In a more than 250-year-old warehouse on a rainy autumn evening just days before Halloween, a team of artists, musicians and actors are concocting entertainment fit for the season.

“There’s a ghost story in the Japanese tale; Appalachia is the Boogeyman, and the Irish tale is a ghost story with a funny twist … classic Irish storytelling,” island artist Monica Gripman said about this weekend’s puppet show, “Darkness Illuminated: Tales of Darkness.”

The show, which will be performed Friday and Saturday night at the Katherine L White Hall, is promised to be as spooky as it sounds. Through the use of handcrafted, lifelike marionettes — created by Northwest Puppet Center and given life by Gripman, who is known for her felted animal sculptures that many say have a lively soul — the show tells three folk tales from three different cultures. The roughly 18 different puppets, which take the forms of humans of all shapes and sizes as well as life-size dogs, will be joined on the stage by masked and costumed actors and musicians.

The show represents the kind of collaborative spirit islanders pride themselves in and, for Gripman, is the culmination of years of work. Gripman has been making her unique felted sculptures that exude a mysterious, animate nature — for years. It all started when she bought a felting kit from the pharmacy to make her daughter a bunny rabbit — but did not give much thought to puppets until she was commissioned three or four years ago by an island man who wanted her to make a marionette for his grandson. Knowing nothing about the making of puppets, she partnered with Dmitri Carter of Northwest Puppet Center in Seattle. He made the puppet, while Gripman gave it a face, hands, feet, hair and clothing.

“That was my first taste of how that all goes together,” Gripman said. “There was also the whole interaction with my felted sculptures and people coming up to me saying they would start having conversations (with the sculptures) expecting them to move. I figured I should make puppets.”

With Carter’s guidance, a $6,500 Arts Projects grant from 4Culture — King County’s cultural services organization — and a fearless attitude, she began work on the puppets that would become part of the “Darkness Illuminated” cast. It was a collaboration from the beginning with Carter doing the structure of the puppet and Gripman taking over to add hands, feet, faces, hair and clothing.

“I just decided to give it a shot and say, ‘Here we go,'” Gripman said. “It is an experiment. A lot of people are doing this stuff for the first time ever. We’re jumping in, and we’re going to see what we make.”

While learning new things through the making of the puppets, Gripman went back to what she knew when coming up with the show’s storyline.

“Two of the three stories (in ‘Darkness Illuminated’) were bedtime stories from my childhood,” she said. “That’s right, bedtime stories. My mother wasn’t very discerning with the stories she told before bed. One of them gave me nightmares well into my 20s.”

She said her mother would talk about the ghosts she experienced as a young woman growing up in Japan, family ghost stories that were told and retold through generations.

“This one that I chose is particularly terrifying. It stuck out to me,” she said.

The Appalachian boogeyman story also comes from her childhood. Gripman said that, growing up in Virginia, the story was a classic known by everyone. As for the Irish story, it’s one she found that is similar to another childhood story.

“I wanted to do projects around these stories for a long time, but nothing ever quite fit,” she said. “I realized puppets would be the perfect medium.”

Any more details about the stories would spoil the show, but a post on Gripman’s company Facebook page, Fable Collections, tells audience members to “expect monsters and beasts to come to life as each grisly saga unfolds.”

Involved in the telling of the saga are island musicians Chai St. Marie, Jon Whalen, John Browne and Craig Sutherland; actors and puppeteers Jyl Brewer, Sandra Cooper, Bernadette LaCarte, Nicole Meoli, Pablo Paeni and many others, including islander Emily Burns, who is a puppeteer assistant and has been hard at work for months creating the feet and paws of the lifelike puppets.

“I’ve had women I’ve spent a lot of time with and know really well start telling me of their own stories about their interactions with these creatures. They create this storytelling ability in your own mind,” Burns said. “They come to life through eyes, movement, gestures; inanimate objects become very much their own.”

And that ability for the puppets to come to life is what is going to make this weekend’s show something so different.

“It’s a fantastical experience. It comes through in movies like ‘Labyrinth’ or the Muppets where you have these interactions (between humans and puppets), but this show is for a mature audience. It’s not limiting itself to genre of a child. It doesn’t just pander to one demographic; it’s very much an adult experience,” Burns said.

“Darkness Illuminated: Tales of Darkness” will premiere at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 28, at the Katherine L White Hall. A second showing will be at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 29.

Tickets are at vashoncenterforthearts.org and are $16 for VCA members and students, $18 for seniors and $20 general admission.