Ominous music begins playing a few seconds before the sound of feet stepping on creaky wood.
"This is it, you guys," a young man says. "No chickening out."
"We all have to do this. We can't leave until we find out how this girl died," a girl says.
Through the somber music and sinister sounds, we soon learn a group of teenagers has gone to a haunted house to find out what happened to Mary Ann, who supposedly died at the hands of her mother. It's radio drama — but not your grandparents' radio drama.
"Damn, this stuff is hella old," a young man says as he walks through the dusty mansion.
The radio drama was the idea of Christian Lamonea, who teaches English for at-risk youth at Rancho Cielo in Salinas. He thought the project would be a way for his students to learn how to use new technology and put into practice their language lessons.
"The one forgotten thing of teaching English is speaking, speaking with conviction," Lamonea said. "Then I wanted to bring back the old-school radio theater to make a story come alive, and teach the students what makes a good storyteller. It's been a great process."
Lamonea, who teaches through the Silver Star Program, took advantage of a relationship he has built with CSU Monterey Bay and its service learning program. Lamonea has worked on several projects with CSUMB instructor Steven Levinson, whose media students collaborated on the radio shows.
Inspired by H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds," the Rancho Cielo and CSUMB students decided scary stories were their thing. They were divided into two groups of about five people each. One produced "The Ghost of Mary Ann," the other "The Forward," a story about a murdered teenager who sends text messages to his tormentors from the grave.
"It was a different experience," said Stephanie Jimenez, 17. "I learned a lot of things I didn't know, like how to make (the sound) of steps."
It took the students about two months to complete the show, from coming up with the story to recording it.
"It was like shooting a movie," said Edgar Jimenez, 17. "We did our sound effects, we recorded our voices."
At first, the group of street-wise students had a hard time buying into the project, Edgar said. But that changed as the days went by.
"We were like, 'It's too much work, it's boring, I'm not good with the equipment,'" he said. "Then we got into it, we started getting better and better. We came out feeling successful."
Thomas Stevens, a 26-year-old CSUMB student majoring in cinematic arts and technology, worked with the Rancho Cielo students as part of his service learning project. CSUMB is the only public university in California where service learning is a requirement for all students, university officials say.
"These kids had never written a script before, so it was very challenging for them, but I am pleasantly surprised with their scripts, I thought they did a great job," Stevens wrote in an email. "The kids were very hesitant and reluctant at first, but as they took notice of what they were creating together, they began to focus. The kids wrote their own script, acted out their own parts and found all their own sounds. All we did was just guide them along and teach them how to record, write a script, find the sound files and edit."
Last week, a handful of Rancho Cielo students had the opportunity to visit the Salinas offices of Radio Bilingue to broadcast their stories, an opportunity that thrilled them.
"It's good — the kids had a smile on their faces, they got into it, they got into their groove," Lamonea said. "They had a peaceful, friendly competition on who could have the scariest story. It was the fire, it was the spark. It's the spark when you're teaching something so good everyone enjoys it on all sorts of levels."
Claudia Meléndez Salinas can be reached at 753-6755 or email@example.com.