The rules are simple and a little ruthless: the story has to be true, it has to be yours, and it has to be over in five minutes. On the night of October 9, 2026, the storytellers who signed up ahead of time won't know their running order until someone reaches into a hat and pulls out a name. Then they'll walk to the front of the sanctuary at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Savannah, 311 East Harris Street, and try to scare a room full of their neighbors in under 300 seconds.
The event is called Spooky Stories, presented by Savannah Stories. The format borrows from the long tradition of true-story slams and open-mic nights that have spread through American cities over the past two decades, but it strips the genre down to its essentials. No slides, no props, no rehearsal-heavy monologue. Just a person, a microphone, and a memory they can't quite explain.
The theme for the evening is the eerie: real-life encounters, mysterious happenings, the kind of thing that gets told at a kitchen table and then, years later, still doesn't sit right. Organizers promise an evening that is fast-paced by design, since a room full of five-minute stories moves quickly and leaves no space for a dud to drag. Doors open at 6 p.m., the show starts at 7 p.m., and the suggested donation is $5 per attendee. Concessions will be sold at the door. All ages are welcome to attend, and, notably, all ages are welcome to tell a story too, which means the lineup could plausibly include a retired nurse and a middle schooler on the same bill.
Storytellers who want a slot are asked to submit through a form linked from the event listing before the show. The hat draw on the night of the performance determines the order, a small piece of stagecraft that does two things at once: it keeps the evening unpredictable, and it quietly signals that no one in the room is more important than anyone else. There is no headliner. There is no featured guest. There is a hat.
The venue is a fitting one for a night of strange tales. The Unitarian Universalist Church of Savannah has been a fixture on East Harris Street for generations, and it carries a nickname that surprises almost everyone who hears it: the Jingle Bells Church. The church notes that composer James L. Pierpont was one time music director of the church. A plaque in Medford, Massachusetts, claims the song was written there in 1850, and the two cities have been arguing about it ever since. As the Unitarian Universalist history magazine UU World has put it, puzzling out the origins of "Jingle Bells" is something of a holiday tradition itself. One Savannah historian has cast doubt on the Sunday-school-origin story on the grounds that no mid-1800s Sunday school would have permitted lyrics like "Go it while you're young."
Whatever the true birthplace of the sleigh-ride song, the church on East Harris Street has a legitimate claim to being the place where it was first locked down on paper.
The building's resume doesn't stop at a Christmas carol. The congregation describes itself as the only Unitarian Universalist church in the United States to operate a radio station. That station, WRUU 107.5 FM, known on air as Savannah Soundings, grew out of the Local Community Radio Act of 2010, which opened the airwaves to low-power FM community stations for the first time in more than a decade. According to the station's own history, the effort began with a conversation in early summer 2013, a community survey that July, and an FCC permit by December of that year, with more than 60 volunteers working to get the station on the air. It received what it describes as the first new permit to build a local Savannah station in over 15 years. A ribbon-cutting ceremony followed on September 20, 2015, after almost three years of volunteer labor. The church also hosts Savannah's annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day concert and produces the Music Alliance Concert Series.
In other words, the room where a stranger will stand up in October to describe something they saw and cannot account for is a room with a long history of people standing up to say things out loud: sermons, concerts, radio broadcasts, and now ghost stories.
That mix of civic institution and open microphone is part of what makes the Savannah Stories format work. Storytelling nights like this tend to succeed or fail on the honesty of the room, and the hat draw is a structural nudge in the direction of honesty. When the order is random, the audience can't pre-sort the evening into "the good ones" and "the filler." Everyone gets the same five minutes and the same silence around them.
There is also something specifically Savannah about the premise. This is a city that has built an entire tourism economy on ghost tours, haunted pubs, and cemetery walks, where the line between history and haunting is a professional asset. Spooky Stories takes that same appetite and points it inward, at the people who actually live here rather than the ones who visit. The ghosts on the bill are the ones that followed somebody home.
For $5, or whatever a listener cares to give, an audience gets somewhere between a dozen and two dozen true stories, told by people who have no particular reason to be good at this and every reason to be believed. Some will land. Some will ramble. One or two will probably get a laugh that the teller didn't intend. And at least one, if the format holds, will make the sanctuary feel a little colder than it did when everyone walked in.
Doors open at 6 p.m. on October 9. The hat comes out at 7.