The Midnight Mansion
submitted by the webmaster
This story basically will examine even further Midnight’s participation with the Internet by digging out our own memories and checking historical data from the web. Again, as with his music, same with his web presence there was a mystic and magical aura around….
Midnight’s second website was the “Official Midnight Mansion Forum” located at the address TheMidnightMansion.com. The site was launched during the Halloween of 2003 and was last updated in September 2006. Since then, the domain name TheMidnightMansion.com has not been used on anything else and who knows what will host in the future….
The site was actually a forum where members could discuss about several music and non-music subjects. Midnight was one of the administrators along with members Juggernaut and Shadow who were building the website together with him.
What made this forum a magical experience, was a maze of black and white, Victorian style artistic and bizarre pictures. In order to get to the ‘sign in’ page of the forum, visitors had to click through those images and go thought several rooms of the Mansion. If you were in a hurry you could easily go round in circles for some time clicking on doors and windows. It wasn’t an easy ‘enter here’ site. You had to move your mouse around the picture and spot where exactly the cursor would indicate a next page! You would have to think where the next passage could actually be. The Back button provided, didn’t take you to the previous page you came from. Sometimes it was the view behind you!
It was an adventurous experience and even though I was never a member of the forum I would challenge some friends to enter his site… no wonder why most gave up after a couple of minutes!
This beautiful labyrinth of strange imagery was one of his brilliant ideas. Although the origin of these photos is unclear to me, it was mentioned on the forum that Midnight hand picked all of them. It was also mentioned that “most of the rooms and hallways are really haunted places”. Nevertheless, you were getting a sense of a mysterious Role Playing Game.
The forum had a strong community sense with members submitting their own lyrics, poems and music as well as music and movie reviews. Apart from the discussions around Midnight’s music, you could ask questions directly to him on the “Telephone” thread. There were special threads related to Crimson Glory and to Ben Jackson Group. The most interesting and apparently most active sections of the forum were “The Attic” (Dream Interpretations by Midnight), “The Basement” (Paranormal activities as well as War and Politics discussion/debate) and the “Midnight Mass” (Theology: Spiritual, religious and cosmic questions and theory).
Thanks to archive.org anyone can have a small glimpse of what The Midnight Mansion was. Unfortunately not the entire site has been archived. Many photos are missing and if you try to access the threads you will manage to enter just a few. Those who were members of the Mansion are the lucky ones to keep some of its magic in their hearts!
* Photos on the left column and below are from The Mansion
* check archive.org for the archived website
