This paper describes the critical and creative process behind Portsmyth, a supernatural story telling an alternative version of our city. It discusses a practice-led research collaboration at the University of Portsmouth which has produced an interactive narrative set along local streets, with a blend of real and imaginary characters based on local history and legend. It includes extracts from the game script, devised as an immersive ‘choose your own adventure’, through collective research into some notorious figures of fear and intrigue, forgotten in the locations which still bear traces of their terrifying tales. A civil war assassin, an exorcist of 1998s council estates, and Jolly Jack, the sinister laughing sailor from the seafront amusement arcade are represented in this potential offering to dark tourism, using state-of-the-art gaming technology. The article will discuss postmodern theories of space and place, positing a third space where our novel narrative is produced. It explores the uncanny route map or chthonic city plan underpinning our creative writing, as players navigate a new view of the seafront setting for this ‘promenade performance’. It will reflect on psychoanalytic theory to illuminate the possible wellbeing benefits of this playable plotline. It summarises the relationship between narrative content and technical formats as we race between traditional literary and digital storytelling in the attempt to show the ‘Jackopalypse’, a symbolic uprising of maritime ghosts at the urban shoreline.

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