The title is Haunted House, but don’t expect a campy, Halloween boo factory when you head out to Miscellaneous Productions’ latest site-specific work.

Yes, it will take place in an old house rumoured to be home to a few historic ghosts—the West End’s late-19th-century Barclay Manor. And yes, the show will have spooky music and scary stories that will sometimes send chills up your spine.

But Haunted House is about the real memories that haunt a group of urban youths. Through monologues, dance, design, and music, they share some of their most painful ghosts with an audience of only 30 each night.

Miscellaneous Productions artistic director Elaine Carol, who works with youths aged 15 to 25, says the idea for the project arose while she was putting together the company’s last work, Power, in 2009. Through that process, the teens and young adults divulged stories about their lives that she calls horrific, ranging from past family trauma to the experience of racism.

“With this project, we started with their real stories and we trained them at a university level in writing, acting, singing, all forms of contemporary dance, various acting methods, voice work, and drumming,” says Carol, who has worked with the core group of seven youths over the past year to create the interdisciplinary work. She’s sitting on a bench in the serene, sunlit garden outside the mansion, where the cast will perform on four evenings. “I work with them really closely to mine their lives for stories. It’s a very profound piece. I asked them to dig deep, but I also need to keep them safe.”

Twenty-five-year-old participant Mitchell Saddleback agrees the process of creating Haunted House and summoning the demons from his past has been a life-changing experience, one he hopes might help others who view the immersive theatre piece. In the work, Saddleback, who grew up on a First Nations reserve in Alberta, talks about the problems of suicide and abuse there, two issues that have taken a toll on his own family.

“At the beginning I was hesitant about what I was going to share—then it turned out to be way bigger than I thought it was going to be,” says the affable Saddleback, joining Carol at the park. “My story is extremely personal. I didn’t know how personal I was going to get. I looked at it and I thought, ‘I’ve never shared this with anybody and now I’m sharing it with everybody. I hope it can get people to talk about things—to talk about suicide and depression.’”

Haunted House begins out back of the grand old mansion, on one of its round rear decks, where the cast plays gamelan music on instruments made from bicycle parts (the result of training by Publik Secrets, a local team of fabricators, artists, and musicians that animates public spaces). Female ghosts (several of them played by professional performers who have come out of Carol’s program) lead the audience along the veranda and then inside, to the historic rooms in the house, where actors express their stories through everything from words to hip-hop dance. They break from whispering chants into solo pieces, with extra, eerie atmosphere provided by cello master Cris Derksen’s music.

The stories include a first-generation Chinese Canadian talking about racism he faced at a Vancouver high school, a son talking about a mother’s abusive boyfriend, and a young woman having to deal with a parent’s death from cancer.

“People have shown so much courage coming forth with the innermost parts of their lives. It’s so much a piece about childhood,” comments Carol.

The memories are dark and haunting, but the group has built humour into the work, as well—a survival skill if ever there was one. And Carol admits she and her team have had a lot of fun playing with the idea of horror movies; she assigned five or six of them as homework viewing.

What Carol has found is that the framework of performance and the horror-movie construct provide her actors with a sort of armour that allows them to share their inner ghosts. “Theatre provides a shield,” she explains, adding that their hands-on involvement in everything from the look of the show to its music also empowers them. “You’re not in group therapy where you’re getting up and telling your story.”

Haunted House is at 1447 Barclay Street on Saturday and Sunday (August 15 and 16) and August 22 and 23.