"Don't think it. Don't say it." Hitting theaters this winter is The Bye Bye Man, a new film from STX Entertainment that features a killer who can really get into your head. In anticipation of the movie's premiere, TarcherPerigee has just re-released the book the film is based on, Robert Damon Schneck's The Bye Bye Man: And Other Strange-But-True Tales (formerly published as The President's Vampire), and we have an excerpt for Daily Dead readers to enjoy.
Synopsis: "The True Story behind the Terrifying Movie
Don't think of his name...
In 1990, three college students spent a long Wisconsin winter experimenting with a Ouija board; it turned out to be the deadliest mistake of their lives.
The board brought them into contact with a psychic serial killer, known only as the Bye Bye Man. Learning his name makes you vulnerable, but thinking about it draws the Bye Bye Man to you.
He is a relentless traveler, moving night and day, coming ever closer until the shrill sound of a steady whistle announces his arrival. He might turn up outside your bedroom door, speaking in the voice of a trusted friend, someone who would never hurt you…
Here is the authentically terrifying, true-life story recounted by historian Robert Damon Schneck in a chapter of his classic underground collection of weird Americana, which formed the basis for the major motion picture, The Bye Bye Man.
This unsettling tale is accompanied by seven more chapters of twisted history, and includes the author’s new afterword, “Searching for The Bye Bye Man.”
To learn more about Robert Damon Schneck's The Bye Bye Man: And Other Strange-But-True Tales, visit:
Excerpt:
I am interested in scientific parapsychology and wanted to find out if some sort of paranormal phenomena was indeed happening, so I started to conduct a number of experiments with John and Katherine. They got messages from the board by touching the planchette with their palms or a single finger, with the Ouija board turned around, and wearing blindfolds in a darkened room while I followed the planchette with a flashlight. No matter what innovation I introduced, the results were the same; the entities kept communicating. I suggested automatic writing and even attached a small golf-pencil to the planchette but this did not work. Then we tried for EVP phenomena with similarly disappointing results. [EVP or Electronic Voice Phenomenon are the “spirit voices” caught on recording equipment, especially audiotape.] We also tried pendulums, but again the board was the only method that got results. I decided to add a new twist to the procedure by writing down the questions without saying them out loud. I selected questions that would need to be answered by numbers, words, or letters. Though the answers were vague, as usual, they remained consistent and could be said to correspond with the questions.
After weeks of this, John and I were getting bored with the eight or so entities that the Spirit of Board would let us communicate with and their repetitious philosophy. I was determined to talk to a spirit that had lived, whose existence could be verified, and who would give us information we could check. At one point the board told us that there were indeed other entities we could communicate with but they might be dangerous, and it encouraged us to continue talking to the other entities. After some digging, we heard about a sinister entity that wanted to communicate with them. They also found out that this entity was not only a human but was still alive. John and I were eager to communicate with whoever it was but Katherine was adamantly against it. She had a history of paranormal experiences and had been sufficiently spooked by them to not even watch scary movies; she certainly had no interest in deliberately contacting something sinister. Katherine refused for a few days, but the two of us were able to wear her down and she agreed to try again. She was not happy about it but was very close to both of us and we were determined to see it through.
At first, to Katherine’s relief, the board simply refused to communicate with the desired entity and instead brought us the same old tiresome folks. The questions that I wrote or asked were now all about the living mind that wanted to reach us. At one point we learned that all of the other entities knew about this person and gave us a name; he was called the Bye-Bye Man.
From The Bye Bye Man: And Other Strange-But-True Tales by Robert Damon Schneck, published by TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2016 by Robert Damon Schneck.
Raised on a steady diet of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Derek has been fascinated with fear since he first saw ForeverWare being used on an episode of Eerie, Indiana.
When he’s not writing about horror as the Senior News Reporter for Daily Dead, Derek can be found daydreaming about the Santa Carla Boardwalk from The Lost Boys or reading Stephen King and Brian Keene novels.
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