Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

The stories of Part 2, all involving ghosts or spirits, achieve their effects more subtly than the jump stories of the previous section. None ends with a sudden stamp or scream, but rather with a gradual, even understated, revelation of the ghostly meaning of the story’s events. These tales, which lack the cathartic jolt of the earlier stories, reflect a different kind of horror, a reflective uneasiness that registers more slowly and lingers longer. The first story, “The Thing,” features a “wraith,” which Schwartz defines in his Notes as an “apparition” of what the seer will look like in death. (As such, it could be called a “premortem ghost.”) The two friends who run from this shambling, decayed creature do not seem to fear it very much; in fact, they even go back in hopes of touching it and then watch it from a porch rather than hide in the house. However, Ted, who screams upon seeing it closely, seems to recognize some aspect of himself in its skeletal face. When Ted dies only a year later, Sam, too, sees this macabre resemblance: “The night Ted died, Sam said he looked just like the skeleton” (24). This eerie ending leaves the reader (or listener) haunted by a number of mysteries—e.g., why Ted was visited by this apparition of his own death and whether the vision itself contributed to his early demise. The story “Cold as Clay,” which ends on a similarly haunting note, uses a form of dramatic irony: The reader, unlike the young heroine, knows that Jim is a ghost when he shows up at her door. For her, the ghastly truth does not sink in until Jim’s coffin is opened and she sees her handkerchief tied around the dead man’s brow. As in many of the stories in Schwartz’s book, her terror is retrospective; she realizes that she rode on a horse while pressed up against a ghost for hours without realizing it.

In the Notes section, Schwartz writes that ghosts, through the ages, were believed to return to our world mostly to complete some unfinished business, such as “to punish somebody or to take revenge” (92). In “Cold as Clay,” the ghost’s actions are vengeful in that they reveal the farmer’s dishonesty and guilt to his daughter. In “The White Wolf,” revenge takes a more direct, violent path, as befits the crime: A hunter who has killed and skinned thousands of wolves to enrich himself has his throat torn out by a mysterious white wolf that cannot be harmed by bullets and that leaves no tracks. In “The Haunted House,” a woman’s ghost, unable to rest, finds a way to avenge herself on the man who murdered her for her money, another instance of mutilation and body horror. Though this story shares some traits with “The Big Toe,” another tale of ghostly revenge involving a severed digit, it is far more nuanced and subtle, with a dark joke about nuptials: Here, a man who murders a young woman rather than marry her is trapped and exposed by a church ritual (the passing of the collection plate), whereby his finger is bound inextricably to hers before a congregation of witnesses. Such undercurrents add to the story’s eeriness and emotional resonance, making it linger longer and more unnervingly in the mind than a jump story like “The Big Toe.”

“The Guests,” like “The Thing” and “Cold as Clay,” is another tale of retrospective terror but also one of sly misdirection. Here, the story’s ghosts, for once, are warmhearted and welcoming, even making cake and coffee for their guests. However, their home, an isolated house in the woods—in Scary Stories, the usual setting for the macabre—signals that things are not quite as they seem, developing the theme of The Impact of Setting in Horror Storytelling. Not until the following day, after speaking with a local and then returning to the woods to find the house’s “burned-out shell,” do the guests realize that they have dined with ghosts and slept in a house that was not actually there. In a way, the story’s eerie hindsight is more disturbing than a jump scare since it is more insidious: If ghosts and ashes can masquerade so seamlessly as ordinary people and well-appointed homes, then our very senses have betrayed us, and nothing (and no one) in our daily lives can be completely trusted. In fact, it is precisely this blending of the everyday with the uncanny that makes the ghost stories in Part 2 so disquieting. Here, unlike the jump stories of Part 1, the settings and situations are largely those of daily life: a suburban street (“The Thing”), a sturdy farmhouse (“Cold as Clay”), a crowded church on Sunday (“The Haunted House”), and a friendly chat over cake and coffee (“The Guests”). The intrusion of the supernatural into these bastions of normality, where we thought we were safe, seems almost a violation of the natural order.

The drawings in this section again illustrate The Macabre Marriage of Illustration and Text, with Gammell often zeroing in on the scariest element of the story. In “The Thing,” the reader doesn’t have to imagine the skeletal creature because it’s there on the page. Similarly, Jim from “Cold as Clay” is shown in his coffin wearing the girl’s handkerchief, which is the shock element of the story. The illustration for “The White Wolf” shows a wolf with a slightly human appearance, raising questions about who the predator is in the story. In “The Haunted House,” Gammell offers a full-page depiction of the haunt herself, who, as described in the story, looks like she’s about to speak. Finally, in “The Guests,” the illustration supports the story’s misdirection, as an intact farmhouse is shown, offering no pictorial evidence of the fire mentioned later in the story.