Southern Fried Rat and Other Gruesome Tales

by Daniel Cohen

  Evening Gown

  Sally had never been the most popular girl in school.

  It wasn't her looks. She was really quite pretty. It wasn't her personality. She was bright, cheerful, friendly, and interesting. Sally's problem was money. She didn't have any, and most of the other girls in the school did. While other girls wore Calvins, Sally had to get along with jeans from Sears. Her sweaters had been worn and washed so many times that they lost whatever shape they may have had in the first place. They certainly didn't do anything for Sally's shape. And her coat, as someone rather cruelly pointed out to her, looked like it belonged in the ancient-history museum.

  During the summer, when most of the other girls and most of the boys in the school were off at the seashore or some other vacation spot, Sally could be found behind the counter at the local junk-food joint. The hours were long, the work was hard, and the pay was terrible, but she needed whatever she could get.

  Sally's father had walked out on the family when she was six, leaving her mother as the sole support for three small children. Her mother had worked at a series of low-paying jobs in order to hold the family together, which she did—but just barely. In short, Sally was poor.

  Sally wasn't in the top clique in school, or the next to the top clique, or any clique at all. She just didn't have the time. When she wasn't taking care of her younger brother and sister or cooking and cleaning at home, she was out working somewhere or doing her schoolwork. Since she was naturally quiet, the most popular kids in school barely knew she existed.

  Therefore it was a major shock to Sally and to every other girl in the school when Davey Phillips asked her to go to the prom. Davey was not only the best-looking boy in the senior class, he was also the best basketball player, he had the flashiest car, and he had the reputation of being a pretty nice guy, too.

  Sally knew who he was. They had been in some classes together, and they had talked from time to time. But she had no idea that he liked her, or that he had ever even really noticed her. He had, however, and when he went over a list of possible dates for the prom, they all seemed vapid or dumpy when compared to Sally. He knew all about the hard life she had led, and he admired her. Although there was a good deal of nasty whispering when word of whom he had asked got out, Davey was the top dog of the top clique, and no one would dare tell him what to do.

  Sally was overjoyed at the invitation. She was also

  frightened and almost desperate because she didn't have anything to wear. At the prom all of the other girls would have gorgeous new evening dresses. Sally not only didn't have a new dress, she didn't have any dress at all.

  Now in stories, a fairy godmother appears and turns the poor girl's rags into a beautiful dress. Or the girl's clever mother turns the kitchen curtains into something that would not look out of place on the pages of Vogue. This is not a story. There are no fairy godmothers, and Sally's mother couldn't even do a hem. Neither could Sally.

  "Maybe we could get a secondhand dress cheap down at the pawnshop," said Sally's mother.

  Sally wasn't too proud to wear a secondhand gown. Besides, there was no other alternative. So she and her mother went down to the pawnshop, and there it was: a beautiful satin evening gown in the most delicate shade of pale blue. It was Sally's favorite color. She hardly dared hope that the dress would fit, but it did—perfectly. And the price was just a few dollars.

  When Sally and Davey arrived at the prom, the envious whispers grew louder and more persistent than ever. She looked truly beautiful in her pale blue evening gown. A lot of the other boys began to notice Sally for the first time. They all wanted to dance with her. But Davey chased them all away. He wanted every dance for himself.

  It was a magical evening. Sally danced and danced, until she began to feel a little dizzy. She tried to shake off the feeling, for she didn't want anything to spoil her evening. But her dizziness grew worse, and she got a headache and a feeling of nausea too.

  "Sally, what's the matter? You look as if you feel sick," said Davey.

  "Yes, I do," she answered. "I think you had better take me home."

  On the drive home, Sally was feeling worse by the minute, and Davey was really getting concerned. But SaUy's mother wasn't worried at all. "It's just the excitemerit," she said. "She was looking forward to this evening so much, she became overexcited. That's how girls are. I remember I was the same way when I was her age. It's a shame to ruin such a lovely evening, but I'm sure there will be others."

  Davey agreed that there would be.

  Sally's mother took her upstairs, put her to bed, and told her she would feel much better after a good night's rest. But when her mother went to awaken her in the morning, she found that Sally didn't feel anything, beeause Sally was dead.

  At first the doctors couldn't figure out what had killed her. Chemical tests showed that she had a high content of embalming fluid in her blood, and that's what did it. Heavy traces of the fluid were found on the pale blue satin dress she had worn. The doctors speculated that the fatal fluid had entered Sally's body when she perspired while dancing.

  The pawnbroker was questioned, and he finally admitted that he had received the dress from an undertaker's assistant. It turned out this assistant had been regularly stealing clothes from corpses before they were buried and pawning them at this particular shop. This was the first time any of the clothes had caused a problem.

  Stories of poisoned garments go back to the days of the ancient Greeks.

  A Warning

  Dr. Cartwright was just getting ready to leave his office after a long day of seeing patients when his nurse in the outer office buzzed him on the intercom.

  "Doctor," she said, "there is a woman out here who insists on seeing you."

  "Tell her to come back in the morning. Office hours are over for the day."

  "I've told her that already, but she won't go away. She says it's an emergency. She's very upset. I think you had better see her."

  The doctor sighed and began thinking about the ingratitude of patients who didn't think doctors had a right to a personal life. But he was a doctor. It was his job to heal and comfort the sick. Even if it was late, one more patient . . . "All right. Send her in," he said. "And you can go for the evening. I'll lock up."

  A moment later a middle-aged woman in a dark and rather old-fashioned dress entered the room. She looked pale and ill, clearly in need of medical attention.

  "What seems to be the trouble, Mrs.—Uh, I don't know your name."

  The woman ignored that. "It's not for me that I have come," she said. "You have to see someone else."

  "Is the person here now?" said the doctor.

  "No, but he doesn't live very far from here."

  Dr. Cartwright groaned. Worse, and worse, he thought. Not only does this strange woman barge in after hours. Now she wants to take me somewhere else.

  "I'm very sorry," he said. "I don't make house calls. If this person is very ill, he will have to call his regular doctor or go to the hospital emergency ward."

  The woman stared directly at him. "There's no time for that. If you don't go at once, he will die. It may be too late already. You are the closest doctor. Please, you must come!"

  The woman's voice was compelling. Her whole body radiated a sense of urgency. Dr. Cartwright was unable to resist. "All right, if it's not far, take me there."

  "It's not far." She then gave the doctor an address, which indeed was only a block away.

  "Give me a moment, and I'll get a few things together in case they are needed."

  When the doctor turned around, the woman was gone. That woman is crazy, he thought. First she barges in on me. Then she disappears. I should forget the whole thing. Yet there was something completely convincing about the woman's sense of urgency and concern. Against his better judgment, Dr. Cartwright decided that he would visit the address she had given.

  The address was that of a small house, one that Dr. Cartwright had doubtless passed hundreds of times on his way to his office
but had never really noticed before. Feeling rather foolish, he went up to the front door and rang the bell.

  The door was answered by a young man.

  "I'm Dr. Cartwright. My office is in the neighborhood. I've been told that there is someone in this house in need of immediate medical attention."

  The young man looked puzzled. "Impossible," he said. "I live here alone, and I feel fine. Is this some sort of joke? Who told you to come here."

  "It was a woman," said Dr. Cartwright. "She was in her mid-fifties and she looked like, she looked like, well . . . She looked just like that." The doctor's eye had been caught by a photograph of a woman hanging in the hall near the door where he stood. "That's her. That's the woman who just came to my office and told me that there is someone in the house who was dying and needed a doctor at once."

  Instantly all of the color drained from the young man's face. "That's a picture of my mother," he said. "She has been dead for ten years."

  Within a few hours the young man was stricken, and he died that very night. There was nothing the doctors could do for him.

  Variations of this tale go back at least one hundred years. It is usually not told as a ghost story, that is, as a piece of fiction, but as a true story. Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand cites a newspaper article that appeared in a December 16, 1890, edition of a Russian newspaper, the Citizen of Saint Petersburg. It is about a young man who is visited by a priest. The priest has been told by a woman that he must go and administer the sacraments to a sick man in the apartment. The young man denies that he is sick, but the priest recognizes the woman who has visited him from a painting on the wall.

  "That is the portrait of my dead mother," says the young man. He takes the sacraments, and that evening he is dead. The story is reported as one that is "going about town" and is "worthy of attention."

  A very similar tale was also collected in the 1920s by the British Society for Psychical Research. It too was supposed to be true.

  Professor Brunvand points out that this story has many similarities to the phantom hitchhiker legend—the most popular and widespread of all modern American ghost legends.

  Sometimes in the phantom hitchhiker story, the person who has picked up the hitchhiker sees a photograph and identifies the girl in the photo as the one he picked up. The response is always something like this:

  "That's a picture of my daughter. She was killed ten years ago, at the very spot that you picked up the hitchhiker."

  Oven Ready

  Mr. and Mrs. Collins received a last-minute invitation to a very important cocktail party at the country club. It was the sort of invitation they had been hoping to get for more than two years, and now that it had arrived, even at the last moment, they were thrilled. Naturally they wouldn't be able to take their six-month-old son, Christopher, to the party, and they needed a baby-sitter badly.

  Lucy Collins quickly called her regular baby-sitter but found the girl already had a date that evening. Her second-choice baby-sitter had another job that evening; so did the third. Mrs. Collins was getting a bit frantic. She was afraid that she would have to miss the cocktail party after all, an enormous disappointment since she had waited so long and wished so hard for the invitation.

  She called her regular baby-sitter back to plead with the girl to break her date and do her a favor "just this once." The girl's date was every bit as important to her as the cocktail party was to Mrs. Collins, and she refused. Still, the girl felt very sorry for her. Mrs. Collins was pleading and asking her if she knew of anyone, anyone at all, who was free that evening to baby-sit for Christopher.

  The girl thought for a moment. She knew these last-minute jobs were always hard to arrange, particularly on a Saturday night. Mentally she ticked off a list of names, discarding first this one and then that one because she knew they would be busy. Then she remembered Carrie Barker. Sure, Carrie was a little weird, a little mixed up. But basically she was a good kid, eager to please, and she would probably welcome the job. She didn't get many sitting jobs because most parents didn't like her looks.

  "Well, if you are really desperate," the girl said, "there's Carrie Barker. She doesn't live too far away. I'll give you her phone number."

  Mrs. Collins was deeply grateful for the information and called Carrie Barker immediately. On the phone Carrie sounded strange and a bit out of touch. But she was perfectly willing to baby-sit and said she would come right over.

  By the time Mrs. Collins made the arrangements on the phone, Mr. Collins was pacing up and down anxiously looking at his watch. It was all right to be a little late to a cocktail party, but if you were too late, then everyone would notice, and that wasn't a good idea. When the doorbell rang, signaling the arrival of the sitter, he was very much relieved. "Thank God, she's finally here," he said.

  It was easy to see why Carrie Barker had trouble getting baby-sitting jobs. Her clothes were strange and her hair was wildly unkempt. Most unsettling and disturbing was the distant, almost vacant, look in her eyes.

  As Mrs. Collins showed Carrie around the house, the baby's room, the kitchen, and the bathroom, the girl moved almost like a sleepwalker. When she presented Carrie with a piece of paper on which had been written a name and number where they could be reached in case of emergency, the girl didn't even glance at it but crumpled it and pushed it into the pocket of her jeans.

  Carrie Barker's appearance and actions were so strange that Mrs. Collins toyed with the idea of making up some excuse, paying the girl off, and then just staying home herself. Mr. and Mrs. Collins had a heated whispered conversation about this. Mr. Collins finally convinced his wife that there was nothing really wrong with the new sitter. "It's just the way the kids are today." And so with a considerable feeling of unease hanging over her, Mrs. Collins was persuaded to go to the party, leaving her baby behind with the sitter.

  The feeling of doom grew on Mrs. Collins as the evening wore on. While others walked about chatting and laughing, Mrs. Collins stood grimly in a corner, hardly talking to anyone. "At least try to look like you're having a good time," muttered her husband.

  It was no use. She was much too anxious to enjoy herself, or even to pretend to. Mrs. Collins found a phone and called her home.

  "Hello." The voice sounded hollow, but it was definitely Carrie Barker's.

  "Oh hello, Carrie. I'm just calling to see if everything is all right."

  "Oh sure, Mrs. Collins. I've made dinner for when you get home. The turkey's in the oven."

  "That's nice, dear. Thank you so much."

  It was only after she hung up that the shock hit Mrs. Collins. Turkey, what turkey? There was no turkey in the house.

  She rushed up to her husband and said, "We've got to go home at once. Something terrible may have happened.''

  He tried to calm her, but she was not to be put off this time. Rather than have his wife make a scene, Mr. Collins made some hasty excuses and they left. He was angry, she was frightened; they didn't talk much while driving home.

  When they arrived they were greeted by the smell of cooking. The dining room table was set with the family's best china and crystal. The lights had been turned out and there were candles on the table.

  Carrie was standing in the kitchen. "Turkey's almost ready," she said. "See." She opened the oven door, revealing the baby inside.

  It seems that the girl had been taking drugs, and her brain had been so messed up that she had mistaken the baby for a turkey.

  —————

  Debbie had just washed her hair in preparation for going out on a big date. She plugged in her hair drier, flipped the on switch, and nothing happened. It was broken.

  She looked at her watch. Roger would be picking her up in fifteen minutes. Unlike some boys, he was always on time, and hated to be kept waiting. And there she would be, looking like a drowned rat. Something had to be done.

  She went into the kitchen and spied the family's new microwave oven. She knew that with it her mother could cook a meal in five minutes, s
o surely it would dry her hair in less than a minute. Debhie stuck her head in the microwave oven, reached over, and turned on the switch.

  Roger found her with her head still in the oven. She looked pretty horrible, and of course she was dead. Debbie didn't know that microwave ovens don't work like ordinary ovens. They cook from the inside. The oven had boiled her brains in twenty seconds.

  The story of the baby-sitter who cooks her charge swept the country during the !ate 1960s and early 1970s. Widely believed, it was also unique among tales of this sort, for parents told it to their children. It was used as a cautionary tale about the sort of horrible things that could happen to kids who took drugs. The story went along with the tales of drug-induced attempts to fly out of tall buildings and of young drug takers who had been blinded by staring at the sun.

  A popular variation of the microwave oven story tells of how a person has washed his cat or dog and then puts it into the microwave oven to dry. When he returns a few minutes later, he finds the animal fully cooked—or in some variations the animal has exploded. It is very similar to older tales of dogs, cats, or children that wind up in washing machines, driers, or trash compactors. And don t forget Hansel and Gretel. The old witch was

  trying to shove those kids into the oven.

  Finger Tales

  The Alexander hotel had a lot of trouble with room 1313. Aside from its unfortunate number, the room really was haunted. The management tried to avoid renting the room, because the guests never stayed through the night.

  But there was a convention in town, and every hotel room for miles around was booked. So when a tired-looking salesman appeared at the desk begging for a room, the clerk took pity on him and gave him the key to room 1313.

  "I warn you," said the clerk. "It's haunted."