by Daniel Cohen
Johnny's mother wasn't terribly surprised when one evening Johnny rushed into the house shouting, "Mommy, Mommy, I saw a dinosaur in the swamp!"
"That's nice," said his mother. "But I hope you didn't play with it. Dr. Brown says that dinosaurs have germs."
Johnny was rather disappointed at the cool reaction, because this time he wasn't making up a story. He really had seen a dinosaur in the swamp.
Johnny tried to tell other people in the town. The reaction was just about the same. Some said, "You should stop telling big lies like that." Or, "Sure, sure you did." Others just snickered and walked away. Now, Johnny was more than disappointed, he was humiliated and angry. He decided that he was going to show everybody in town that he was no liar.
Johnny decided that he was going to make friends with the dinosaur, and then he would make all those people who didn't believe him pay. When he went into the swamp the next time, he took a bag of peanuts with him. When he met the dinosaur he asked it if it wanted a peanut. The dinosaur shook its head to indicate that it didn't.
"That's good," said Johnny, "because then I can eat all of the peanuts myself."
Naturally, as soon as the dinosaur heard that, there was nothing in the world it wanted more than a peanut. It whimpered and begged until Johnny very reluctantly gave it a peanut, and then another. But first he made the dinosaur promise that if he gave it peanuts, it would do everything he said.
When Johnny went home that evening, he once again told his mother that he had met the dinosaur in the swamp.
"You shouldn't play with dinosaurs," said his mother. "Dr. Brown says that dinosaurs have germs."
"Well," said Johnny. "Dr. Brown shouldn't say such things about dinosaurs. It might make them mad."
His mother ignored the last remark. Later that night when the family was asleep, Johnny snuck back to the swamp, where he found the dinosaur waiting for him. He led the dinosaur to Dr. Brown's house.
The next morning Dr. Brown's neighbors awoke to find that the doctor's house, garage, and lawn had all been stomped out of existence—and Dr. Brown along with them. The only clue that the police were ever able to find was a couple of peanut shells.
After that, Johnny began having the dinosaur stomp out the town a block at a time. On one particularly good night he had the dinosaur stomp his school flat, while a PTA meeting was going on.
Pretty soon there was nothing at all left of the town except the house in which Johnny and his family lived. One afternoon the family were all sitting on the front porch, and Johnny happened to mention that he had seen the dinosaur in the swamp again.
"Well," said Johnny's mother. "I hope you don't play with it, because the late Dr. Brown said that dinosaurs have germs."
Johnny whistled. The dinosaur came bounding out of the swamp. Johnny threw it a peanut and said, "Step on Mother first."
This rather nasty humorous anecdote comes from the collection of folklorist William Koch of Kansas. It has been slightly adapted.
The Cat
in the Bloomie's Bag
Lucy was driving to the shopping mall to do some last-minute Christmas shopping. She was in a hurry and was distracted, so she didn't notice the cat trying to cross the street until it was too late. She hit it, and the instant she did she knew she had killed it. Lucy, who was a cat lover and normally a very careful driver, felt absolutely horrible.
She stopped the car and rushed back to the spot where the cat lay. There was no doubt it was dead. Her only consolation was that the poor animal had probably not even known what hit it. Lucy turned to walk back to her car, but the thought of that poor broken form on the side of the road stopped her. She had killed the cat, and even if she had not meant to, she was still responsible for it. She couldn't just leave it lying there by the side of the road, nor at Christmastime.
Lucy went back to her car and found a bag that had been left in the trunk. It happened to be a Bloomingdale's shopping bag. Gingerly she put the dead cat into the shopping bag and put the bag on the back seat of the car. It seemed heartless to put the poor thing in the trunk. Lucy said to herself that she would take the cat home and bury it after she went shopping. This thought gave the anguished Lucy some comfort.
Lucy pulled into the shopping mall parking lot. It was crowded with the cars of holiday shoppers, but she found a spot. Then she headed for the mall. As she reached the entrance she saw a large sign posted on the door. Did You Remember to Lock Your Car? it read. In smaller print the sign warned that during the holiday season there was always an increase in the number of thefts from parked cars, and that the management of the mall was not responsible for such thefts, and so on.
Had Lucy locked her car? She couldn't remember because the accident with the cat had upset her so much. She decided that it was best to go back and check. As she walked back toward her car she noticed a strange red-haired woman standing next to it, looking quickly around. Lucy stopped to see what would happen. As she watched, the woman furtively opened the back door to the car, which Lucy now realized that she had forgotten to lock, reached in, and pulled out the Bloomie's bag. The bag with the dead cat in it. The woman then walked quickly to another car and got in.
What was Lucy to do? Accuse the woman of stealing? There were no police around (there never were when you needed them). Besides, what had the woman taken? A bag with a dead cat in it! The police would laugh at her. Yet Lucy was outraged. This person had gone into her car and taken something that belonged to her. She couldn't be allowed to get away with it.
The red-haired woman had already started her own car and had begun to pull out of her parking space. Impulsively Lucy decided to follow the thief. The woman headed down the highway and pulled into another shopping mall a few miles away. She parked her car, and Lucy noticed that she was clutching the stolen Bloomingdale's bag when she got out. She looked very nervous. Perhaps this was the first time she had ever stolen anything. Perhaps she knew or at least suspected that she was being followed. Lucy didn't care, she was too angry.
Lucy followed the red-haired woman into the mall. For a while she seemed to be wandering aimlessly, the Bloomingdale's bag still firmly in her grasp. Then she spotted what she had been looking for—a bar. She went in, with Lucy still following at a discreet distance. Lucy was now convinced the woman did not know she was being followed.
The red-haired woman sat down at a table in the darkest corner of the bar. She was obviously tired and frightened. The waitress appeared quickly and she ordered a drink. Then she looked around very carefully. Feeling sure she was not being watched, the red-haired woman very carefully slipped her fingers inside the stolen bag she had been holding so tightly.
Her face registered uncertainty as she reached deeper and deeper into the bag. Her hand inside the bag began to move around frantically. Then, abandoning all caution, she picked up the bag, looked inside, screamed, and fainted.
The people in the bar had no idea what had happened, and Lucy certainly didn't want to tell them. They were unable to revive the red-haired woman, who had not only fainted but struck her head on the leg of the table as she was slipping to the floor. She was bleeding badly, and an ambulance was sent for.
Within a few moments the woman was strapped to a stretcher and was about to be carried away.
The waitress said, "Just a second. I'm sure she wouldn't want to lose this." And very gently she laid the Bloomingdale's bag across the stomach of the woman on the stretcher.
There are many, many different versions of the cat-in-the-package theme. In one of them, a family that has been picking mushrooms want to see if what they have picked is safe or poisonous. So they test it on the cat—obviously not a nice family—but they get their comeuppance. For a while the cat looks fine, so they all settle down for a nice mushroom omelet. Then Junior looks out the window, and there is the cat on the front lawn—dead.
In a panic the family rushes to the hospital to have their respective stomachs pumped. When they return home after the exhausting and painful orde
al, they find a note on their door from a neighbor. In the note he apologizes for running over their cat and killing it.
Screams in the Night
There was a man who lived with his young son and daughter in a cabin way out in the woods. His wife had died many years earlier. The man lived by hunting and fishing. Every day he had to go into the woods, leaving his children alone in the isolated cabin for hours. He didn't want to do this, but there was no other way he could get food for his family.
One day while the man was out hunting in the woods, he suddenly began to feel very cold, and he started shivering all over. The man knew somehow that something had gone wrong at home, but he didn't know what. He rushed back through the woods to the cabin. Inside he found the little girl crouching in a corner and crying hysterically. The little boy was nowhere around. When he asked the little girl what had happened, she just became more hysterical.
Though the man searched the entire area, he could find no trace of his son. He often asked the girl what had happened that day, but she would never say anything.
A year went by, and as it does, life went on. The man went back to his old habits of hunting and fishing all day, and the girl stayed home alone in the cabin. It had to be that way, otherwise the man and his daughter would starve.
One day when the man was out in the woods, the same cold feeling that he had had on the day his son disappeared came over him. Once again he knew that something was terribly wrong at home. He rushed back to the cabin, but as he feared, he found it empty. The girl was gone. He searched the cabin and the surrounding woods, but he could find no trace of her. By nightfall he was exhausted. He decided that there was nothing more he could do in the dark. It would be best to try to get some sleep and start searching again in the morning. So he lay down and tried to sleep, but he couldn't. His eyes simply wouldn't close.
He kept thinking about what might have happened and where the missing children might be. Then he suddenly had a thought. In all his searching, he had never looked in the attic of the cabin. So he decided to get up and take a look in the attic.
Naturally, he was more than a little nervous about what he might find up there. And he decided that if there was anything in the attic, he didn't want it to hear him coming. He didn't put on his shoes and he didn't take a flashlight, so that he would be able to creep up on whatever it was without being seen or heard.
He crept up the stairs barefoot and in the dark. He was very careful not to make a sound. Slowly and silently he pushed open the door to the attic at the top of the stairs and stepped in. . . .
YAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
In telling this story, you end with a scream. And then you wait until those sitting around recover, and someone asks: "What happened? Why did he scream?"
The answer is: "You'd scream too if you stepped barefoot on broken glass."
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The man lay in bed, in semidarkness, watching the thing at the end of the bed move back and forth. He had seen it there every night for the past week. This night he was determined to fix it once and for all.
Slowly he reached down under the bed where he had placed his shotgun. He picked the gun up noiselessly and raised the sight to his eyes. And the thing disappeared.
So he put the gun back down on the floor, and the thing appeared once again. Once again he picked up the gun and raised the sight to his eyes. And the thing disappeared.
This time he decided not to put the gun down. He just waited until the thing appeared again. When it did, he took careful aim, pulled the trigger and . . .
EYAHHHHHHHHH!
When someone finally asks what happened, you reply, "He shot off his big toe."
These are just two examples of a popular genre of tale known, for obvious reasons, as scream stories. Both of these tales have humorous endings, but that is not necessary in this type of story. Anyone who has ever been to summer camp should be familiar with such tales, for they are commonly used by counselors to terrify their young charges at night.
Possibly the most familiar of all of the scream stories is "The Golden Arm," which was made famous by Mark Twain. It is about the man who steals his wife's golden arm from her grave and is pursued by her ghost. The ghost gets ever closer and moans, "Where is my golden armmmmm?" For the punch line the teller shouts in the ghostly voice, "You've got it!" and then grabs someone sitting close by.
Modern Ghosts
Traditionally, the ghosts of pale knights and gray ladies have wandered the drafty corridors of Gothic castles. But today very few live in castles, Gothic or otherwise, and the supply of pale knights and gray ladies has dropped significantly. It's hard to imagine a ghostly pale knight clanking and groaning while riding up and down in the elevator of a twenty-story apartment building or of a gray lady carrying her head down the corridor of a suburban high school.
Still, the ghosts have not disappeared—not by any means. They have merely changed form. Here are some contemporary examples.
In New Orleans teenagers are warned to stay out of the park at night because of the ghost of Marie. In life Marie was a young girl very much in love with a fellow named Bob. She had become pregnant by him, and she wanted to marry him.
Bob had other ideas. He was young and wild and didn't want to be saddled with a wife and kid early in life. So one night he took Marie walking in the park, and when they reached a deserted spot he stabbed her to death. Bob hoped that the killing would be attributed to some unknown sex maniac, but he wasn't too clever, and there was plenty of evidence indicating he was the killer.
The police brought him in and he broke down and confessed almost at once. He's still in jail today.
Marie was not satisfied with human justice. Her spirit now haunts the park where she was killed. The ghost carries the bloody knife that she was murdered with, and it is said that she takes a horrible, unspeakable revenge on any young man caught in the park at night.
—————
At the University of Indiana there are some very old buildings. One of them, a girls' dorm, is haunted. This, according to the stories that have been told by generations of Indiana students, is how the haunting came about.
The dorm had once been a men's dorm, and there was a medical student who lived in a room on the third floor. He had been sneaking his girlfriend into the room for some time. One evening when they were up in his room together, she told him that she was pregnant and that they would have to get married.
The medical student felt that his whole future would be ruined. Everything he had worked for and dreamed of was crumbling. He would never be able to finish medical school. And besides, he didn't like the girl anymore.
He became enraged, almost insane. He grabbed for one of the knives that medical students use in dissection and stabbed her in the throat. She died instantly, without making a sound.
The medical student then waited until it was very late at night and the corridors of the dorm were deserted.
He carried the girl's body down into the building's huge basement and hid it in an unused passageway, hoping that it would never be found. But after the girl was missing for a few days the police began to suspect the medical student who was known to be her boyfriend. They arrested him and he confessed to what he had done and led them to the body.
But the murdered girl's ghost still haunts the old buiding, which was turned into a girls' dorm. Those who have seen it says she has long black hair and wears a yellow nightgown.
—————
Among Chicanos there is a ghostly figure that is widely known and much feared. It is La Llorna—the weeping woman. No one knows the ghostly figure's real name or the details of her life and death. But this much is agreed upon: In life she was a young woman who had several children. She fell hopelessly in love with a bad, wild man who didn't like children and didn't want them around, so in an act of desperate love the woman drowned her own chidren. Then she was so overcome with remorse that she drowned herself.
Now the figure with long black h
air blowing wildly in the wind and eyes red from constant weeping wanders
up and down along the banks of the river crying for her lost children, it is considered extremely bad luck to see La Llorna. or even to hear her crying, and many of those who have reported the apparition, have died within the year.
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At Camp Strongbow there was a regular initiation for new boys. The counselors would take each out in the woods alone and tell him that he had to pass a survival test. The test was to see if the camper could survive on his own in the woods for a week. The counselors would then hand the terrified camper a hunting knife and three matches and tell him that they would be back in a week to pick him up.
Of course, it was a joke. The new campers had to spend only one night in the woods. When the counselors came to get them the next morning, most boys were so happy to be rescued that they couldn't get mad at the joke that had been played on them.
A couple of years ago the counselors at Camp Strongbow took a new camper out into the woods and told him the story of having to survive for a week alone. This particular boy was from a big city and had never been in the woods before. Besides, he was very timid, so when the counselors left him with his knife and three matches he was really scared.
Early the next morning the counselors went to pick the boy up, but they couldn't find him. It seems he had been able to build a fire—they found a small pile of charred wood and two spent matches—but the boy was nowhere around. The counselors searched all day but couldn't find him. The next day the state police were called in, and they brought bloodhounds. Still, no clue to the fate of the missing camper was ever discovered.