More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

by Alvin Schwartz

  Leon was very excited to see him. “What is it like up there?” he asked. “And what about baseball?”

  “When it comes to baseball,” said Todd, “I have some good news, and I have some bad news. The good news is that we do play baseball in Heaven. We have some fine teams. I play second base on my team, just like I used to in the old days. That’s the good news.”

  “What’s the bad news?” asked Leon.

  “The bad news,” said Todd, “is that you are scheduled to pitch tomorrow.”

  Cemetery Soup

  On her way home from the market, the woman took a short cut through the cemetery. There, sticking up out of the ground, she saw a big bone. She picked it up and looked it over carefully.

  “This will make a very good soup bone,” she said. “I think I’ll take it home. It’s perfect weather for hot soup.”

  When she got home, the first thing she did was start the soup. Into the big soup pot went water, carrots, green beans, corn, barley, onions, potatoes, a snitch of beef, some salt and pepper, and—the bone. She brought it all to a boil, then brought it down to a simmer.

  “Yum!” she said, sniffing it and tasting it. “I can hardly wait till supper.”

  Suddenly she heard a small voice.

  “Please give me back my bone.”

  The woman paid no attention. Soon she heard the voice again.

  “May I have back my bone, please?”

  The woman was reading the newspaper, and again she didn’t take any notice. In a little while, the voice spoke up once more. It was beginning to sound angry.

  “Give me back my bone!”

  The woman kept on reading the paper.

  “Some people are too impatient,” she muttered.

  Once more the voice spoke. Now it sounded very angry, and it was so loud that the whole house shook.

  “I WANT MY BONE BACK!”

  The woman reached into the pot, grabbed the bone, and threw it out the window. In a voice just as loud, she shouted,

  “TAKE IT!”

  There was an eerie silence. Then the woman heard footsteps scurrying away from the house down the road toward the cemetery. And she got up and served herself some soup.

  The Brown Suit

  A woman came to the funeral parlor to see her husband’s corpse.

  “You did a good job,” she said to the undertaker. “He looks just the way he always looked, except for one thing. My husband always wore a brown suit, but you have him dressed in a blue suit.”

  “That is no problem,” said the undertaker. “We can easily change it.”

  When she returned later, her husband was wearing a brown suit.

  “Now he looks just the way he always did,” she said. “I know you went to a lot of trouble.”

  “It was no trouble,” he said. “As it happened, there is a man here who was wearing a brown suit, and his widow felt that blue would be better. He is about your husband’s size. So we gave him the blue one and gave your husband the brown one.”

  “Even so,” she said, “changing all that clothing was a big job.”

  “Not really,” said the undertaker. “All we did was exchange their heads.”

  Ba-Rooom!

  O’Leary is dead,

  and O’Riley don’t know it.

  O’Riley is dead,

  and O’Leary don’t know it.

  They both are dead

  in the very same bed,

  and neither one knows

  that the other one’s dead.

  BA-ROOOM! BA-ROOOM!

  To the tune of “The Irish Washerwoman”

  Thumpity-Thump

  When we moved to Schenectady from Schoharie, we rented a house awful cheap ’cause it was spooked, and nobody would live in it. But we didn’t care, ’cause we didn’t take no stock in spooks.

  We had just gone to bed the first night, dog tired from riding in a wagon all day. We hadn’t had time to shut our eyes when we heard a thumpity-thump, thumpity-thump comin’ down the attic stairs. I covered my head with the blankets, but I couldn’t shut out the sound. Thumpity-thump, thumpity-thump, it went. I could hear it plain as day.

  Past the bedroom door thumpity-thump, thumpity-thump and down the stairs thumpity-thump, thumpity-thump and through the kitchen thumpity-thump, thumpity-thump and down the cellar stairs thumpity-thump, thumpity-thump, makin’ the most awful racket you ever heard. It was more than we could stand. So we all followed the sound to see what was goin’ on.

  When we got down the cellar stairs, we saw that it was a chair that had made all of that racket. There it was, with one of its legs pointin’ to a place on the dirt floor. We all just stood and gawped till my brother Ike said that he believed that the chair was trying to tell us something about the place it was pointing at.

  So Ike went and got a shovel and started diggin’. He didn’t have to dig far before his shovel struck somethin’ hard. Pretty soon we could see the edge of a box stickin’ out. We all hollered for him to hurry up and uncover the rest of it. And the chair—it got so excited, it jumped up and down like it had gone plumb crazy.

  When Ike got the box uncovered, Pop and the boys pried off the lid. And there was the body of a man all smooched with blood. It was plain as the nose on your face that he had been murdered, and the chair wanted folks to know it. Right then and there we decided to leave. Bein’ strangers, everybody would think that we had murdered him and come there to hide the body. It didn’t take us long to fill up that hole and get out of that house.

  The chair was awful mad about our leavin’, and it went up the cellar stairs thumpity-thump, thumpity-thump louder than when it had gone down. Then it thumpity-thumped up the next set of stairs and the next louder still. When it got back into the attic, it THUMPITY-THUMPED so loud we thought it would thump all the plasterin’ down on our heads.

  Nobody asked us why we were movin’ out so soon, ’cause nobody ever stayed more than one night in that place, and most not that long. But I can tell you we were thankful to get back to Schoharie where chairs stay where they’re put and don’t go rarin’ and rampagin’ ’roun, scarin’ folks out of their wits, pointin’ out murders and goodness knows what!

  Abbreviations in Notes, Sources, and Bibliography

  AF Arkansas Folklore

  CFQ California Folklore Quarterly

  HF Hoosier Folklore

  HFB Hoosier Folklore Bulletin

  IF Indiana Folklore

  IUFA Indiana University Folklore Archive, Bloomington, Ind.

  JAF Journal of American Folklore

  KFQ Kentucky Folklore Quarterly

  NEFA Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History, University of Maine, Orono, Me.

  PTFS Publication of the Texas Folklore Society

  SFQ Southern Folklore Quarterly

  SS Alvin Schwartz, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

  WF Western Folklore

  Notes

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was made. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature on your eBook reader.

  The publications cited are described in the Bibliography.

  Hoo-Ha’s (Introduction): The term “heebie-jeebies” comes from a pre-World War I comic-strip cartoonist named W. DeBeck. The term “screaming meemies” was the name first given to the whistling shells that the German army fired at the Allies during World War I. Various dictionaries.

  Living Ghosts (Chapter 1): There has always been a belief that the dead can return to our world in ghost form, if they have a need to do so. They may be invisible, or rise up like a drifting mist, or appear as they did when they were alive. Of these living ghosts, the best known are the ghostly or vanishing hitchhikers. There are many tales about them. Usually there is a main character who dies, then makes repeated efforts to return home or to familiar surroundings. The ghost manages to hitchhike a ride in a passing car, but always vanishes just before the car reaches its destination. There are several tales of
living ghosts in Chapter 1: “Something Was Wrong,” “The Wreck,” and “One Sunday Morning.” For a detailed discussion of ghosts, see SS, pp. 90–92.

  “One Sunday Morning” (p. 9): This tale is rooted in the ancient belief that the night belongs to the dead and that places of worship are haunted after dark.

  The scholar Alexander Krappe suggested that it may also be rooted in a dream, possibly in an experience in which the dreamer walked in her sleep. It might be, he said, that the dreamer actually walked to the site of the dream and continued dreaming until she awakened, and in that way provided a basis for a tale. What if she found on awakening, as Ida did, that her clothes had been torn or that she had suffered a bad scratch? Such things could be explained in a number of ways, he said.

  Krappe told of a German physician in the nineteenth century. When he was in high school, the physician lived in the same house with a seventeen-year-old boy who walked in his sleep. One night the boy dreamed that it was seven o’clock in the morning and time to go to school.

  While still asleep, he washed, dressed, got his books together, and went downstairs. On his way out the door, he stopped to check the time, as he did every morning. Just then the clock struck midnight, chiming twelve times, and awakened him.

  Had the boy not awakened, Krappe suggested that he probably would have gone to school, just as Ida in “One Sunday Morning” went to church where she continued to dream. See Krappe, Balor, pp. 114–25; JAF 60: pp. 159–62.

  “Sounds” (p. 12): The person who found this legend was a newspaperman from Brooklyn, NY, named Charles M. Skinner. Although not a trained folklorist, Skinner was the first serious collector of American legends. Between 1896 and 1903 he compiled five books of legends from throughout the United States and its possessions, some of which became bestsellers. In all, Skinner found and retold 515 legends dealing with ghosts, treasures, Indian uprisings, witches, rescues, and other subjects. Only in recent years have folklorists become interested in such material. See Dorson, “Skinner.”

  “Somebody Fell from Aloft” (p. 17): A writer and artist named George S. Wasson was the author of this tale and others that suggested the kinds of stories being told in Maine fishing villages during the nineteenth century. They were based on his knowledge of the local tales and dialects in such places. All involved a small port named Killick Cove, actually Kittery Point in southern Maine, where Wasson lived. See Dorson, Jonathan, pp. 243–48.

  “Clinkity-Clink” (p. 26): This is one of the famous Uncle Remus stories that Joel Chandler Harris created from Negrotales, songs, customs, and ways of speaking he learned as a white boy in the Old South.

  His stories on Negro plantation life first appeared in 1878 in the newspaper The Atlanta Constitution. The first of his books, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings, appeared two years later and brought him fame. Nine other collections followed, including Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit and The Tar Baby and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus.

  They evoked a remarkable sense of the life and character of the Negro in the Old South, with Uncle Remus serving the traditional role of an elderly Negro, storyteller to the master’s children. See Brookes, pp. 3–21; 43–62.

  Buried Alive (p. 35, “Rings on Her Fingers”): When a dead person is embalmed, a fluid commonly containing formaldehyde is pumped into the blood and lymph systems. It preserves the body for a long time. It also assures that the person who is being buried is dead.

  Before modern methods of embalming became widespread, there were many legends like “Rings on Her Fingers.” Each told of how some person had been given up for dead when actually they were in a coma or trance of some kind, and regained consciousness during their funeral or after they had been buried. In the latter case, those who were rescued from a horrible death owed their lives to grave robbers.

  In those years thieves dug up corpses for their jewels, or they stole the corpses and sold them to medical schools. Now and then they found a living person who was revived by the shock of cold air or by the efforts they were making to cut off one of their fingers. See Sources for “Rings.”

  In the early 1800s an English woman was so concerned about being buried alive, she arranged to be buried in a funeral vault in a coffin without a lid. A small opening was left in the wall of the vault so that she could breathe and be heard if she regained consciousness. See Hole, p. 54.

  Vampires (p. 44): The vampire in the tale “The Window” is a living corpse, a person who died but is not always dead. It cannot rest in its grave. It spends each night searching for a human from whose throat it can suck the blood it needs. But by cockcrow it must return to its coffin.

  People in many parts of the world believe in vampires. But the belief is strongest and most widespread in Russia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Greece. In eighteenth-century Hungary, the outcry over the threat of vampires was as great as the concern over witches in New England a hundred years earlier.

  There are few detailed accounts of vampire experiences in America or the British Isles. One is a brief tale collected in 1933 in Crane, Missouri, by Vance Randolph. It tells of a boy who went into a witch’s yard to retrieve a ball he had been playing with. The witch’s daughter cut his throat and, with her mother, drank his blood. Randolph suggests that it is related to the ballad “Sir Hugh,” which involves a similar incident.

  The English story “The Window” is probably one of the most detailed of the English-language accounts. However, the description of the method used to destroy the vampire may not have been complete. In the Eastern European tradition, the vampire would have been decapitated before it was cremated. Then its remains would have been buried at a crossroads. There also is one other traditional method of ensuring the vampire will not return: driving a sharpened wooden stake through the vampire’s heart.

  It is said that only certain people become vampires: witches, suicides, and persons who were bitten by a vampire. If a corpse is buried with its mouth open or a cat jumps over the corpse while it is being buried, the corpse will also become a vampire.

  It is said that the best way to ward off a vampire is to wear bells, garlic, or iron in some form.

  See Leach, Dictionary, p. 1154; Randolph, Church House, pp. 164–65; Ozark Folksongs, vol. 1, pp. 148–51; Belden, pp. 69–73.

  Horror Stories (p. 57, “Oh, Susannah!”): This is one of a group of unusually popular legends about atrocities committed by mad killers at loose on or near college campuses. They include stories of young people who have been struck with an ax or stabbed with a knife, whose cries for help are ignored because their roommates are too frightened to open the door to their room. The folklorist Linda Dégh suggests that these legends are modern cautionary tales warning young people of the dangers that threaten them as they are increasingly on their own. See Barnes, 307–12; Dégh, “The Roommate’s Death,” IF 2; SS, 95–96.

  Poltergeists (p. 87, “Thumpity-Thump”): The haunted chair in this story is a poltergeist, a term that means literally “noise ghost.” However, such a ghost usually is invisible. It makes its presence known through knocking and rapping sounds and other noises and actions for which there is no explanation.

  Such ghosts are said to move furniture, cause dishes to fly from cupboards and crash to the floor, hurl burning chunks of wood from fireplaces, and even cut clothing and blankets into strange shapes, often crescents, with invisible shears. See Gardner, pp. 96–97; Musick, West Virginia, p. 42; Lawson and Porter, 371–82.

  In Pickwick Papers, Dickens tells of a talking chair that helps a traveling salesman win the hand of the woman he wants to marry. See Dickens, pp. 188–96.

  Sources

  The sources of each item are given, along with variants and related information. When available, names of collectors (C) and informants (I) are given. The publications cited are described in the Bibliography.

  INTRODUCTION

  p. xi Hoo-Ha’s: From a T. S. Eliot poem, “Fragment of an Agon.” See Eliot, p. 84.

  WHEN SHE SAW HIM, SHE SCREAMED AND
RAN

  p. 3 “Something Was Wrong”: Retelling of an untitled story in Cerf, Try and Stop Me, pp. 275–76.

  p. 5 “The Wreck”: Based on a brief reference in Parochetti, 55. This is one of the many “ghostly hitchhiker” stories in which a young woman is given a ride home in a car, then turns out to be a ghost. See Beardsley, Richard K., CFQ 1: 303–36; CFQ 2: 3–25; SS: p. 121. See the Note “Living Ghosts.”

  p. 9 “One Sunday Morning”: I first heard this tale as a student at Northwestern University, Evanston, 111., in the 1950s. The text is based on my recollections, but also on references in Krappe, Balor, pp. 114–25, and Krappe, JAF 60: 159–62. See the Note “One Sunday Morning.”

  p. 12 “Sounds”: Based on a legend in Mobile, Alabama, toward the end of the nineteenth century. The deserted house described in the text was built by a wealthy Englishman who lived there with his daughter, who he said was “half-witted,” and several servants. No one visited them, and they seldom went out. He abruptly returned to England without her. She disappeared. The house was sold again and again. No one could live there. See Skinner, pp. 17–19. See the Note “Sounds.”

  p. 15 “A Weird Blue Light”: Retold from a newspaper report in the Downey, Cal., Champion, Dec. 17, 1892, taken from the Galveston, Tex., True Flag, n.d., reprinted in Splitter, p. 209.

  p. 17 “Somebody Fell from Aloft”: Adapted and abridged from a story in Wasson, “Who Fell from Aloft?”, pp. 106–28. See the Note “Somebody Fell from Aloft.”

  p. 23 “The Little Black Dog”: This tale of a dog seeking revenge is adapted from the Ozark Mountains story “Si Burton’s Little Black Dog,” (I): Mrs. Marie Wilbur, Pineville, Mo., 1929. See Randolph, Church House, pp. 171–73.