More Short & Shivery

by Robert D. San Souci

  Coffin notes that “the motif of the rolling head is worldwide, being known to Europeans, Indonesians, and Africans, as well as to the North American Indians.” The Cheyenne version has the young girl use quills and a root digger to escape the head and save her brother. The Blackfeet tale has two boys use a stick, a stone, and water squeezed from moss. The Modocs of northern California and southern Oregon tell of a monstrous, man-eating head that is disposed of by two old women, who promise to ferry the head across a stream, but push it into the water instead (Jeremiah Curtain, Myths of the Modocs, published in 1912; reissued, New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971).

  THE CROGLIN GRANGE VAMPIRE. This account first appeared in a book called In My Solitary Life by Augustus Hare (4 volumes; London: Allen, 1896–1901), and has been reprinted in Aidan Chambers’ Book of Ghosts and Hauntings (originally published, London: Longman Young Books, 1973; reissued, Hammondsworth, England: Kestrel Books/Penguin Books, 1981); Raymond T. McNally, A Clutch of Vampires (New York: Bell Publishing Company, 1974); and, somewhat recast, in Nancy Garden, Vampires (New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1973). Charles Harper, in his book Haunted Houses (1924), said there was no place called Croglin Grange. Others pointed out that part of Hare’s report resembled the novel Varney the Vampire (London: 1847).

  But in the Spring 1963 issue of Tomorrow magazine, F. Clive Ross claimed he visited the area in Britain where the events Hare reported took place. Ross said he met a woman who had known a Mr. Fisher, a member of the family that, according to the story, owned Croglin Grange. Born in the 1860s, Mr. Fisher said he had heard the tale from his grandparents who told him these events happened between 1680 and 1690, rather than 1875, as Hare reported.

  THE YARA. This legend is adapted from “The Yara,” by Brazilian journalist and historian Affonso Arinhos de Melo Franco (1868–1916), reprinted in The Golden Land: An Anthology of Latin American Folklore in Literature, selected, edited, and translated by Harriet de Onis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948); and from Frances Carpenter, “Mario and the Yara,” South American Wonder Tales (Chicago and New York: Follett Publishing Company, 1969). Details of Indian life and culture, as well as natural history, came from such sources as Alex Shoumatoff, The Rivers Amazon (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1978, revised 1986), and F. Bruce Lamb, Wizard of the Upper Amazon: The Story of Manuel Cordova-Rios (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971, revised 1974).

  Affonso Arinhos de Melo Franco calls the people “the Manaus,” but it is unclear whether that names a tribe or merely a village. He might refer to ancestors of the reclusive Waimiri-Atroari tribe, whom Alex Shoumatoff describes in 1978 as living in nine villages 150 miles north of the present-day town of Manaus.

  “ME, MYSELF”. Adapted from J. F. Campbell, Popular Tales of the West Highlands, Orally Collected: New Edition (London: Alexander Gardner Publisher, 1890). Campbell notes that this “is a story which is all over the [Scottish] Highlands in various shapes.”

  Added facts about the Hebrides Islands come from John McPhee, The Crofter & the Laird (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), which explains: “The large seeds of a treelike West Indian plant called Entada scandens have drifted to the shores of [the islands] for thousands of years, and they have always been called fairy eggs. People once wore them around their necks, believing that this protected them from the evil moods of fairies.” Other references include Ronald Macdonald Douglas, Scottish Lore and Folklore (New York: Beekman House, 1982), and Lillian Beckwith, The Hills Is Lonely (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1963), an account of the author’s stay in the Hebrides.

  ISLAND OF FEAR. Retold from “The Island of the Cannibal” in Arthur C. Parker, Seneca Myths & Folk Tales (originally published, Buffalo, New York: Buffalo Historical Society, 1923; reissued, Lincoln: University of Nebraska/Bison Books, 1989), and “The Friendly Skeleton” in Lewis Spence, North American Indians: Myths & Legends (original publication: London: George G. Harrap & Company, 1914; reprinted, London: Bracken Books, 1985). Many other versions have been recorded from Native American storytellers throughout the Northeast region.

  THREE WHO SOUGHT DEATH. Adapted from “The Pardoner’s Tale” in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, edited by F. N. Robinson, second edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1933, 1957). Versions of this moral tale turn up in the literature of ancient India, Arabia, Italy, and central Asia.

  SISTER DEATH AND THE HEALER. This widely known Hispanic tale from the Mexican-American border region is rooted in an older story from Spain. Among many versions consulted were those in John O. West, Mexican-American Folklore: Legends, Songs, Festivals, Proverbs, Crafts, Tales of Saints, of Revolutionaries, and More (Little Rock: August House, 1988); José Griego y Maestas and Rudolfo A. Anaya, Cuentos: Tales from the Hispanic Southwest: Bilingual Stories in Spanish and English (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1980); and the Editors of Time-Life Books, The Enchanted World: Tales of Terror (Chicago: Time-Life Books, 1987). For my retelling, I borrowed a few details from Spanish counterparts.

  THE MOUSE TOWER. Adapted from accounts in Curious Myths of the Middle Ages by Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould (London: Rivingtons, 1866), and an account in The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm, Volume I, edited and translated by Donald Ward (Philadelphia, Penn.: Institute for the Study of Human Issues Incorporated, 1981). The Grimms’ work was originally published in 1816. See also The Finest Legends of the Rhine by Wilhelm Ruland (Bonn, Germany: Stollfuss Verlag, 1969).

  Baring-Gould argues that the real-life Bishop Hatto was not “hard-hearted and wicked” and that “the [mouse] tower was erected as a station for collecting tolls on vessels passing up and down the river.” Maria Leach, editor of Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, notes that stories of a miser devoured by mice or rats in a tower are widespread throughout Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, and Scandinavia.

  THE DEVIL AND TOM WALKER. This account was first published in Washington Irving, Tales of a Traveller (New York: 1825; reprinted in The Works of Washington Irving, Volume I, New York: P. F. Collier, n.d.). Folklorist Richard M. Dorson, in his Jonathan Draws the Long Bow: New England Popular Tales and Legends (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946), comments that it is a literary tale that has evolved into regional folklore, noting that the story was included in Charles M. Skinner’s Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, Volume I (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1896).

  I have omitted many of Irving’s satirical jabs at business, politics, and social custom, and the subtext about Tom Walker’s wife. But the text remains substantially Irving’s, with only minimal additions for the sake of continuity or clarity.

  THE GREEDY DAUGHTER. Adapted from the story of the same title originally published in R. H. Busk, The Folk-Lore of Rome (n.d.), reprinted in Folk Tales of All Nations, edited by F. H. Lee (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1930). I also consulted the more extended and earthier version titled “Uncle Wolf” in Italian Folktales, selected and retold by Italo Calvino, published in Italy in 1956; English translation by George Martin (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980); available in paperback in The Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library (New York: Random House, 1981).

  THE PIRATE. Adapted from Richard H. Dana’s eighteenth-century poem “The Buccaneer,” reprinted with commentary in Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore: In Prose and Poetry (first edition, 1884; revised, 1906; reprinted, Boston: Charles E. Tuttle, 1971). I have also consulted the prose version by Charles M. Skinner in his Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1896). These accounts are loosely based on the actual burning of the ship Palantine in the winter of 1750–51, which gave rise to many tales about a blazing ghostly vessel.

  THE GOLDEN ARM. Adapted and expanded from Joseph Jacobs, English Fairy Tales (London, 1890), this tale is akin to such formula stories as the English “Teeny Tiny,” in which a teeny-tiny woman takes a teeny-tiny bone from a churchyard t
o make some teeny-tiny soup, and “Tailypo,” from the American South, retold in the first volume of Short & Shivery (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1986).

  Folklorist Maria Leach comments in her The Thing at the Foot of the Bed: And Other Scary Tales (Cleveland, Ohio: William Collins & World Publishing Company, 1959; reprinted by New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1977), “This is one of the most famous scary stories told. It is said to have been told around every Boy and Girl Scout campfire ever kindled … the story Mark Twain used to tell to scare whole audiences.”

  THE SERPENT WOMAN. This tale has been condensed and rewritten from the story of the same title originally published in Mrs. Middlemore, Spanish Legendary Tales (n.d.), reprinted in Folk Tales of All Nations edited by F. H. Lee (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1930). The story uses the familiar element of the witch transformed into another form (black cat, raven, serpent) and discovered when a wound inflicted on the animal is revealed in its human form. For a parallel, one might look at “The Witch Cat” in my first Short & Shivery collection.

  There is also an echo of the swan-maiden or seal-maiden motif in which magical beings put aside a coat of feathers or a fishskin to become beautiful, seemingly human women.

  LOFT THE ENCHANTER. Adapted from accounts in Ghosts, Witchcraft, and the Other World: Icelandic Folktales I, translated by Alan Boucher (Reykjavik, Iceland: Iceland Review Library, 1977) and Legends of Icelandic Magicians, translated by Jacqueline Simpson (Cambridge, England: D. S. Brewer, Ltd.; Totowa, N.J.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1975). Additional background details are from Nagel’s Encyclopedia-Guide: Iceland, Third Edition, Completely Revised (Geneva, Paris, Munich: Nagel Publishers, 1984), and A Family in Iceland: Families Around the World Series (New York: The Bookwright Press, 1985).

  THE ACCURSED HOUSE. Adapted and expanded from an account in Charles M. Skinner, Myths & Legends of Our Own Land: Volume II (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1896). This story picks up the classic folkloric theme of the ghost who guards a hidden treasure.

  ESCAPE UP THE TREE. I based this story on a Nigerian version of a well-known African tale because of the unique form the pursuing creature takes. I have added details from Caribbean versions—clearly from African roots—from the islands of Trinidad, Martinique, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Les Saintes, and Haiti. In these stories, a witch, a female demon, or the devil himself forces a boy/young man to escape up the tree. The tale has similarities to “Brother and Sister” in the first Short & Shivery collection. In the United States, a variant story is widely known as “Wiley and the Hairy Man.” Here a young boy is eventually trapped by the hairy man or the devil, and is rescued by his three (or four) dogs.

  For the originals, see “The Hunter and the Witch” in Nigerian Folk Tales, as told by Olawale Idewu and Omotayo Adu (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1961). See also variants grouped under the heading “Escape up the Tree” in Folk-Lore of the Antilles, French and English, Part III, by Elsie Clews Parsons (first published by the American Folk-Lore Society in 1943; reprinted, New York: Kraus Reprint Company, 1969). Maria Leach discusses the tale in God Had a Dog: Folklore of the Dog (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1961).

  THE HEADREST. Retold from Annie Ker’s Papuan Fairy Tales (c. 1912), a collection of folktales from the northeastern coast of New Guinea, reprinted in F. H. Lee, Folk Tales of All Nations (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1930). Mrs. Ker lived at a mission compound in New Guinea in 1910.

  THE THING IN THE WOODS. Adapted from an account in Gumbo Ya-Ya: A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales by Lyle Saxon, Robert Tallant, and Edward Dryer (first published in 1945 by Louisiana Writers Project Publications; reprinted, New York: Bonanza Books, n.d.). Details of Cajun life and language came from William Faulkner Rushton, The Cajuns: From Acadia to Louisiana (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), and other sources.

  The Cajuns live mainly in rural southern Louisiana, are largely Roman Catholic, and are the largest French-speaking group in the United States. “Cajun” comes from “Acadian,” referring to the part of Canada to which their ancestors came from France. Those early French settlers immigrated to Louisiana after their farms were seized and burned by the English governor of Nova Scotia in 1755. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow tells the story of their exile in his poem Evangeline.

  KING OF THE CATS. Adapted from Joseph Jacobs’s classic More English Fairy Tales (London, 1894). Jacobs’s version, which is widely anthologized, was put together by that author from several earlier narratives. He cites five variants of the legend, commenting, “An interesting example of the spread and development of a single anecdote throughout England … a tale which is, in its way, as weird and fantastic as E[dgar] A[llan] Poe.”

  THE DEAD MOTHER. Retold from Russian Folk Tales by William R. Shedden-Ralston (London, 1873); reprinted in Bernhardt J. Hurwood, Passport to the Supernatural: An Occult Compendium from All Ages and Many Lands (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1972).

  KNOCK … KNOCK … KNOCK … A retelling of one of the most popular examples of urban folklore. In The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends & Their Meanings (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981), Jan Harold Brunvand offers an extended discussion of this “well-known urban legend that folklorists have named ‘The Boyfriend’s Death’ … a story that has traveled rapidly to reach nationwide oral circulation.” In Folklore of Canada (Canada: McClelland and Stewart, 1976), Edith Fowke refers to “The Boyfriend’s Death” as being “widely known today.… Such legends are particularly rife among teen-agers, who sometimes call them ‘scary stories.’ These tales, which are always sworn to be true, are told at social get-togethers such as pajama parties, nights at summer camps, canoe trips, or camp reunions.”

  TWICE SURPRISED. This is one of the most widely repeated ghost stories in Japan. It is known variously under such titles as “Surprised Twice,” “The Terrible Face,” “The Ghost Covered with Eyes,” “The Face That Grew Long,” “The Eyeless Demon in Monjuroku,” and “Was It This Kind of Face?”

  I have based this retelling on a version in Ancient Tales in Modern Japan: An Anthology of Japanese Folk Tales, selected and translated by Fanny Hagin Mayer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, copublished with Asian Folklore Studies, 1984), and on a study of the story and its variants found in The Yanagita Kunio Guide to the Japanese Folk Tale by Yanagita Kunio, translated and edited by Fanny Hagin Mayer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, copublished with Asian Folklore Studies, 1986). The latter volume is a translation of Nihon Mukashibanashi Meii, originally published in Tokyo in 1948.

  About the Author

  Robert D. San Souci is the award-winning author of many books for young readers, including Larger Than Life, Young Merlin, Young Guinevere, Feathertop, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Sootface, and The Hobyahs. Widely traveled and a popular speaker, he has lectured in schools, libraries, universities, and conferences in more than thirty states. A native Californian, Robert San Souci lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.