“Draw a house and a tree.” The page looks like a friendly personality quiz. You sketch a little person and tap “Analyze.” A progress bar appears: “Reading your drawing… 35%.” Nothing strange so far.
Then a black dot appears in the house's window. You didn't draw it. Moments later it has eyes. And while the result loads, the face moves closer without a single extra click. You came to learn about yourself and somehow ended up performing an accidental summoning.
The first screen must be completely ordinary
Let visitors choose colors, draw freely and see their artwork in a small preview. Rounded buttons, a bright layout, a promise of an amusing result. The first dark mark could easily be mistaken for an accidental brushstroke.
But then the status changes to “Counting people in the picture.” You drew one. The system finds two. It hasn't even decided whether you're an introvert, and there's already an uninvited houseguest.
The face advances without asking you
Making the ghost clickable would be an easy trick: click for a scary screen. The stronger idea is that nothing needs clicking. The loading animation progresses, and so does the thing inside the drawing.
At 60%, it looks straight at you. At 80%, its face barely fits inside the preview. “Analyzing” quietly changes to “Connecting.” You created the picture, but something inside it seems to control what happens next.
The tension is in not knowing when it will move again. An experiment on anxious anticipation found that uncertainty about the timing of a threat can intensify defensive responses.[1] That's inspiration for the scene, not proof that this imaginary website would frighten everyone.
Curiosity turns the loading bar into a trap
The visitor didn't arrive looking for a ghost. They wanted to know what their drawing reveals. One well-known account of curiosity describes a gap between what we know and what we want to find out.[2] A progress bar promises to close that gap.
But the strange face opens a second question: Who is it? Why is it in my picture? Worse, this isn't a stock horror photograph. It's the visitor's own drawing, freshly made and suddenly changing against their will. That personal-invasion effect is a creative hypothesis, not an experimentally measured result.
Make it scary enough to watch, not too scary to finish
A field study of 110 haunted-house visitors found that enjoyment tended to peak at intermediate levels of fear.[3] Starting with an enormous ghost and an ear-splitting sound might simply make people leave.
The spot becomes eyes; the eyes become a stare; the stare becomes an approach. In the story, the process cannot be stopped. In reality, the browser page must always be closable, with an option to pause the animation and no intense flashing or sudden volume spikes.
At 100%, the “result” appears: “We weren't analyzing your personality. We were checking whether something could leave your drawing.”
You never signed up for that test. Apparently, the ghost passed. The real twist isn't that there was a face in your picture: it's that you were part of someone else's experiment all along.
References (3)
- If or when? Uncertainty’s role in anxious anticipation (2018) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Loewenstein (1994), The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation doi.org
- Andersen et al. (2020), Playing With Fear: A Field Study in Recreational Horror pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
