nostomanic: the tale of the dream girl

Back in 1991, if you watched Nickelodeon's Are You Afraid of the Dark?, which aired at the witchiest hour of the day (10PM!), after having read a Goosebumps book, you were basically going to die--the human heart can only handle so much unadulterated spookiness.

The intro alone was so horrifying that I don't think anyone would have judged you if you'd decided to go to sleep before the episode even began.

The one thing scarier than ghosts, demons, monsters, and serial killers is an off-centered, attic-dwelling hobo clown.

The Midnight Society, a super exclusive group of Canadian youths whose parents obviously didn't give a shit about their kids' welfare, met up in the dark woods (at midnight, naturally), sat around a bonfire, and took turns telling chilling tales. The storyteller would sit in a stone chair constructed by ancient Canadian druids...

...but the kids would never just launch into their tales from there, they'd tease them out a little, preface them with some pithy observation about the human condition. Something like "sometimes things look one way, but they're really another. But are they really that way? Or still, yet another way? How many ways can things be?" And then everyone would demonstrate how thought provoking that preamble had been by exchanging stunned looks.

After the group's minds were blown by this introduction, the person sitting in the stone chair would take the bag of "Midnight Dust," say, "Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, I call this story 'The Tale of the Spooky Something or Other,'" and then throw dust onto the bonfire, stoking the flames. At the end of the night, they'd put out the bonfire because they were responsible scary storytellers.

Meet the Midnight Society
Members of the group would come and go, their departures usually explained away by Gary, the mature leader, saying, "so-and-so's family moved away" and never "so-and-so has entered puberty and has decided to start making out with people instead of frittering away his/her teen years telling scary stories."

One time it looked like they were all about to get wasted.

But then, that didn't happen.

M. Night Shyamalan isn't afraid of the dark
According to something I read on an IMDB message board (so, a super trustworthy source) the idea for The Sixth Sense was lifted from an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? called "The Tale of the Dreamgirl." (In case you don't live in the world and don't know how The Sixth Sense ends, beware, spoilers follow.)

In the episode, a guy sees a hot girl in his dreams and he tells his sister about it because they apparently have the kind of relationship where it's cool to talk about nocturnal emissions. The sister finds an old newspaper clipping that sheds some light on dream girl's identity.

Before the dude can get too excited, his sister, who likes to dole out information in juicy slivers, unfolds the top portion of the newspaper article.

Dream girl is dead! Later, brother and sister visit Donna Maitland's grave where they discover that half of the grave stone is not-at-all strategically covered in leaves.

They clean off the leaves because they're bored or whatever...

Bah! John Angelli is the brother's name. He's dead too!

The sister begins to unfurl her handy newspaper clipping once again and...

yup! Confirmation! He's been dead the whole time.

You can watch Are You Afraid of the Dark? right now!
Like, a year ago, people were trying to sell the first season DVD on Amazon for more money than a human could ever even have: $219.99.

But now you can download episodes on iTunes at an affordable price, giving you the opportunity to track the transformation of Gary's bangs over the years...