Scary Stories Complete Set

by Alvin Schwartz

  That night her brothers heard her cries in time. They chased the creature down the hill, and David shot it in the leg. But the creature managed to scramble over the graveyard wall and disappeared near an old burial vault.

  The next day, Margaret and her brothers watched as the sexton of the church opened the burial vault. Inside was a horrifying scene—broken coffins, bones, and rotting flesh were scattered all over the floor.

  Only one coffin had not been disturbed. When the sexton opened it, there lay the creature with the shrunken face that had attacked Margaret. The telltale bullet was in its leg.

  They did the only thing they knew of to rid themselves of a vampire. The sexton built a roaring blaze outside the vault, and fed the shrunken body to the flames. They watched the body burn until nothing remained but ashes.

  Wonderful Sausage

  One dark, rainy Saturday afternoon, a fat and jolly butcher named Samuel Blunt had an argument over money with his wife, Eloise. Blunt lost his temper and killed Eloise. Then he ground her up into sausage meat and buried her bones under a big flat rock in the backyard. To keep the murder a secret, he told everyone that she had moved away.

  Blunt mixed his new sausage meat with pork, then seasoned it with salt and pepper, added some sage and thyme and a bit of garlic. To give it a special flavor, he smoked it in his smokehouse for a while. He called it “Blunt’s Special Sausage.”

  There was such a demand for this new sausage that Blunt bought the best hogs he could find and started raising his own pork. He also kept a sharp lookout for humans who might make a tasty sausage meat.

  One day a nice, plump schoolteacher came into his shop. Blunt grabbed her and ground her up. Another time Blunt’s dentist came by. He was a little round man, and into the grinder he went. Then one by one, the children in the neighborhood began to disappear. And so did their kittens and puppies. But no one ever dreamed that Blunt the butcher had anything to do with it.

  Things went on that way for years. Then one day Blunt made a big mistake. A fat boy came into the butcher shop. Blunt grabbed him and started to drag him off to the sausage grinder. But the boy broke loose, and ran out of the shop, and Blunt chased after him waving a big butcher knife.

  When people saw this, they realized at once what had become of all the missing children and grown-ups and kittens and puppies. An angry crowd gathered at the butcher shop. No one knows for sure just what happened to Blunt that day. Some say he was fed to his hogs. Others say he was fed to his sausage grinder. But he was never seen again, and neither was his wonderful sausage meat.

  The Cat’s Paw

  Somebody was stealing the meat Jed Smith kept in his smokehouse. Every day a ham, or some bacon, or something else was missing. Finally, Jed decided he had to put a stop to it. One night he hid in the smokehouse with his rifle and waited for the thief.

  He didn’t have to wait long, for soon a black she-cat slunk in. She was the biggest cat Jed had ever seen. When she jumped up and pulled down a ham hanging from the ceiling, Jed grabbed his rifle and turned on the lights. But instead of running away, the cat jumped at him. He fired, and shot off one of her paws.

  Jed was sure he heard a woman scream right after his gun went off. The cat began tearing around the room, spitting and yowling. Then she ran up the chimney and was gone.

  Jed stared at the cat’s paw. Only it wasn’t a cat’s paw anymore. A woman’s foot lay wriggling on the floor, all shot up and bloody.

  “So it’s a witch that’s been doing it,” he told himself.

  Just then one of Jed’s neighbors, a fellow named Burdick, came racing down the road to get a doctor. His wife’s foot had been shot in an accident, he told Jed. “She’s bleedin’ pretty bad,” he said.

  The doctor got to her barely in time. People who were there when it happened said that she was “spittin’ and yowlin’ just like a cat.”

  The Voice

  Ellen had just fallen asleep when she heard a strange voice.

  “Ellen,” it whispered, “I am coming up the stairs.

  “I am on the first step.

  “Now I am on the second step.”

  Ellen got scared and called her parents, but they didn’t hear her, and they didn’t come.

  Then the voice whispered, “Ellen, I’m on the top step.

  “Now I’m in the hall.

  “Now I’m outside your room.”

  Then it whispered, “I’m standing right next to your bed.”

  And then,

  “I’VE GOT YOU!”

  Ellen screamed, and the voice stopped. Her father rushed into the room and turned on the light.

  “Somebody is in here!” Ellen said. They looked and looked. Nobody was there.

  When I Wake Up, Everything Will Be All Right

  There are scary stories here about a subway car, a shopping mall, and other dangerous places.

  “Oh, Susannah!”

  Susannah and Jane shared a small apartment near the university where they were students. When Susannah got back from the library one night, the lights were out and Jane was asleep. Susannah undressed in the dark and quietly got into bed.

  She had almost fallen asleep when she heard someone humming the tune to the song “Oh, Susannah!”

  “Jane,” she said, “please stop humming; I want to get some sleep.”

  Jane didn’t answer, but the humming stopped, and Susannah fell asleep. She awakened early the next morning—too early, she decided—and was trying to get back to sleep when she heard the humming again.

  “Please go back to sleep,” she told Jane. “It’s too early to get up.”

  Jane didn’t answer, but the humming continued. Susannah became angry. “Cut it out!” she said. “It’s not funny.” When the humming still did not stop, she lost her temper. She jumped out of bed, pulled the covers off Jane, and screamed. . . .

  Jane’s head was gone! Somebody had cut off her head!

  “I’m having a nightmare,” Susannah told herself. “When I wake up, everything will be all right. . . .”

  The Man in the Middle

  It was almost midnight. Sally Truitt had just gotten on the subway train at Fiftieth Street after visiting her mother.

  “Don’t worry,” Sally had told her. “The subway is safe. There is always a policeman on duty.” But that night she didn’t see one. Except for her, the subway car was empty.

  At Forty-second Street, three tough-looking men got on. Two of them were holding up the third, who looked drunk. His head rolled from side to side, and his legs refused to work.

  When they got him seated between them, his head came to rest on one of his shoulders. Sally thought he was staring at her. She buried her head in a book and tried not to notice.

  At Twenty-eighth Street, one of the men stood up.

  “Take it easy, Jim,” he said to the man in the middle, and he got off.

  At Twenty-third Street, Jim’s other friend stood up.

  “You’ll be fine,” he said, and he got off.

  Now the only ones left in the car were Jim and Sally. Just then the train went around a sharp curve, and Jim pitched onto the floor at Sally’s feet. When she looked down at him, she saw a trickle of blood on the side of his head and, just above it, a bullet hole.

  The Cat in a Shopping Bag

  Mrs. Briggs was driving to the shopping mall to do some last-minute Christmas shopping when she accidentally ran over a cat. She could not bear to leave the corpse on the road for other cars to hit and squash. So she stopped, wrapped the cat in some tissue paper she had with her, and put it in an old shopping bag in the backseat. She would bury it in the backyard when she got home.

  At the mall, she parked her car and began walking to one of the stores. She had taken only a few steps when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a woman reach into the open window of her car and take the shopping bag with the dead cat. Then the woman quickly got into a car nearby and drove away.

  Mrs. Briggs ran back to her car and followed the woman. Sh
e caught up with her at a diner down the road. She followed her inside and watched the woman slide into a booth and give a waitress her order.

  As the woman sat sipping her soda, she reached into Mrs. Briggs’ shopping bag. Then she bent down and looked inside. A look of horror crossed her face. She screamed, and fainted.

  The waitress called an ambulance. Two attendants carried the woman away on a stretcher. But they left the shopping bag behind. Mrs. Briggs picked up the bag and ran after them.

  “This is hers,” she called. “It’s her Christmas present! She wouldn’t want to lose it.”

  The Bed by the Window

  The three old men shared a room at the nursing home.

  Their room had only one window, but for them it was the only link to the real world. Ted Conklin, who had been there the longest, had the bed next to the window. When Ted died, the man in the next bed, George Best, took his place; and the third man, Richard Greene, took George’s bed.

  Despite his illness, George was a cheerful man who spent his days describing the sights he could see from his bed—pretty girls, a policeman on horseback, a traffic jam, a pizza parlor, a fire station and other scenes of life outside.

  Richard loved to listen to George. But the more George talked about life outside, the more Richard wanted to see it for himself. Yet he knew that only when George died would he have his chance. He wanted to look out that window so badly that one day he decided to kill George. “He is going to die soon, anyway,” he told himself. “What difference would it make?”

  George had a bad heart. If he had an attack during the night and a nurse could not get to him right away, he had pills he could take. He kept them in a bottle on top of the cabinet between his bed and Richard’s. All Richard had to do was knock the bottle to the floor where George could not reach it.

  A few nights later George died just as Richard had planned he would. And the next morning Richard was moved to the bed by the window. Now he would see for himself all the things outside that George had described.

  After the nurses had left, Richard turned to the window and looked out. But all he could see was a blank brick wall.

  The Dead Man’s Hand

  The students at the school for nurses got along quite well with one another, except for Alice. The trouble with Alice was that she was perfect. At least that is how it seemed to the other students.

  She was always friendly and always cheerful. Nothing ever upset her. Her school assignments were always on time, and always perfect. She didn’t even bite her fingernails.

  Many of the student nurses resented Alice. They would have liked to see her fail at something—become frightened, or cry, or do something that showed she had weaknesses like they did.

  One night several students tried to frighten Alice with a practical joke. They borrowed the hand of a corpse they had been studying in anatomy and tied it to the light cord in her closet. When she tried to turn on the light, she would find herself holding a dead man’s hand. “That would scare anybody,” one of them said. “If it doesn’t scare her, nothing will.”

  After tying the hand in place, they went to the movies. When they got back, Alice was asleep. But when they didn’t see her the next morning, they decided to find out what had happened.

  There was no sign of Alice in her room. But they soon found her. She was sitting on the floor in her closet staring at the dead man’s hand and mumbling to herself. Alice didn’t even look up.

  The “joke” had worked, but nobody was laughing.

  A Ghost in the Mirror

  This is a scary game that young people sometimes play—trying to conjure up a ghost in their bathroom mirror. Many don’t really believe that a ghost is going to appear. But they try to raise one anyway, for the fun and the excitement.

  Some are willing to settle for any ghost, but others have a particular ghost in mind. One of these is a ghost named Mary Worth, who also is known as Mary Jane and Bloody Mary. She is the heroine of an old comic strip, but some say she actually was a witch who was hanged at the infamous witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692.

  Another of these ghosts is “La Llorona,” the weeping woman who wanders the streets of cities and towns from Texas to California and throughout Mexico, looking for her lost child.

  Still another is Mary Whales, a young woman who is supposed to have been killed in a car accident in Indianapolis, Indiana, about 1965. Her ghost is one of the “vanishing hitchhikers.” It is said that again and again she thumbs a ride home in a passing car, then vanishes before she gets there.

  Here is how ghost hunters try to raise a ghost:

  1. They find a quiet bathroom, close the door, and turn off the lights.

  2. While they stare at their face in the mirror, they repeat the ghost’s name, usually forty-seven times or a hundred times. If any ghost will do, they say “any ghost” in place of a name. If they do manage to raise one, its face will slowly replace their face in the mirror.

  Some say a ghost is likely to be angry at being disturbed. If it gets angry enough, they say, it will try to shatter the mirror and come right into the room. But a player can always turn on the lights and send the ghost back to where it came from. And when that happens, the game is over.

  The Curse

  My dad’s friend, Charlie Potter, was a small, nervous man who was always looking around, as if he was in some kind of danger. After he told me this story about his college fraternity, I understood why.

  “The frat doesn’t exist anymore,” he said. “It was banned years ago. We had just nine members at that point and were taking in two more: Jack Lawton and Ernie Kramer.

  “One night in January, just about this time of year, the nine of us took them out into the country for their initiation. We took them to an old deserted house where two young men about our age had been murdered recently. Their murderer was still at large.

  “We gave Jack a lighted candle and told him to go up to the third floor. ‘Stay there for an hour,’ we told him, ‘then come back down. Don’t speak. Don’t make any noise. If your candle goes out, carry on in the dark.’

  “From where we were standing, we could see the light from Jack’s candle moving up the stairs to the second floor, then to the third. But when he got to the third floor, his candle went out.

  “We guessed that he had come to a drafty corner, and the wind blew it out. But when the hour went by and he didn’t come down, we weren’t so sure. We waited another fifteen minutes and got more and more nervous.

  “So we sent Ernie Kramer up after him. When Ernie got to the third floor, his candle also went out. We waited ten minutes, twenty minutes, but there was no sign of either of them. ‘Come on down,’ we called, but they didn’t answer.

  “Finally, we decided to go and get them. Armed with flashlights, we started up the stairs. It was as quiet and dark as a grave in that house. When we got to the second floor, we called out again, but there was no answer.

  “When we got to the third floor, we walked into a great big open space like an attic. Jack and Ernie weren’t there. But we saw footprints in the dust. These led to a room on the other side of the attic.

  “That room was also empty. But there was fresh blood on the floor, and the window was wide open. It was about twenty-five feet to the ground, but there was no ladder or rope in sight that they could have used to get down.

  “We searched the rest of the house and the land around the house and found nothing. We decided that they were playing a trick on us. We figured that in some way they had escaped through the window and were hiding in the woods. The blood on the floor was to throw us off the track. We guessed that they’d show up the next day with a lot of stories and a lot of laughs. But they didn’t.

  “The next day we told the Dean of Men what had happened, and he reported it to the police. The police didn’t find anything either, and after several weeks the search ended. To this day no one knows what happened to Jack Lawton and Ernie Kramer.

  “There isn’t much more
to tell,” he said. “We weren’t arrested, but the college disbanded the fraternity and suspended the nine of us from school for a year.

  “The strangest part came after we graduated. Someone must have placed a curse on us. Every year since then, around the time of that initiation, one of us has died or gone crazy.

  “I’m the only one left,” he said, “and I’m in pretty good health. But there are times when I feel just a little peculiar. . . .”

  (Now rush at someone in the audience and SCREAM:)

  AAAAAAAAAAH!

  The Last Laugh

  These stories are scary and funny.

  The Church

  There was a fellow named Larry Berger who wasn’t afraid of anybody alive. But anybody who was dead scared the wits out of him.

  One night Larry was out driving in the country in his old jeep when he got caught in a bad thunderstorm. The rain was coming down in sheets. Since his jeep didn’t have a top to it, Larry started looking for a place to take shelter.

  But at the first place he came to he didn’t even slow down. It was an old deserted cabin, probably as dry as a bone inside. But Larry knew for a fact that it was haunted, and he wasn’t going to stay there.

  A few miles farther, he came to an old abandoned church standing all alone in a field. It hadn’t been used in years. All the window glass was gone, but it still had sections of the roof intact. So Larry parked his jeep and ran inside.

  It was as dark as could be in there. Larry groped around until he found a pew and sat down. It was nice and dry, just as he had thought it would be, and he stretched out his legs and made himself comfortable.