On Halloween night, when the old saying goes that spirits roam the earth, Schenectady's 8th Step at Proctors will fill its Addy Theatre with witches, ghosts and a professor who may or may not be entirely human. The show is called Whispering Bones: Season of the Witches, and it has become something of a local ritual for anyone who likes their holiday scares served with a side of storytelling craft rather than jump scares and fake blood.
The production centers on Erastus Betterov-Underhill, a character who leads a troupe of storytellers through an evening built entirely around witch tales. According to The Daily Gazette, the role of Dr. Betterov-Underhill is played by Kelvin Keraga, who also created the show itself. Keraga, 74, launched Whispering Bones 16 years before this year's performance, per the same report, and has spent that time gathering the ghost stories that make up each year's program.
This year's lineup leans hard into witchcraft, but not the kind most people expect. Keraga has said the show explores witches beyond classic witchcraft, a framing echoed by a listing on secure.qgiv.com, which describes the program as featuring witches who haunt nightmares, provoke suspicion, make audiences laugh or even heal souls. The same listing notes the program includes works such as “The Sea's Dead” by Katharine Tynan and “The Room in the Tower” by E.F. Benson, alongside an original piece called “Ere the Fire/After the Fire” and an episode of “Shannah's Spell Closet.”
Who's Telling the Tales
The Daily Gazette's reporting lists a cast that includes Barbara Chepaitis, Katherine Danforth-Hayes, Jackie DeGeorgis, Jewell Winant, Shawn Paper and Isabel Coviello joining Keraga onstage. Event listings from 8thstep.org have at times named different combinations of performers for the production over the years, including one listing crediting Barbara Chepaitis, Catherine Danforth, Gabriel Fabian, Tony Malinowski, Mary Murphy and David Steele, and another naming Tanya Gorlow, Jeannine Haas, Kerry Kazmierowicztrimm, Tony Malinowski and a group billed as The Snickering Witches. The venue's own materials describe the production broadly as a mix of creepy, comic and thought-provoking ghost stories, performed in the Addy Theatre on the third floor of Proctors, reachable via the lobby elevator in the Box Office arcade.
According to The Daily Gazette, showtime at 8th Step at Proctors on Halloween night is 7 p.m. Keraga has said he has personally collected the ghost stories that populate the show, a process that has stretched across the production's run. The show's official site describes this year's material as spooky, funny and sometimes disturbing, but without gore, and suitable for middle-schoolers or older, according to whisperingbones.com.
A Tradition With a Few Blurry Edges
Exactly how long Whispering Bones has been running depends on which account you consult. The production's own about page states the show began in 2011, while a separate 8th Step event listing referenced celebrating “13 lucky years” and another 2026 listing on arts.ny.gov describes the show as marking its 14th year. The Daily Gazette's own account places the show's launch 16 years before this year's performance. None of those figures are reconciled in the available materials, so the exact anniversary remains something of a mystery befitting a ghost-story show.
Whispering Bones isn't confined to Schenectady this fall. The production is also scheduled for Oct. 29 at 7:30 p.m. at the Sand Lake Center for the Arts in Averill Park, and Hubbard Hall in Cambridge, New York, hosted its own run of the storytelling event on Oct. 23 and 24, directed by Hubbard Hall board member Kelvin Keraga, according to the Bennington Banner. A separate production at Fort Salem Theater describes its own version of Whispering Bones as a mix of classic, creepy and comic ghost stories featuring works tied to Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Wilkins Freeman and E.F. Benson, per fortsalem.com.
Literary Roots and a Veteran Byline
The Daily Gazette's piece draws a literary thread back to The Yellow Wallpaper, the short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and published in the early 1890s, which centers on a woman confined by her physician husband under the guise of medical treatment. The article was authored by Don Wilcock, who began writing about music at U.S. Army headquarters in Vietnam and was inducted into the Eddie Hall of Fame in 2024, according to the same report published by The Daily Gazette in its Life & Arts section.
For Schenectady audiences looking for a Halloween outing that trades costumes and candy for atmosphere and craft, Whispering Bones offers a long-running, if slightly fuzzy-dated, alternative. Whatever year it technically is for the production, the formula of witch-themed tales, a changing cast of local storytellers and a theater tucked on the third floor of Proctors has clearly found an audience willing to come back every October.
