On the Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge over Austin’s Lady Bird Lake last Sunday evening, a loose group of people began to shift and glance at one another. Just before seven, a murmuring started through the crowd.
“Are you here for the scream thing?” someone finally dared. We were all here for the scream thing. It was the first meeting of Scream Club Austin: a recurring invitation for strangers to gather briefly and scream in a public space as a form of free, primal therapy. Screaming publicly to release emotion—even with a group—isn’t new, but this wave of the movement kicked off with the establishment Scream Club Chicago, which has been holding weekly meetings since June and recently got a fresh wave of attention, spurring offshoots around the country like the Austin iteration.
While the group waited for an organizer to reveal themselves, I asked people on the bridge what they had come to scream about. The question proved personal; a handful of people politely declined to answer. Showing up to express public rage, after all, isn’t the same as wanting to share—or in some cases, admit to—what’s behind it.
But like those friends who don’t mind recounting in great detail what they discuss in therapy, others in the crowd openly divulged the fuel behind their screams to come. Tony Bellegante cited “everything,” which made his friends laugh. And, after being prompted for something more specific: “Sure, the country’s descent into fascism.” Bellegante wasn’t alone. Several attendees’ responses could be summarized as “everything” or “the state of things”; a broad, circling gesture meant to say “all of it” accompanied others. But for some, their screams were more personal.
“My dad has terminal cancer, so I’m actually in a really fixed season of grief,” Harleen Singh said. She’d met up with her friend Sonia Mammen on the bridge. Mammen immediately teared up when I asked her what she came to scream about. “I am approaching 22 years since my own dad’s passing, and I just have a lot of friends going through hard times,” she said, looking at Singh. They weren’t the only pair who brought a friend to share in their release.
“We’re both involved in a lawsuit that was very morally wrong, and it’s still going on,” two friends told me. “We can’t move on until it’s over, so we came out here to scream about it.”
Joanna Evergarden hadn’t really thought about what she’d shown up to scream about. “Oh, what are other people saying?” she asked. “I was just going to let my vocal chords go—but if I have to scream about something, I’m trans, so I’d probably scream about that. Just my frustration with the dehumanizing policies coming down from this administration.”
Matt Hislope offered an explanation for why so many people turned out for the event. “There’s a [mental health] practice that my friend just started where you shake and scream and yell for an hour straight, and this seemed sort of similar. You can pay a fair amount of money for those kinds of experiences, so if they’re offering this for free . . . ” he said. “Doing this in a group, too, is more powerful than anything I could do on my own. Especially in these particular times, a bunch of people screaming in unison is very powerful.”
By the time organizer Krystal Morris set a sign that read “Ever feel the need to scream? Join us!” in a garden bed and called the crowd to attention, the group was fully abuzz.
Morris, who has worked as a dog trainer in Austin for over a decade, later told me she’d been toying with the idea of a “vent club” for months before organizing the Austin chapter of Scream Club. “Austin has so many clubs—running clubs and book clubs and silent clubs. I mean, it’s lovely, but you see 300 people running and you’re like, ‘Good Lord,’ right?” Jogging wasn’t the outlet Morris was looking for. After enough small annoyances piled up for her this summer (the AC at her house went out, and the AC in her van followed), she yearned for a place to vent openly. “Just complain, you know?” Morris said. “I don’t need someone to tell me how to fix this. I just need to get it out of my system.”
After Morris saw Scream Club Chicago take off, she reached out to the group’s founding organizers, who encouraged her to go forth and scream. Morris was put in touch with new scream clubs popping up in Seattle, Savannah, and even Puerto Rico. Their leaders shared tips on creating the right vibe for meetings and coaching breathing exercises for large groups. Morris briefly instructed screamers on which side of the bridge to face, showed them how to fully unleash without injuring their voices, and led them through a quick body-loosening exercise. “I’m nervous,” someone whispered as Morris counted loudly down from three. Then: Screams.
On cue, a loud roar rose above the bridge and out over the waters of Lady Bird Lake. The screams varied in length and then finally trailed off. Some in the group broke into giggles. Morris seemed unfazed. Part of the act, she told me, was feeling a little silly after screaming, prior to feeling the cathartic effects. From what I could tell looking around at the crowd, she was right. Morris led the group in three more screams, each louder than the one before and with less giggling in between. These folks had come for release, and the absurdity of yelling off a bridge with some two hundred strangers wasn’t going to keep them from achieving it.
After the final scream, the group quickly disbanded. Morris said she hopes to introduce more social opportunities, like getting ice cream afterwards, to club meetings down the line. “I want to keep it fun but create a real community. I think that’s the beauty in a club like this: You’re building communities.”
About twenty minutes after the meeting adjourned, as I walked back to my car, I heard a lone, guttural scream erupt from the bridge. Someone’s “Hell, yeah!” followed. Screaming can’t alter your circumstances or the amount of control you have over “all of it.” It doesn’t really affect any large-scale change. But it can feel good to be heard at full volume—if only by a group of strangers, briefly, on a bridge.
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