My wife and I re-watched all of Stranger Things last month. I had forgotten how much I really enjoyed it. It also got me thinking about my setting for NIGHT SHIFT (or any other modern horror RPG) Jackson, IL.
One of the great things about my Jackson, IL project is I get to involve some of the best occult and weird-things investigators I know; my brothers and sisters.
Seriously. I talk about all the monsters my mom gives me all the time and all the bad horror movies I watched with my dad. Well, think of the stuff I write and now times that by five. We have this huge discussion thread that has been going for a while now where we talk about all the weird shit that went on in the town we grew up in. Even right now they are still at it while I am typing this and trying to stay caught up.
I'd better get some of this all down here before they provide me with another year's worth of posts.
Up first is an Urban Legend I remember as a kid. This rumor involved a small Midwest town with two smaller colleges and how an axe murderer, or serial killer, or deranged student, was going to kill some students in the girls dorm.
Here is one article I was able to find that covers it. It never mentions any town by name, but my old home town fit all the criteria, as did a few others.
Here is my revised version for Jackson, IL for use with NIGHT SHIFT and using my Weirdly World News introduced in the Night Companion.
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MIDWEST MURDER MYSTERY!
The Jackson College Prediction
As Told Since the Late 1970s
The story has been circulating around Jackson College for as long as anyone can remember, though every retelling changes a detail or two. It all begins with an article, if it ever truly existed, in a fringe tabloid called Weirdly World News.
No one has ever found a copy.
No librarians have ever seen it.
No archive lists it.
And yet, somehow, everyone has heard about it.
The Alleged Article
According to the rumor, Weirdly World News once ran a short, breathless piece claiming that a well-known psychic, sometimes named, sometimes not, foretold a tragedy in:
“a small Midwestern town with two colleges or twin campuses, where one women’s dormitory faces to the south and another to the west.”
That was the entire identifying description.
No town was named.
No state was noted.
No dates were provided beyond a cryptic warning:
“The danger comes due in a spring month with five Thursdays.”
Everyone remembers that part clearly, even if they disagree on everything else.
Why the Legend Stuck
Naturally, the description was generic enough to apply to more than one place in the Midwest… but it also matched Jackson, Ill, a little too closely for comfort.
The both campuses in town had women’s dorms. And in the murky, grainy way old buildings are remembered, it is easy to see one dorm as “facing south” and the other “facing west,” depending on which entrance a person uses or which direction the old architecture leans.
This vagueness kept the rumor alive.
The resemblance to Jackson kept it fed.
Spring Months With Five Thursdays
The legend only resurfaces during years when a spring month, March, April, or May, contains five Thursdays. Students whisper about it in the cafeteria. Professors jokingly warn their classes to “stay safe.” Campus security quietly increases patrols, though nobody ever admits it.
Some upperclassmen swear their older siblings heard the same warnings a decade earlier.
Some claim the psychic predicted:
a stabbing
an axe
a faceless figure
a student “losing control”
Others insist the warning was far more symbolic, mentioning only “moon-dark corridors” or “the hour of the fifth.”
All of this contradicts.
All of it circulates.
The Vanishing Article
Every few years, someone tries to track down the original Weirdly World News issue. Every few years, they fail.
Some say the tabloid never printed the article.
Some claim the article was retracted.
Some insist it existed only as a single teaser in the back pages of a spring edition.
A few swear their aunt or an older neighbor once had a copy taped to a fridge.
But when pressed, no one has ever been able to produce one.
What Actually Happened
Of course nothing.
No attacks, no tragedies, no unexplained disappearances.
And yet, each new generation of students tells the story again whenever a spring month carries a fifth Thursday… as if the warning might finally stick, or the shadowed threat might finally step out from where it has been waiting, just off the page, just past the edge of memory.
Jackson remains quiet each year.
But the legend, and the fear, continues.
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Game Masters Note
Of course, the article is real in the Jackson, Ill, universe. And it will turn up, when the prediction starts to come true.
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