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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dykstrav" data-source="post: 3168783" data-attributes="member: 40522">The trick to get "creepy" instead of "campy" is to think subtle. What you're going for is to make the characters have to realize what they're seeing shouldn't be possible. This can be easily done without having blood running up the walls and rattling chains.For an old orphanage, think about how the children would feel. Instead of having their ghosts congregate in some place where bad things happened to them, have them congregate in some place they were happy. That'd be creepier to me. Think about the past, how you can tell the story of the place and its people through the creey stuff.Maybe in the dining room, where the children got to eat and chat with each other before lights out. Every night dusty bowls and spoons mysteriously appear around dinner time, lined up on the table, waiting for a portion of gruel that will never come.People can hear children whispering in the bedrooms at night. Anyone that goes in there finds nothing and the voices stop. If they leave, the voices start again a few minutes later. The children are just acting like children, staying up past their 'bedtime.'Have the characters spot a little girl sneaking through the orphanage at night. If she spots them, she runs away and disappears. Characters that follow her notice that her route takes her from the kitchen to a spot under a tree outside. She puts something down and goes back inside. At the base of the tree are scraps of old food long since decayed, piled on top of a small mound. If the characters dig through the soft dirt, they find a cat skeleton a few inches down. The little girl was sneaking table scraps from the kitchen at night to a stray cat that waited around outside the orphanage for her.Little things like that make the place feel like something else "lives" there, like the characters are not alone even in an empty 10-by-10 room.</blockquote>

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