Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

At a party attended by youngsters, a boy tells the other children never to stand on a grave after dark because “‘the person inside will grab you. He’ll pull you under’” (41). When a girl scoffs, calling it superstition, the boy offers to pay her a dollar if she goes through with it and leaves a knife stuck in the grave as proof. That night, the girl goes to the graveyard, nervous in spite of herself, and picks a grave. After driving the knife into the soil, she tries to leave but feels herself pulled back, repeatedly, toward the grave. Screaming in terror, she collapses. The next day, her body is found sprawled on the grave, pinned there by her knife, which she unknowingly drove through her skirt: “She had died of fright” (42).

A farmhand asks his friend, with whom he shares a room, why he’s seemed so tired lately, and his friend tells him that every night, a witch turns him into a horse and rides him across the countryside. That night, the two switch beds, and the witch, mistaking the farmhand for his friend, enchants him with an incantation and a magical bridle, changing him into a horse. The farmhand recognizes the witch as an old woman who lives nearby. The witch rides him at a furious pace, whipping him to make him go faster until they come to a house where a party is raging: “There was a lot of music and dancing. They were having a big time inside” (43). The witch hitches him to a fence before going in. The farmhand rubs the bridle against the fence until it comes loose; once free of the harness, he becomes human again. Seeking out the witch in the house, he paralyzes her with the same magic words she used on him and, slipping the bridle over her, turns her into a horse. After having her shoed at a blacksmith’s, he briskly rides her to the farm where she lives and convinces her husband to take this “good filly” in exchange for a stronger horse from his stable. After the farmhand rides off, the husband takes the bridle off his new horse to hang it up in the barn. When he comes back, he finds “his wife with horseshoes nailed to her hands and feet” (44).

A young woman marries a man from “another part of the county” (45), and though they get on well, he has a mystifying habit of going to the river every night to swim—sometimes all night long. They have two sons, and as soon as they can walk, the husband teaches them how to swim, too. Soon enough, the three of them leave the wife alone every night to go swimming in the river. Eventually, she tells her neighbors that her husband is slowly turning into an alligator; what’s more, he’s trying to turn the boys into alligators, too. The neighbors decide that she’s going “strange” since everyone knows that there are no alligators in the area and that a father taking his children swimming is perfectly natural. One morning, however, the wife runs into town soaking wet, claiming that a big alligator and two small alligators pulled her into the river and tried to force her to eat a raw fish. She is put in a psychiatric hospital for observation. Her husband and two sons are never seen again, but from time to time, people claim to have seen alligators in the river, usually a big one and two smaller ones. These people are usually disbelieved, for “[e]verybody knows there aren’t any alligators around here” (46).

A man on a business trip to Philadelphia stays overnight at a friend’s house. Unable to sleep, he hears a car in the street and looks out the window; to his amazement, he sees a long, black hearse full of passengers. The driver, a “queer, grotesque”-looking man, calls up to him, “There is room for one more” (47). The next day, his friends tell him that it must have been a dream. After attending his business meeting in a big office building, he waits for an elevator to take him back down, but when it arrives, it is packed with people, one of whom is the grotesque hearse driver from the previous night, who again tells him that there is “room for one more” (48). Disturbed, he backs away. When the doors close, he hears “shrieking and screaming, and then the sound of a crash” (48). The elevator has fallen down the shaft, killing everyone onboard.

A rich man who wants to go hunting in a remote, dangerous part of northern Canada finally finds a guide who is poor and desperate enough to take him. This guide, an Indigenous American named DéFago, escorts him through the snow-swept wastes to the shores of a frozen lake, where they hunt for three days without success. On the night of the third day, as the two men shelter from a howling storm, the hunter peers out of the tent and is amazed to see that no trees are moving: The air is perfectly still, yet he can hear the wind howling. Stranger still, it seems to be calling his guide’s name: “Da-faaaaaaaaago!” DéFago, huddling in a corner of the tent, tells the hunter to pay it no mind, but as the wind continues to howl his name, he looks terrified and suddenly jumps up and bolts out of the tent. As the guide vanishes into the night, the hunter can hear him scream, “Oh, my fiery feet, my burning feet of fire” (51). At daybreak, the hunter follows DéFago’s tracks through the woods and onto the frozen surface of the lake, where they disappear, as if DéFago has somehow been pulled into the sky. What’s more, the spaces between his footsteps become wider and wider, as if he was taking giant steps just before he vanished. Just then, the wind picks up again, and behind its howling moans, the hunter can hear DéFago’s screams of agony about his “burning feet.” Terrified, he flees the place and does not return for a year. Then, at a local trading post, he asks about DéFago, but no one has seen him. One of the men laughs that maybe it was the Wendigo who got him. The Wendigo, according to Indigenous American legend, “comes with the wind,” and once it gets hold of you, it drags you “at great speed until your feet are burned away and more of you than that” (52). A few days later, the hunter sees an Indigenous American man enter the trading post and sit down by the fire. Somehow reminded of his former guide, the hunter asks him if he is DéFago. The man does not answer, and finally, the hunter loses his patience and lifts the hat that conceals the Indigenous American man’s head and face. The hunter screams in horror: Under DéFago’s hat is nothing but a pile of ashes.

This macabre, poem-like story accompanies a game often played at Halloween parties, wherein the players gather in a circle in a darkened room as the storyteller hands them various gooey objects that masquerade as parts of a human body. First, a murdered man’s brains are passed around: “Let’s feel his brains (A wet, squishy tomato)” (55). A pair of grapes pass for his eyes, an apricot for his ear, a piece of liver for his heart, etc. Finally, a handful of wet spaghetti marks the end of the game: “That’s all there is, except for these worms. They are the ones that ate the rest of him” (55).

Walking home late from a friend’s house, Sam Lewis sees a woman carrying a basket covered by a white cloth. He cannot see her face because of her thick winter clothing. He greets her but does not receive an answer. He offers to carry her basket for her, but when she hands it over to him, a “small voice” calls out of the basket, “That’s very nice of you” (56), followed by maniacal laughter. In shock, Sam drops the basket, and a human head rolls out. Realizing that it is the woman’s head, he takes off running, but both the woman and her disembodied head pursue him. Finally, the head overtakes him and sinks its teeth into his left leg and then his right. As he screams in agony, the woman and her head disappear.