GdL16: Origins

Although the origins of this website have been previously touched on here, nobody at the Local has really delved into the entire history of this website.

Back in 2006, Strange Jason and I were chatting via AIM when he notified me of his plans for a “personal Halloween countdown” where he would listen to some spooky audio every day in October. Being a good friend, I looked far and wide and sent him as much scary music, MIDI files, old time radio, audio books and sound effects as I could find. The following year, I decided to modify his idea by picking a new horror/Halloween-related Myspace profile song every week to entertain my friends. However, things didn’t exactly work out the way I had planned. I had unknowingly linked to unauthorized Myspace profiles featuring two of the songs I had used, which make it very hard to find a replacement version of the song. I ended up substituting Tenacious D’s “Tribute” for tracks that were taken down numerous times and eventually quit in frustration. And, yes, “Tribute” counts as a spooky song. Read this if you doubt me. Anyway, the three songs I ended up using were:

Tubular Bells – Mike Oldfield (as made famous by The Exorcist)
Main Theme from Halloween – John Carpenter
Tribute – Tenacious D

In 2008, talking with Jason inspired me to give it another shot. In fact, Jason was planning on doing something similar on his Myspace profile. Jason, being impressed by my knowledge of Halloween props and horror movie trivia, encouraged me to try writing articles for my Myspace blog for each day in October. It took some convincing, especially since I felt my knowledge wasn’t as impressive as Jason thought it was (due to me copy-pasting stuff from movie review websites and various horror-related forums during lulls in our AIM conversations), but eventually I agreed. The fact that Jason said he would do something similar on his profile was also a big factor in that decision. It got to the point where he was so stunned by the stuff I was finding that he tried convincing me to start a website instead. Eventually, Jason offered to start up a website if I would agree to participate. I agreed (not realizing that he meant starting it immediately) and, well, I think you can guess what happened next.

At the same time, I was still preparing for the Myspace countdown. Although the article part was ditched in favor of posting at Gravedigger’s Local 16, the music part was still a go. Thankfully, Myspace switched to allowing its users to select five profile songs instead of just one. This meant that instead of changing songs every week, I could create a five songs a mix of cool music and spooky atmospheric tracks that I kept up for the entire month of October. The tracks selected were:

Family Secrets – Midnight Syndicate
Jack the Ripper – Screaming Lord Sutch
Hall of Portraits – Hedstorm Productions
The Trouble with those Mothra Girls – Daikaiju
Spooky 2007 (Diablo’s Theme) – The Ghastly Ones

Oddly enough, it took me until the 2009 Halloween countdown to actually start posting the trivia I had shared with Jason which prompted him to start up the site!

Happy Birthday Gravedigger’s Local 16!

1 comment

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    • Our Ghoul Jenn on September 9, 2011 at 6:59 am
    • Reply

    Congratulations!!

  1. […] onto my Myspace page as part of a Halloween special and eventually forgot about them due to both the development of Gravedigger’s Local 16 and the fading popularity of that particular social […]

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