, of course, processed this all through their play and stories.
Around this time, I was in the classrooms a lot as extra support, and I noticed all of the play and conversations started to include skeletons, bats, ghosts and witches. Other children made up stories with an even wider cast of characters: goblins, zombies, Frankenstein, and vampires. A pattern emerged; children would tell these stories with “spooky” characters and then swoop in as the hero to save the day! It was apparent to me that these stories empowered rather than scared the children.
Sure, a few children didn’t like listening to spooky stories. There was a 4-year-old girl who walked away from the stories when they included witches. She had enough self-awareness to realize that witches were “too spooky” for her. This was when I started to tell spooky stories of my own, ones that didn’t include witches, so that she would stay.
Soon, children were asking me to tell spooky stories every day. I told them that my stories would only be a little spooky so as to not scare everyone. After a while, I started to include their ideas so that they could have more ownership. I scaffolded the process so I did less and less and they did more and more.
Spooky stories continued long after Halloween was over. Telling spooky stories became our special connection.
I used these stories to strengthen the children’s understanding of story structures and elements, encourage descriptive language, and explore fears and worries. Over time, spooky stories evolved and were more fanciful and weird rather than spooky. Children would ask me to include fairies and unicorns, dinosaurs and monster trucks, whatever they were drawn to personally. I started to use our neighborhood, school and classrooms as the settings, as in, “Once upon a time, something strange happened in Long Beach. One day all of the kids woke up and got ready for school, but they were shocked when they saw that the entire school had disappeared!”
After a while, spooky stories became a way for us to practice problem solving as I weaved in real life scenarios. There was a story about a T. Rex that wanted to make friends but everyone was scared of him, and another where the fairy hurt her wings and her friends and family rallied around her to support. Stories continued to have bad guys for the children to fight and defeat. I didn’t try to change that story line much. Good guy and bad guy play endures for a reason. Characters that go through trials to ultimately triumph at the end are satisfying to people of all ages.
Spooky stories became something that tied us together. Through the tradition of oral storytelling, the children and I explored what was meaningful to the individual and to the larger community. Telling spooky stories was a way for each of us to feel a bit of peril in order to feel brave. In the spooky stories we made up we were all in it together. We shared the problems and the problem solving. We celebrated the wins.
From a truly spooky time in everyone’s lives emerged a way for us to stay connected, strong and resilient. We invented fiction that translated into real life empowerment. We were the protagonists and the heroes. We were human and superhuman all at once. And we never felt alone when we were telling stories.
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