Crack an egg on your head, let the yolk run down, yolk run down, yolk run down . . .

Saturdays growing up, midnight found us whispering these words to each other. It’s the opening verse of “Concentrate, Concentrate,” a sleepover game played in low voices, after the parents have called lights out. One kid stands with their eyes shut, while another kid stands behind them, acting out each verse with taps of the fist, spidering fingers slowly down the first kid’s spine, and reciting:

Squeeze an orange on your shoulders, let the juice drip down . . .

Stick ten needles in your sides, let the blood drip down . . .

You only need two people, but if you form a circle, everyone can play. Hands on backs behind hands on backs; everyone making the same motions and chanting in unison.

The final verse describes standing on the roof of a building, looking over the ledge, when you feel a sudden push. Here, the person in back shoves the person in front to illustrate the loss of balance, the fall.

The color the person in front sees flash across the inside of their eyelids at this exact moment is said to determine how that person will die. Orange means fire. Yellow means poisoning. Blue means drowning. Brown: a live burial.

I was in elementary school the first time I played “Concentrate, Concentrate,” and, sure, it gave me the heebie-jeebies—that was the point—but maybe not as much as you’d think. Consider the landscape. Around that time, us kids were crowding into bathrooms to summon Bloody Mary, holding a lighter to the mirror to warm up a place for the ghost’s face to appear. We were twisting each other’s hands into grotesque shapes till someone cried out for mercy—which sometimes came too late, after the wrist was already sprained. We were challenging each other to round after round of “Bloody Knuckles.”

Against this backdrop of risk, pain, and visits from beyond the grave, a game to divine our deaths made perfect sense.

English folklorists Iona and Peter Opie were pioneers in the field of children’s folklore (or “childlore”), the strain of folklore—games, superstitions, riddles, rhymes, pranks, jokes, and other traditions—created, practiced, and passed on to children by other children. While versions of “Mercy” are played all over the world, other rituals might be region- or community-specific. In Armenian playgrounds, you might find the clapping game “Tsap Tsap Bilobil,”¹ and in Nigerian playgrounds, a dance called “A Day the Lion Is Sick.”² In parts of the American South, there’s a practice of catching live anoles at recess, then letting them bite onto your earlobes so you can wear them to class, like dangly lizard earrings.

An important feature of childlore is that kids spread it to other kids, independent of adult instruction. Because as soon as parents got involved (or teachers, or adult authors of books marketed for children), that wasn’t really ours anymore, was it? That was somebody else’s lesson, written for us. It was our siblings who taught us to avoid the cracks in the sidewalk, because of what one wrong step might mean for dear old Mom. It was our classmates who taught us not to touch that one chain link on the fence surrounding the community pool, unless we wanted to end up like that local legend of the long-lost drowned girl.

Not all the folklore of my youth was the stuff of nightmares, aimed at drawing blood or opening portals to the afterworld—but the other stuff was still pretty strange. We had jump-rope rhymes that told us who we were going to marry. We knew the formula to make an upside-down calculator spell out “BOOBLESS.” Then there was that song about “great green gobs of greasy, grimy gopher guts, mutilated monkey meat . . . ”

Didn’t that one end with: “And me without a spoon”?

I wrote a book set in the context of all this adolescent freakiness, but I’m far from the first to notice the potential of childlore in the horror genre. After all, “childhood rituals” begins and ends with chills.

In the 2022 film Talk to Me, a group of teenagers pass around an embalmed hand during a house party, hoping to communicate with the dead. Bodies Bodies Bodies, out that same year, features a different (but equally disturbing) game played during a hurricane party, which is basically a sleepover on steroids; and 2019’s Ready or Not revolves around a game of hide-and-seek. The 2020 short film “The Fortune Teller” puts a sinister twist on paper cootie catchers. In A Nightmare on Elm Street, the haunting “One, Two, Freddy’s Coming for You” is sung to the tune of “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe,” and laid over an image of kids skipping rope in slow motion. Maybe the best-known example, though, and definitely one of the scariest, is that scene in 2013’s The Conjuring, in which a mother’s terror is punctuated by the clap-clap of a game of “Hide and Clap.”

A pair of recent works of literary fiction come to mind, too: Sarah Pinsker’s novelette “Two Truths and a Lie” (2020) and Kiersten White’s novel Mister Magic (2023) both feature mysterious kids’ television shows that may be less—or more—than real: a shared, distorted memory born in the minds of children.

And here’s me taking my turn between the fast-spinning ropes, adding my voice to that midnight chant. Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is my debut collection: twelve stories that play in and across the genres of horror, fabulism, folklore, SF, and the weird—and every one of them revolves around games and childlore. Inside, you’ll find that spiky “S”³ we drew in the margins of our composition notebooks. You’ll find the secret traditions of varsity athletes, and the terrifying legends—and somehow even more terrifying pranks—of sleepaway camp. These characters are haunted by old hurts and regrets, and also by living dolls and possessed CD-ROMs. They look for assurances of a future from cootie catchers and curlicued orange peels. They play dress-up in hopes it will help them survive.

My stories, like the others I’ve mentioned, live squarely in the overlap between children’s folklore and adult fears. Still, it wasn’t till after I’d finished the book that I sat down to really think about the appeal of childlore for horror writers and fans like me.

It’s not hard to understand its appeal for adolescents. This is one of life’s twilight zones: a peculiar, slippery time between the worlds of childhood and adulthood, when you’re old enough to convince your big brother to take you to an R-rated movie, and young enough to believe the monster on screen might come for you after the credits roll. Old enough to want desperately to break free of your too-small slice of the world, and young enough to feel invincible, so sure the larger world won’t eat you alive. At that age, we craved more agency than we were given, more experiences than we’d been exposed to, more danger than we were allowed to pursue. Our games and rituals gave us all of that, and in the context of ostensible safety. In this context, we could test life’s boundaries. We could test, too, the limits of our bodies, which felt alien to us, and magical, the way they were expanding seemingly overnight. Enter “Mercy.” Enter “Bloody Knuckles.” How much could these new bodies tolerate?

Yet for all the boundary testing, all the danger seeking, the thing about our games was? They had rules. And that was the other great thing about them. My adolescence was the last time I remember life’s problems having clear solutions, and clear steps to those solutions. It was the last time I truly believed that if I just followed the rules, I’d be all right. If my classmates and I stuck spoons under our pillows, flushed ice cubes down our toilets, and wore our pajamas inside-out, we’d guarantee ourselves a snow day. If the MASH life-prediction game told me I’d grow up to own a mansion, that was as good as fact to me. There was my future, stretching ahead of me: long, bright, unswerving, invulnerable.

We were creating a world just for us. We were creating a language, and no adult could speak it.

And yet, all those horror movies I mentioned earlier—they’re marketed for adults. So what is it about childlore that’s so compelling to adult horror lovers? I won’t settle for ours being a common case of arrested development, or simple nostalgia: a longing to return to a time when magic—even dark magic—could be real. What makes childlore so scary? What about it feels ripe for subversion, redemption?

For one thing, adults have little to do with it. Childlore gets passed from one generation to the next by an older sibling or cousin. It gets passed from one school to another by the new kid whose family made her move towns mid-year. It’s a world us adults aren’t totally privy to, and there’s nothing more frightening than the unknowable, the unseen. Especially if you sense that the kids are onto something.

There’s this notion that children have an infiniteness to their imaginations that we lose access to as we age. Maybe because they’re closer to life in the womb and thus have retained some softness to them, some sensitivity to portals that makes them more receptive to messages from other worlds. Or maybe it’s simply that they haven’t lived long enough to be hurt to the extent that we’ve been hurt, so they’re more welcoming to new experiences. (I’m thinking of that episode in Alien: Earth in which Wendy doesn’t run from the juvenile xenomorph, but gleefully plays with it.) We don’t need to test the limits of our bodies anymore; we’re all too aware of them, and they’re nowhere near as generous as we had hoped.

Childlore is a reminder, too, that children are perfectly capable of inventing their own worlds, apart from the sanitized little worlds we create for them. Adults tend to underestimate kids. It sounds obvious, but is easy to forget that they are also people. And maybe it’s that fact, or our willful ignorance of it, that freaks us out.

Now that I’m what some would call a grown-up, I’m forced to accept that childlore isn’t meant for me anymore, that it’s surrounded by some force field through which grown-ups can’t pass. As a result, I don’t know much about what’s going on in that realm today. I have it on good authority that some kids are still drawing that spiky “S” in study hall. No doubt, though, that other things have changed. Global events like the COVID-19 pandemic have certainly played a part. Remember circle-circle-dot-dot cootie shots? How about coronavirus tag?⁴

Too, when I was growing up, the internet was still this wild, elusive place: Myspace, GeoCities, chat rooms pinging with “a/s/l?” Today’s instant, ubiquitous access, plus the proliferation of social networks, means childlore can spread across thousands of miles as fast as a video upload. Now, a lot of childlore shows up as virtual challenges. Around 2017, there was the Eraser Challenge, which consisted of rubbing an eraser across bare skin to cause friction burns: a dare-you, pain-endurance flavor of game familiar to many of us. In the Charlie Charlie Challenge, kids tried to commune with a demon using two pencils in the shape of a cross over a sheet of paper, which had written, in each quadrant, either “yes” or “no.” Then, starting around 2022, there was TikTok’s Fairy Flying Challenge, condemned by adults⁵ for its illusion of a body floating midair, which some worried might trigger comparisons to hanging and suicidal ideation.

Ever since 2018’s notorious Tide Pod Challenge, there’ve been lists of dangerous viral challenges that parents should watch out for, written and published—by adults, of course—on a relentless basis. The Salt and Ice Challenge. The Dragon’s Breath Challenge. The Momo Challenge, now recognized as an urban legend, a hoax. Because social platforms are readily available to anyone with internet access and a passing tolerance for in-app advertising, kids aren’t in a kids-only bubble there. These trends can be closely monitored and mediated by adults. I learned about the recent “watch me slowly melt away” trend from a video posted by a middle school teacher, @mr_phlindsay_sped, whose entire account seems dedicated to helping educators and other adults demystify today’s rapidly evolving childlore, which often starts online before making its way into classrooms. “Watch me slowly melt away” involves taking a series of short videos at increasingly unflattering angles till you’re quadruple-chinning for the camera. The spooky name hooked me, though as far as I can tell, the trend itself is tame: an innocent refusal to obsess over appearances.

If childlore is meant to be a world only kids can enter, a language only kids can speak, how insulated is it now from adults’ prying eyes? Used to be, the only way to figure out what your kid was doing, hunched over suspiciously in that corner there, was to ask them. And even if you were shameless and nosy enough to do it, they’d probably just laugh you off, or come up with some fib, keeping their secrets for themselves. Now, adults can do their research on their own time and publish their findings. I’m writing this now, aren’t I?

Out in the open, childlore is vulnerable to being co-opted—and not just by any adult, but by corporations looking for something more insidious and effective than a regular paid ad. I’m thinking of 2019’s Bird Box Challenge. Originally a partnership between Netflix and Twitch streamers tasked with playing video games blindfolded (an echo of a major element in the film), the challenge quickly progressed beyond Twitch into everyday people filming themselves trying to cook, walk, and even drive while blindfolded. Some hospitalizations later, Netflix had to issue a warning that the Bird Box Challenge should only be attempted in safe environments.

Hollywood PR stunts notwithstanding, I have to believe kids still have their wonderfully bizarre, unspoiled private worlds. If they do, they’re probably not on TikTok. Maybe they’re somewhere closer to the Backrooms:⁶ that fictional, digital, extradimensional, labyrinthine expanse of empty rooms with roots in creepypasta and the internet aesthetic of liminal spaces. Sometime in the 2010s, an image of a large carpeted room began circulating on online message boards. Then in 2019, a user gave the image a name and description, and since then many users have expanded upon that lore, transforming that single room into a vast, multilevel, tunneled space populated by supernatural entities and artifacts. In 2022, then sixteen-year-old Kane Parsons (also known as Kane Pixels) uploaded a short horror film titled “The Backrooms (Found Footage)” to YouTube, prompting a surge in Backrooms content, and by early 2022, r/backrooms had more than 150,000 members. It’s a mind-boggling example of collaborative worldbuilding; an immense shared dream.

But? Even the Backrooms aren’t so far back as to be safe from view forever—and I’m not the one holding the obnoxiously bright flashlight. In 2023, A24 announced it was developing an adaptation of Parsons’ short film. There are multiple video games based on the concept. An episode inspired by the Backrooms was included in the third season of American Horror Stories, and Dan Erickson, creator of the TV series Severance, named the Backrooms as one of his influences.⁷

So unsupervised, no-grown-ups-allowed childlore isn’t tucked away in the tunnels of the Backrooms after all. Probably it’s right in front of us, just wrapped in so much absurdity and irrationality that we—so-called rational adults—can’t take it seriously. Gen Z’s particular brand of online humor has been likened to early-twentieth-century Dadaism.⁸ But if the Dadaism born in the mid-1910s was a nihilist reaction to terror surrounding World War I, then 2020s Dadaism is an expression of mounting anxiety about a bleak-looking future, amid disillusion with the status quo carrying us at full speed toward that future. In any case, this new Dadaism, with its intentional nonsense, also acts as armor. A kind of protection spell—because if the adults don’t understand it, they’ll likely lose interest, and leave the kids alone.

So what does childlore look like today, and in the future?

Guess I don’t know. Guess I’m not meant to.

I do know this: Gearing up to write this essay, I was struggling to remember the lyrics of that old sleepover game I used to play, “Concentrate, Concentrate.” All day I racked my brain, determined to dredge up the words from the depths of my memory. It felt lazy and inauthentic to Google them, since that’s something I couldn’t have done back then. I wanted to be able to rely, like I had at that age, exclusively on what had come to me through word of mouth.

But I couldn’t call the lyrics to mind after all. So I relented, and looked them up.

I found my answer in a TikTok video—of course. The speaker looked to me like he couldn’t have been out of high school. He asked his invisible audience if they’d heard of this creepy game, then he explained the rules and encouraged everyone to try it.

Last I looked, the video had more than 120,000 likes, with thousands of commenters sharing the color they saw the moment they were pushed over the building’s edge.

The video was posted two years ago. The rules are just the same as I remember.

¹. McDowell, Robert & Matikyan, Hasmik. “Childlore and Children’s Folklore in the UK and in Armenia (Historical and Current Perspective).” Գիտական աշխատություններ, pg. 218–228. Jan. 2021.

². Akinyemi, Akintunde. “The Aesthetics of Yoruba Recreational Chants.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 31, no. 4, pg. 89–103. Indiana University Press. Fall 2000.

³. Morgans, Julian. “Investigating the Origins of the S, Again.” VICE. Mar. 6, 2017: bit.ly/3IqfsVx.

⁴. Cray, Kate. “How the Coronavirus Is Influencing Children’s Play.” The Atlantic. Apr. 1, 2020: bit.ly/4gFJwsU.

⁵. Mayer, Beth Ann. “Everything to Know About the Fairy-Flying Trend: Why Mental Health Professionals Are Concerned.” Parade. Aug. 3, 2023: bit.ly/4nHwQUA.

⁶. Patston, Manning. “The Backrooms: An Eerie Phenomenon Lies Behind These Familiar Hallways.” Happy Mag. Nov. 23, 2022: bit.ly/46DqSgy.

⁷. Percival, Tom. “Severance Was Influenced by this Terrifying Online Urban Legend.” The Digital Fix. May 7, 2024: bit.ly/48xdayk.

⁸. Sadashiv K, Sakshi. “The Art of Absurdity: Resurgence of Dadaism through Gen Z Memes.” ArtNowThus. Apr. 11, 2023: bit.ly/428TcWT.