Screenshot from the Halloween Horror Night 18 website, Universal Studios Florida, 2008.
A Note About “Legendary Truth 2008:” The following information describes characters from the Halloween Horror Nights 18 (2008) alternate reality game, “Legendary Truth: The Collective.” The game unfolded over the course of several months, as new puzzles were revealed and new events occurred inside the confines of the Universal Studios Florida theme park. The purpose of the game was to create an elaborate storyline that interconnected the event’s various haunted houses and scarezones. This storyline placed the attractions and characters into a pseudo-historical context: most of the characters mentioned in “Legendary Truth: The Collective” are entirely fictional, yet their back stories depict them as ancestors, descendants or other relations of real, formerly-living persons.
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On this date in 1920, Diane Bennet, an unassuming Vocal Coach who would later become Dr. Mary Agana’s fifth patient (and victim), was born. Bennet will join our story later, as her familial involvement actually begins many years earlier with her mother, Alice Dodgson.
Alice was born out of wedlock to an unnamed minor and a young clergyman named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. As a result of the birth, Charles Dodgson was forced out of the priesthood, and soon began supporting himself through writing. As he penned what would become his most famous work, Dodgson assumed a pseudonym. In 1865, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” was published under the pen name Lewis Carroll (source).
In 1908, six-year-old Alice Dodgson was a student at the one-room schoolhouse of Carey Elementary. On August 27 of the same year, the school’s teacher, Miss Mary Worthington, disappeared under suspicious circumstances. While none of the pupils would admit complicity, the schoolhouse featured signs of possible foul-play, including broken glass and blood. The room also bore the signs of what many attribute to a Halloween prank gone wrong: candles, mirrors and written copies of incantations.
Diane Bennet first enters the story proper in 1950, when, at the age of 30, she was married to a man named Frank Bennet. Within a few years, claims of infidelity arose. A private investigator and photographer, Boris Shuster and Charlie McPherson, respectively, were secretly hired and soon produced proof of impropriety. In July of 1958, the marriage between Diane and Frank Bennet was officially ended.
It’s entirely possible that the stress of a failed relationship exacerbated pre-existing conditions on the part of Ms. Bennet. What is known with certainty is that she suffered from stuttering (a condition inherited from both her mother and father) and severe cases of bibliophobia and metrophobia, the fears of books and poetry, respectively. In an attempt to cure herself of these afflictions, and her tendency to assume the fetal position and cry hysterically, Bennet became the fifth patient of Dr. Mary Agana and her “Living Fearlessly” program.
Sadly, by this time, Agana had already begun her descent into madness. Her course of ‘treatment’ for Bennet involved surrounding her with a therapy circle comprised of mental patients from a local psychiatric hospital. On Agana’s command, the mental patients began reciting lines from various classic stories. Unable to escape, Bennet collapsed in terror. Whether she expired from the terror induced by the gibbering patients, or whether they actually murdered her in their fervor is unknown. What is known, however, is that on August 8, 1958, the date of her only treatment by Dr. Mary Agana, Diane Bennet lost her life.
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