by Dot Cannon
Lurking somewhere in Southern California, is a creative who goes by the moniker of “Spooky Webmistress”.
And just in time for Halloween, her talents may well hold you spellbound.
That’s because Webmistress, as we’ll call her from here on, is a pioneer. She created the first interactive virtual haunt on the Internet–in 1998.
Today, her website, now known as Frightbytes, is still going strong. It may very well give you chills–in the best possible way.
When you check out her website, you’ll find original scary stories, including a brand-new one, “The Dead of Night”, which Webmistress wrote and illustrated for Halloween, 2020. Her graphics depict a creepy-beautiful world of zombies, evil clowns, spirits and more.
And this is no passive experience. The choices you make, determine the outcome of the story in which you’re participating.
(Royalty-free image by Enrique Meseguer from Pixabay.)
In addition to the haunt stories, you’ll find lots of other fun, Halloween-related posts on Frightbytes. These include Halloween games, mazes and Halloween history. Not to mention horror graphics, horror quotes and a “Pumpkin Personality” test. There’s even advice on how to get rid of ghosts!
Over Coffee® caught up with Webmistress for a conversation about her creative journey, her own Halloween plans and what Frightbytes has in store that’ll throw a scare into you, this Halloween or anytime, from the safety of your home.
How did Halloween, and horror, first capture your imagination as the area in which you wanted to use your creativity?
Webmistress: Halloween, and horror, have always fascinated me since childhood. My mother instilled my love of horror. When I was 8 years old she took me to the movies to see House on Haunted Hill. This was the original with Vincent Price that was released in 1959. I lasted 15 minutes. The hideous floating housekeeper and the head in the suitcase were too much for me. Good times!
I’m going to guess graphic art and creative writing, but what is your artistic background?
Webmistress: My parents exposed me to the arts. We were a musical family so I had quite a few years of piano lessons and dance lessons. I lacked music and dance genes and found creating things on my own was a place I could be comfortable in. Even in school when doing writing assignments, I always wanted to build a prop to go along with (them). Writing was not enough; I wanted an image or an object to go along with it to tell more of the story or to leave a sense of mystery behind.
(Royalty-free image by loulou Nash from Pixabay.)
Please tell me the story of creating your website, Frightbytes.com.
Webmistress: I have been a video game player most of my adult life. Creating a website in 1998 let me design stories to have some interactivity and a “choose your own adventure” style. I wanted people to be able to choose different story paths and find different endings. To make it game-like I added notes and secret “hot spots” to find what they call in the gaming world “Easter Eggs” or collectibles. Frightbytes.com is all about discovering secrets, hidden objects, and even hidden stories inside the story. That’s the fun of creating a virtual haunt or anything else, you’re only limited by your imagination.
(Editor’s note: “The Dead of Night” follows this tradition, with a “story inside the story”, a hidden quest and plenty of secret “hot spots”. One of the latter is driving us nuts; we STILL can’t find it!)
How did you come to choose to create an interactive virtual haunt in 1998, when “online” wasn’t a place where people spent much time?
Webmistress: Many of us were just beginning to flock to the free website services like Tripod, Angelfire, Geocities, Delphi and others. Does anybody remember the “Spinning Hamster” or the “Dancing Baby” web pages? They were quite the rage back then! In the summer of 1998 I wanted to have a webpage too. The beginning of Frightbytes.com began on Angelfire free webhosting and was called “The Hauntings“. I learned basic html and codes to incorporate sound and music. I felt like Doctor Frankenstein creating my monster, byte by byte (literally). What better place to create a virtual haunted house than on the Internet.
By September it was ready and the next step was to try to get into the Yahoo directory. Back then it was difficult.
Fast forward to Halloween 1998 and something remarkable happened. The Hauntings was listed in Yahoo just before Halloween and my website went viral, for lack of a better description. My website Guestbook was overflowing and my counter was going crazy. DJs were mentioning it at Halloween parties, I later found out, and the following year the Los Angeles Times newspaper mentioned The Hauntings in its Halloween coverage.
By November of 1998 I was already creating Part II of The Hauntings and adding another story path to Part I. By 1999, I knew my graphics skills were lacking, so I upgraded to a new graphics program.
The year 2000 was devoted to completely redoing The Hauntings Part I and Part II and adding other content to the site. By 2001 I felt ready to claim a domain of my own. I knew enough about HTML that I didn’t need online editors and I wanted my website to be advertising-free to give visitors the best possible experience.
I was preoccupied for days trying to come up with a domain name. Then, late one evening (on a dark and stormy night, no doubt) it finally hit me like a ton of Halloween candy corn: Frightbytes. There were moments of sheer terror when I went to a domain registrar and typed it in–was it available?
Yes, it was. I almost cried in relief. Frightbytes.com was brought to life in December 2001. It’s alive! Alive!
What was your experience like, as Frightbytes evolved over the years?
Webmistress: For the most part, so much fun, enjoyment, and continued learning. But also, frustration at things beyond my control. Browser wars and changes in codes for sound files constantly made things difficult. I’ve had to re-do hundreds and hundreds of pages multiple times to keep sound file codes working. Then there came an issue with Midi files, so those had to be removed. I wanted to keep Frightbytes working the best it could, so instead of creating new content, much of my time was spent having to redo codes.
And then I discovered FLASH. What a remarkable piece of software for content creators. I dove into creating so many Flash-based stories. Disaster struck when Adobe Flash lost favor. It became the dark villain of the web, the Boogeyman if you will. The final nail in the coffin was the threat of websites being deemed dangerous for having Flash content.
I removed many years of work and felt devastated. (That was) around 2015 or 2016 and I had to revert Frightbytes.com back to 1998 content and size.
One by one, Salems Marsh Asylum, Carnival of Terror and Zombie Invasion were rebuilt. With each story that was redesigned I expected to be disappointed with the rebuild but a funny thing happened–I wasn’t. Flash was helpful for effects, but my stories didn’t need Flash to be told. It was a setback to have to redo so much content, but I feel my website is better off without Flash. However, it was time-consuming, and rebuilding took away from creating new content, which disappointed followers of Frightbytes. Hopefully, the new story, Dead of Night, will help to put me back in favor.
