Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

“Some of these tales are very old, and they are told around the world. And most have the same origins. They are based on things that people saw or heard or experienced—or thought they did.”

Many—perhaps all—scary stories are rooted in actual fears or real-life dangers; as such, they help us cope with a scary world and with aspects of the unknown. Confronting a fear or danger in the form of a story can often, paradoxically, make us feel safer: This “catharsis” leaves us with an (empowering) sense of having faced a threat and perhaps better able to deal with the real thing. By qualifying that people have only “thought” they experienced some of these threats, the author suggests that many of them (ghosts, witches, zombies, and urban myths) are superstitions with no literal reality. All, however, allude metaphorically to real-life fears: death, old age, violence, strangers, accidents, etc.

“The boy took the toe into the kitchen and showed it to his mother. ‘It looks nice and plump,’ she said. ‘I’ll put it in the soup, and we’ll have it for supper.’”

Many tales of the uncanny begin with characters making a spectacularly bad choice. The foolishness of the mother’s decision to cook the toe has a dreamlike oddity that tells us that something supernatural is on the way. It introduces the motif of mutilation and body horror and also shows a lack of reverence for the dead, which (the “Notes” explain) is a common motif of the story’s many variants, which are all tales of revenge from beyond the grave.

“‘What do I come for?’ he said. ‘I come—for YOU!’ […] (As you shout the last words, stamp your foot and jump at someone nearby.)”

Literally a “jump story,” this tale, like the others in Part 1, only works if it is read aloud and acted out, a testimony to The Power of Stories Read Aloud. The story’s suspense, with its ghoulish descriptions of body parts, builds up to a sudden, startling action by the reader: a stamp and a jump to bring the decaying feet and body to “life” for the audience—particularly the person the reader has targeted.

“Soon the boy heard the singing again. Now it was coming down the chimney: […] ‘Me tie dough-ty walker!’ […] The dog sang right back: […] ‘Lynchee kinchy colly molly dingo dingo!’”

This tale, a variant of the preceding one, features a nightmarishly odd song, mysterious in origin and constantly rising in volume, to conjure a sense of dread and the uncanny. It also adds a dog, which, as if by magic, sings back to the voice from the chimney and then dies of terror. This element of ridiculousness, which (like many jump stories) borders on the comical, builds to a tension-breaking catharsis of fright and laughter.

“A year later Ted got sick and died. Toward the end, Sam sat up with him every night. The night Ted died, Sam said he looked just like the skeleton.”

As the author’s “Notes” explain, the skeletal “thing” that the two friends run from is a “wraith,” a ghostly premonition of how a living person (in this case, Ted) will look at the time of death. A macabre reminder of the fragility of life and the inevitability of death and an example of body horror, it offers no physical threat but instead a terrible knowledge, one that Ted seems to recognize: Unlike Sam, he takes “one look and scream[s]” (24). Healthy and vigorous at the start of the story, he wastes away and dies within a year, having looked his own death in the face.

“Terrified, her father told her the truth about Jim’s death. Then quickly he went to see Jim’s parents. They decided to open his grave. The corpse was in its coffin. But around its head they found the girl’s handkerchief.”

“Cold as Clay” is another tale of a young man who wastes away and dies, this time of a “broken heart,” due to the actions of his girlfriend’s possessive father. Guiltily, the father then deceives his daughter by keeping from her the news of the boy’s death. In ghost stories, the dead often return to the world of the living in order to correct an injustice, and here, the ghost forces the girl’s father to tell her the truth by bringing her home on the father’s horse. In many of these stories, a telling detail—often in the last sentence—confirms that the visitation was real and not a hallucination. Here, it is the handkerchief, tied tenderly by the girl around the boy’s cold forehead, that provides this chilling proof.

“After four or five years, Bill had killed so many wolves, there were hardly any left in that area. So he retired, and he vowed never to harm another wolf because wolves had made him rich.”

Having driven wolves almost to extinction in his territory, Bill makes a solemn vow never to hunt another one since he owes his wealth to them. Later, however, he breaks his promise, which always bodes ill in folktales. The uncanniness of the “white wolf” that kills him shows itself in the absence of paw prints around his corpse and in the fact that “it was never seen again” (28). Reinforcing the moral, the innocent lamb that Bill used for bait survives unscathed. The animal motif is prominent in this story.

“The next Sunday the preacher put the finger bone in the collection plate, and when a certain man happened to touch it, it stuck to his hand. The man jumped up and rubbed and scraped and tore at the bone, trying to get it off.”

As in “The Big Toe” and “The White Wolf,” a spirit reaches from beyond the grave to avenge itself on a living person. In this tale, however, the ghost enlists the help of another living person to exact this revenge. The dead girl’s accusing finger echoes the body horror of a few of the book’s jump stories (“The Big Toe,” “What Do You Come For?,” “Me Tie Dough-ty Walker!”), but with a more satisfying moral: Here, the bodily fragment exposes the true villain of the story—and in church, of all places. If your guilt is great, the dead can strike at you anywhere.

“Then the woman screamed. In the rubble was a badly burned table, like the one they had seen by the front door. On the table was the envelope they had left that morning.”

“The Guests,” unlike the book’s jump stories, deals not with an imminent peril but with a past one: The characters’ horror sinks in after the fact, with the knowledge that they have been in the presence of ghosts. In a way, this haunting is more disturbing than a jump scare since it masquerades so perfectly as everyday life, making all things suspect. As in “Cold as Clay,” the terrifying truth is driven home by a small detail: the envelope on the table in the burned-out house.

“They put you in a big black box

and cover you over with dirt and rocks.

And all goes well for about a week,

And then the coffin begins to leak.”

This gross-out ditty implies that human consciousness continues after death and that the slow process of decay will be felt (and tasted) in every detail. The cathartic shock of the song’s humor (“All goes well for about a week”) and visceral climax (eating your own pus) puncture the mystique of death, robbing it of some of its dread.

“They found her body sprawled across the grave. Without realizing it, she had plunged the knife through her skirt and had pinned it to the ground. It was only the knife that held her. She had died of fright.”

The only story in Part 3 with no apparent supernatural aspects, “The Girl Who Stood on a Grave” nevertheless dramatizes the fatal consequences of a belief in the supernatural, as the last line makes clear. As in “The White Wolf” and “The Wendigo,” the heroine’s bravado leads to her downfall. As an old tale that’s hypothetically possible, it is sometimes told as fact, which likens it to the stories in Part 4 (“Other Dangers”), such as “The Hook” and “The Babysitter.”

“He took off the bridle and went to hang it up. But when he came back, the new horse was gone. Instead, there stood his wife with horseshoes nailed to her hands and feet.”

In this tale, unlike the previous one, bravado triumphs—when combined with resourcefulness. For once, the supernatural being (a witch) loses when a clever farmhand turns her own spell against her. Here, the telling detail that reveals the shocking truth doubles as the witch’s punishment: horseshoes nailed to her hands and feet, crucifixion style.

“The driver called to him, ‘There is room for one more.’ Then he waited for a minute or two, and he drove off.”

A dreamlike vision of an eerie impossibility—a hearse filled with people in place of a coffin—warns the protagonist of an impending threat, saving his life. Unlike the premonition of early death in “The Thing,” this harbinger of doom allows the seer to avoid the fate it foretells. Though lifesaving, its macabre prescience is still terrifying. As in “The Guests” and “Cold as Clay,” the horror is mostly a delayed reaction—a sudden realization of the danger that one was in without knowing it.

“To get a look at him, he lifted the Indian’s hat. Then he screamed. There was nothing under the hat but a pile of ashes.”

The last line of this story alludes to the Indigenous American legend that the Wendigo drags her victims until “[their] feet are burned away, and more of [them] than that” (52). In another instance of body horror, DéFago’s head has been reduced to ashes, and yet he continues to ape the bodily motions of the living DéFago, such that the protagonist even recognizes him. Like “Me Tie Dough-ty Walker!,” with its bloody head and singing dog, the story is doubly uncanny: The (unseen) savagery of the Wendigo is manifested in her zombie-like victim, which proves the Indigenous American stories true while adding a jolt of visceral body horror.

“We have here his remains.

First, let’s feel his brains. (A wet, squishy tomato)

Now here are his eyes, still frozen with surprise. (Two peeled grapes)”

A component of a ghoulish party game, this gross-out poem, like “The Hearse Song” and “Old Woman All Skin and Bone,” uses cathartic humor and body horror to take the “sting” out of death. However, “The Dead Man’s Brains” takes it a step further, forcing its listeners to literally handle death in the form of the moist “organs” of a corpse (a tomato, grapes, an apricot, spaghetti) in a darkened room. As in some of the jump scare stories, which single out a particular listener with a pointing finger or a stomping foot, this visceral physical element turns the audience into participants, willing or not.

“‘Would you like to come in and have some cocoa?’ she asked. […] ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to go home.’ […] He went around to the other side of the car to let her out. Hanging on the door handle was a hook.”

As in “The Guests” or “Cold as Clay,” a shocking discovery ends the story on a note of after-the-fact horror. Though not supernatural, the hook may be more terrifying in its retrospective threat to life and limb. It also serves as comeuppance for the boyfriend, who shuns his date for her supposed cowardice—which he ascribes to her gender—only to be shown that she was wiser than him.

“The pawnbroker said he bought the dress from an undertaker’s helper. It had been used in a funeral for another young woman, and the helper had stolen it just before she was buried.”

Like all the stories in Part 4, this one touches on fears and anxieties that people have about actual (or at least possible) hazards in their day-to-day lives, as opposed to supernatural threats. Secondhand items of uncertain origin—especially clothing, which is worn right up against the skin—are frequent vectors of anxiety since they bring into an intimate space the potential dangers of the unknown. Here, a seemingly pure white gown turns out to have been stolen from a corpse; as if that is not bad enough, it is also infected with deadly chemicals. Appearances, then, can be deceiving—leading to the poisoning of an innocent young woman at what should have been a happy occasion (a dance).

“She began to watch the truck in her mirror. When she changed her speed, the driver of the truck changed his speed. When she passed a car, so did he.”

Driving, especially at night, is prone to a whole host of fears, high among them the anxiety of being followed by a stranger. At first unconcerned, the female protagonist becomes increasingly terrified by the inexplicable behavior of the strange truck behind her, which follows her closely while flashing its high beams at odd intervals. The twist ending shows her terror to be misplaced: The big, menacing truck turns out to be benevolent, and the true danger involves a different automotive phobia—a stranger hiding in the back of one’s car. The story switches a seemingly imminent threat for a retrospective one: As in “The Hook,” the protagonist realizes only later how close she came to being murdered by an intruder.

“Doreen called the operator. Almost at once she called back. ‘That person is calling from a telephone upstairs,’ she said. ‘You’d better leave. I’ll get the police.’”

The terror of “The Babysitter” lurks in the devious anonymity of modern technology, which can allow telephone calls from inside the house. It also combines an active danger with a retrospective one: The operator reveals not only that a dangerous intruder is in the house but also that he has been there for at least two hours, while the protagonists thought they were perfectly safe. Technology, however, also comes to the rescue, as the operator summons the police within minutes.

“‘I am the viper,’ he said. ‘I vish to vash and vipe the vindows.’”

In this humorous horror story, a telephoned “threat” (similar to the one in “The Babysitter”) turns out to be completely harmless, just a “little old man” with a speech impediment. The catharsis of the story comes from the rising tension—as the minutes tick down to the “viper’s” threatened arrival—which is relieved by the absurd appearance of the little man who mispronounces his “W”s. The ending may be an anticlimax, but it’s a reassuring one: Weird things, it says, are not always as sinister as they seem (or worse, as in “The Babysitter”).

“At this point, the storyteller stops, as if he has finished. Then usually somebody will ask, ‘Why did Rupert scream?’ The storyteller replies, ‘You’d scream too if you stepped on a nail in your bare feet.’”

A sort of “shaggy dog story,” this tale builds up mystery and suspense in the same way as “The Viper,” only to misdirect the listener. With its final sentence, it reveals itself to be a joke, with no intention of answering the mysteries of the missing dog or the noises in the attic. Having fun with the tropes of spooky stories, it makes the listener laugh at how easily they were taken in.

“‘How long do we have to put up with this dead corpse?’ the widow asked.”

The humor of this macabre story lies mostly in the nonchalance, and almost indifference, of the dead man’s family to his miraculous return. His widow, especially, shows little reaction other than bored exasperation, which increases as his moldering presence keeps her from marrying her suitor (a fiddler) or collecting the life insurance. As such, she shows herself to be colder than her dead husband and considerably less animated: Aaron Kelly finally tears himself to pieces in a fit of dancing while his widow cold-bloodedly tells the fiddler to play louder.

“When he opened his eyes, there was a second cat in the room. But this one was as big as a wolf. It looked at him very closely, and it asked, ‘Shall we do it now?’ ‘No,’ said the other cat. ‘Let’s wait till Martin comes.’”

As in “The Attic,” the central question of the story—what happens when Martin comes—receives no answer. In the spooky old house, with the gathering of talking, ever-larger cats, the listener wonders how big and fearsome “Martin” will be and what fate is planned for the old man. The serene patience of the cats is itself comical, and the story’s uneasy vein of humor finally climaxes with the terror of the old man, who is less patient and jumps out the window. The lingering mystery of “Martin,” however, is probably spookier (and more amusing) than any concrete answer could have been.