Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

A hunter named Rupert lives alone deep in the woods with his dog, Sam, a big German shepherd he raised from a pup. Checking his traps in the morning, he always leaves Sam behind to guard the house, but one day, he senses that something is wrong and hurries back home. Not finding Sam in the house, Rupert searches the woods for days but can find no trace of his dog. One morning, he hears something moving in the attic. Cautiously, he gets his rifle and starts up the stairs, barefooted to make less sound. Step by step, he creeps up the stairs until he is right outside the attic door. Hearing nothing within, he opens the door, and—“AAAAAAAAAAAH!” (When the listener asks why Rupert screamed, the storyteller is to tell them, “You’d scream too if you stepped on a nail in your bare feet” [76]).

The first-person narrator of this nine-verse poem says tersely that the “Slithery-Dee […] came out of the sea” (78). By the third and fourth lines, this creature, which is not described by the poem nor depicted in the illustration, has eaten everyone but the narrator: “He ate all the others, / But he didn’t eat me” (78). The narrator then repeats these lines but is interrupted before the final word, “me,” by a loud “SL-U-R-P.”

The night after his funeral, a dead man named Aaron Kelly rises from his grave and returns to his house, where he finds his family gathered around the hearth. Sitting down beside his widow, he ignores her lectures that he should, being dead, leave the house and return to his coffin. Arguing that he doesn’t “feel dead,” he insists on rocking by the fire as usual, his decaying bones creaking louder than the rocking chair. His presence in the house prevents his widow from collecting his life insurance, putting her in financial straits. One night, the town’s best fiddler comes to court the widow, which makes for an awkward date, with Aaron creaking and cracking his bones right beside them. Finally, Aaron says, “This isn’t very jolly […] Let’s dance!” (82). Obligingly, the suitor whips out his fiddle, and Aaron dances to his music increasingly wildly. Suddenly, one of his flailing bones breaks off, hitting the floor. At this, his widow calls for the fiddler to play faster and faster until Aaron, struggling to keep up, has “collapsed into a pile of bones” (82). Even so, his skull continues to dance, clacking its teeth and grinning at the fiddler. Aaron’s family gathers his bones and returns them to his coffin, jumbled so that he can’t rise again. However, “his widow never did get married again. Aaron had seen to that” (83).

An old man seeking shelter from a thunderstorm enters an old, seemingly abandoned house and lights a fire in the fireplace to get warm. Waking from a short nap, he sees a black cat sitting by the fire, purring. Soothed, the old man drifts off again, but when he wakes, the cat has been joined by a second cat, this one as big as a wolf. This cat looks at him closely and then asks the first cat, “Shall we do it now?” (85). The first cat answers, “No. […] Let’s wait till Martin comes” (85). Thinking that he must be dreaming, the old man shuts his eyes, but when he opens them again, a third cat has appeared, this one the size of a tiger. Looking the old man over, it asks the other cats if they should “do it” now, but they say to wait until Martin comes. At this, the old man jumps up and flees out the window, shouting back, “When Martin comes, you tell him I couldn’t wait” (85).

A businessman, arriving at a hotel late at night, is told that the only available room is haunted. Scoffing that he doesn’t believe in ghosts, he takes the room. However, as soon as he unpacks his things, something comes out of the closet: a ghost with bleeding fingers, moaning, “Bloody fingers! Bloody fingers!” (87). The man grabs his things and flees. The next night, a woman checks into the room and suffers the same fate. Then, a week later, a man takes the room, bringing a guitar with him. He has just begun to play his guitar when the ghost appears, moaning over and over, “Bloody fingers” (87). For a time, the man ignores this so as to concentrate on his playing, but finally, he looks up and says, “Cool it, man! […] Get yourself a Band-Aid!” (87).