Island dancer, choreographer and actor-playwright Abby Bender unveiled her latest spooky-season performance piece for a series of rapt — and sometimes terrified — audiences during the Halloween season.

Ms. Bender is the founder of the annual Built on Stilts dance festival that takes place each August. The offseason finds her creative spirit moving in many directions, including the supernatural.

5ister5 of the Ark was an hour-long, immersive theatre piece that transformed a rambling Camp Ground cottage in Oak Bluffs into the haunted home of a ghostly family.

“The house spoke to me about what it wanted to be,” Ms. Bender, while reflecting back on the show.

Cass Tunick and Katherine Reid as part of 5ister5 of the Ark. — Ron Wyman

Ms. Bender said she is always on the lookout for Island homeowners willing to let her create new, site-specific theatre works in which the action moves from room to room. In 2021 and 2022, she collaborated with Island dancer and educator Jesse Keller Jason on the Oak Bluffs Halloween work Rizing.

For 5ister5 of the Ark, she borrowed catering tablecloths to swathe the homeowners’ contemporary furniture and decor, creating the effect of a closed-up cottage that had changed little since the 1870s. Ms. Bender and actor Danielle Mulcahy addressed the audience as the latest crop of youngsters to arrive at “Camp Hippocampus.” Both women were clad as camp leaders with yellow knee socks, Bermuda shorts and Scout-style sashes covered with badges.

Their first activity as Pinkletink campers would be to tour the old house, once home to a family of 19th-century healers but long abandoned now... or so it is said.

In fact, the Pinkletinks found spirits and visions in every room of the house, from a pair of ghostly caretakers in the kitchen to the unquiet shades of five spinster sisters who were named after the daughters of Greco-Roman medical deity Asclepius.

For extra eeriness, four of the sisters had parasitic twins who died before birth but appear full-grown as ghosts. Between visits to the ghosts’ rooms, the Pinkletinks also endured pranks and jump-scares from older campers, played by Laura Sargent Hall, Libby Stackhouse and Katie Federowicz Perez.

Cass Tunick as Aceso and Lucia Gianetta as Iaso. — Ron Wyman

Ms. Bender said Camp Hippocampus grew out of a 20-minute act she and Ms. Mulcahy developed last year for the Circuit Arts off-season variety show, Locals.

Other Island actors in the show were Katharine Reid as Panacea, Roberta Kirn as Hygeia, Scott Crawford as Aegle and J.P. Hitesman and David Mintz playing the caretaker ghosts.

Ms. Bender lured two New York actors as well. Lucia Gianetta, who has appeared in several Broadway shows, played Iaso, and Cass Tunick, who works in the improvisational method known as Action Theatre, played the raging Aceso and all four of her sisters’ twin shades.

“She’s absolutely brilliant [and] she loves the artistic community out here,” said Ms. Bender, who performed with Ms. Tunick during this year’s Built on Stilts.

Writing ghost twins for four of the sisters was Ms. Bender’s solution to casting Ms. Tunick as all five, she said.

“I’m a Gemini. I always love twins. I love doppelgangers in general. [And] I knew that Cassie can’t be in two places at once,” she said.

Ms. Tunick is eager to reprise her roles next year, although Ms. Bender said the owners of the house haven’t yet offered it for a 2025 production. But they did attend 5ister5 of the Ark twice during this year’s run, she said.

Given the fact that the cast is often larger than the audience, tickets to Ms. Bender’s house-based performances generally sell out soon after she announces them to her email list (shakes9999@yahoo.com).

Her website abbybenderworks.com includes photos and videos of past performances, with media from 5ister5 of the Ark expected soon.

Over the winter, Ms. Bender is looking forward to taking part in the Locals variety show at the Grange again and to bringing back the live game show Membership Down, in which she and her cousin, Bunch of Grapes Bookstore owner Molly Coogan, put contestants through a series of entertaining challenges to raise money for the winners’ chosen charities.

“I’m not sure where we’re going to do it this year, but we’ll definitely do one,” Ms. Bender said.