Tragedy in Cate Center

Author's note: This story is adapted from a ghost story as told in Jeff Provine's "Campus Ghosts of Norman, Oklahoma." In the original story, a young boy at a linguistics camp at OU in the summer of 1986 decides to explore the basement after lunch one day in August. He climbs into the dumbwaiter he finds in the basement, and he is decapitated when the dumbwaiter is called upstairs. It's a gruesome scene — Norman Police said it was one of the worst scenes they'd ever come across, and it took several hours to remove the boy's body from the dumbwaiter. Now, Cate Center is supposedly haunted by the boy who was beheaded in the dumbwaiter. Depending on your choices in this retelling of the Cate Center story, either you or your friend Margot is decapitated by the basement, or you avoid the basement woes altogether. It's told in the second-person in the hopes that it gives the story a spooky, personal touch.

Tech explanation: I built this story using Twine, an open source tool for creating nonlinear, interactive stories. To get the Twine story on my website, I uploaded the Twine file (which downloads as an .html file) to my personal website — danabranham.com — much like I would upload a photo I wanted to use in a blog post, for example. With that link copied to my clipboard, I simply tapped "Embed URL" on Google Sites, under the "Insert" tab, pasted in the link to my Twine file on my personal website, and it was automatically embedded in the page. I dragged the box down to make sure it was tall enough that even the longest pages of my story would fully display, and then hit publish. Inside Twine — which you can use in a browser or download as an app for your computer — you build passages and connect them to each other with simple syntax: [[brackets like these]] are used to signify that text should link to a particular passage. Essentially, you create a web of interconnected mini-stories that combine to create a larger story.

Bibliography:

Provine, Jeff. Campus ghosts of Norman, Oklahoma. The History Press, 2013.