Spooky Machine: A Local Qwen Ghost Story Generator

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Ghost in the Machine Submission 👻🌼

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine

Spooky Machine is a small ghost story generator. Give it a premise—like a locked bedroom door opening at midnight—and it asks a locally running open-weight model to turn that idea into an atmospheric story.

I started with the challenge’s smart-home-sensor prompt, then pared the project back to one thing: telling scary ghost stories. No sensors, accounts, saved stories, or extra controls—just an idea and a story.

The MVP runs locally. To try it on a computer with Ollama and Qwen3 4B installed:

ollama create spooky-qwen3 -f Modelfile python server.py Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Then open http://127.0.0.1:8000, optionally enter a story idea, and click Tell me a ghost story.

A tiny ghost story generator powered by a local open-weight model.

Install Python 3.11+ and Ollama, then run:

ollama create spooky - qwen3 -f Modelfile python server.py Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode The Modelfile makes a small spooky-qwen3 variant from your already-installed Qwen3 model and disables its reasoning prefix, so the app gets the story instead of the model's planning text. Open http://127.0.0.1:8000, optionally add a story idea, and ask for a ghost story. Your idea stays on this computer.

If you don't have qwen3:4b yet, run ollama pull qwen3:4b first. Run the tests with: