Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

The following stories are based on folklore, written in the style of the classic ghost tale collection. I may add more as time passes.

Never Push Over a Tombstone

This story took place in the town of Scagaweay, up near the Great Lakes, back in the 1970s. Now that I've told you where and when it happened, you'll know that it must be true.

In Scagaweay there lived some high school students who were of a bad, rough sort. Their names were Mike and Norman and Carrie and Jason and Rosie. They dressed in scruffy jeans and jackets and hung out in places where they weren't supposed to, like the old abandoned rock quarry, where they smoked cigarettes and drank vodka even though they were underage. All of them, that is, except for Carrie, who hung out with the other four because they were her only friends. She only pretended to smoke and drink, and she couldn't swear like the others without stammering a little.

Halloween came, and at midnight these friends all went out to the local cemetery. Most people who go to the cemetery on Halloween do it to tell scary stories there, but these kids went out to smoke and drink and swear. They wandered around with a flashlight, looking at the tombstones and making fun of the names they found. Except for Carrie, who only grinned nervously at her friends' jokes.

Eventually they found the grave of the man who had founded the town, John R. Scagaweay. He had been very rich, and could afford to put up an enormous monument over his grave: a tall, white obelisk made of marble. But the ground around it had softened over the years, so that it tilted like the Tower of Pisa.

It gave Mike and Norman and the others the idea of pushing it over. So they knocked it to the ground. Then, after kicking at it and scuffing it—except for Carrie, who hung back—they all went home.

The next day, Jason was sitting out behind the winter cabin that his family owned, cleaning a rifle, when a bear charged at him from the woods. It clawed him across the chest and neck, and chased him back into the woods, where he bled to death before he could make it back out again.

The day after that, Mike was riding his motorcycle down the country highway, when a tractor trailer hauling some metal pipes overturned ahead of him. One of the pipes flew at him and knocked his head clean off. It bounced away so far it took the police almost six hours to find it, still inside the helmet he was wearing.

On the third day after Halloween, something pulled Norman to the bottom of the municipal swimming pool and held him there until he drowned. No one could figure out what he was even doing out at the pool, because it was closed for the season behind a high, chain-link fence, and the gate was locked up tight.

And on the day after that, Rosie was taken to the hospital because her stomach hurt. As soon as she got into the emergency room she started vomiting up green sludge filled with white, wriggling things that looked like maggots. For hours and hours all she could do was vomit, and her belly and hips and legs and face got thinner and hollower until it she was only skin and bones, and when she died that night she looked like an old woman who had starved to death.

That night Carrie went back out to the cemetery, where she tried all by herself to push the obelisk back up into place. She must have got it part way up, but it slipped, because when they found her the next day it had fallen on her, crushing her head like a melon.

Apparently John R. Scagaweay didn't care that she only sort of went along with her friends when they did mean things.

Drive with a Dead Man

The old man was dead when they found him, alone, propped up in the oak chair at the head of the dining table in the big house on the wooded hill that overlooked the town. They didn't know he was dead at first, because he was glaring at them with eyes like burning coal. It was only when they got close that they found that his flesh was cold and hard and waxy, for he had been dead for almost a day.

They had expected to find him dead. They were the ones who put poison in his vitamin pills.

They were his doctor and his lawyer, and he was already an old man when as young men they had gone to work for him. But the years came and went, and they too grew wrinkled and lined, and the doctor's hair turned white and the lawyer lost all of his, and still the old man went on living, getting older and meaner and shrinking up inside his clothes and inside the great mansion where he lived all by himself. Some said he lived so long because he came from a family where the men all lived to be a hundred and twenty. Others said it was because he was a warlock who had sold his soul to the devil for a million dollars and a long, long life.

But the doctor and the lawyer finally got tired of waiting for the old man to die, because they knew that all his money go to them when he went, and they wanted to enjoy it before they themselves needed nurses and lawyers to look after them.

They weren't very happy when they read the will. They got all the money, like they expected, but it also required them to drive the hearse that would carry the old man out to the cemetery. But it seemed like a small thing, so they went along with it.

The day of the funeral came, and all of the town turned out, because the old man had been so fabulously rich. It was a long line of cars that left the funeral home, following the hearse as it turned out onto the street leading out of town, for the cemetery was out in the countryside.

The first sign that something had gone wrong came when the lead policeman on his motorcycle noticed in his side mirror that the hearse was going too fast and was creeping up behind him. He sped up, but the hearse kept speeding up too, until he and it were going over the speed limit. He tried signaling it to slow down, but it kept coming up on him, nipping at his rear tire, so he peeled off to the side and slowed up alongside to tell the lawyer (who was driving) to slow down.

That's when he noticed that the hearse's windshield and windows were fogged up. They were so fogged up that he couldn't see inside.

He sped alongside, trying to warn the driver off, but the hearse kept going faster and faster. Fifty, sixty, eighty miles an hour it was going. As they approached the bridge across the river, the policeman finally fell back and radioed for help.

But as he watched, the hearse swerved and sailed off the embankment to plunge nose first into the river and sink without a trace.

The next day divers went down, and they found the hearse half buried (nose down) in the river bed, like a spike. They couldn't leave it like that, so the city authorities fetched a crane and tried pulling it out. But it must have been stuck very fast in the mud, for the crane couldn't move it, but only strained at it, until the chain itself broke and whipped around, killing half a dozen people standing nearby. So they brought in the biggest and strongest crane in the state, and with that they managed to pull the hearse out and set it on the riverbank, where it sank all the way up to its axles into the ground.

They opened it up, so that the dirty river water came gushing out. To everyone's amazement, inside they found only the coffin. Of the doctor and lawyer there was no sign.

Even stranger, the steering wheel was also gone.

They took the coffin back to the funeral home, to move the old man into a new coffin. It's when they opened the coffin up that they found the steering wheel. The old man—cold and waxy and very, very dead—was clutching it in his haggard hands.

Come and Ride With Me

A woman and her daughter moved to a new town, and bought a small house out in the country. It was summer, and a few nights after they moved in, the daughter opened her window before going to bed.

She woke to hear a voice calling from outside. "Sarah," it said, "come and ride with me."

It was a young man's voice, and it was full of ardor and pain. But the girl (whose name was not Sarah) didn't answer, and buried her head under the blankets as the voice called again. Over and over it called to her, begging her to come out and ride with him.

But eventually it stopped, and she fell back asleep.

The next morning she decided it had only been a dream, so she didn't mention it to her mother. They had a few nights of rain after that, so it was a few more days before she again slept with her window open. As she opened the window, she wondered if she'd have the same dream again.

Sure enough, she woke to hear the same voice, full of yearning, calling from beneath her window: "Sarah, come and ride with me. Won't you come and ride with me?"

This time she knew she wasn't dreaming, and she sat up in bed, then crept to the window to listen as the boy continued to call. Still she didn't answer, and when the voice fell silent and she heard footsteps on the grass below, she crawled back into bed.

Still she didn't tell her mother what had happened. She wasn't afraid—the young man sounded nice but a little confused—and she thought her mother would be upset if she told her about the boy. Besides, she doubted that he would come around a third time.

But some nights later she again heard the voice calling. "Sarah, come and ride with me. Oh, won't you come and ride with me!" It was filled with such sadness and longing that the girl got up and went to the window and peered through the curtains.

"I'm not Sarah," she called back, though the night was so dark she could see nothing outside. "You've got the wrong house!"

"Come and ride with me, Sarah," the young man pleaded from the shadows below. "You promised you would!"

"I'm not Sarah," the girl repeated. "Did Sarah use to live here?"

"Oh, come ride with me, Sarah!" the young man said.

The girl hesitated, then shut and locked the window. Now she was worried that the young man might be a little crazy.

So this time she did tell her mother what had happened. As she thought, it frightened her. "If it happens again," she told her daughter, "tell him you'll call the police." That evening, they went around making sure that all the doors and windows were locked up tight.

The girl tried shutting her ears against his voice when the young man came around after that. "Sarah, come and ride with me," he would plead. One night she did answer, to tell him that she had called the police, and that he would have to leave if he didn't want to be arrested, but he ignored her and continued to plead with her, begging her to come down and ride with him. "Where is your car?" she finally challenged him, for she had never heard the growl of motor, either before or after his arrival. He didn't answer, but only again asked her to come and ride with him.

Her mother finally went to the police to complain. They said they would investigate, and a patrolman came out to ask them some questions, but he didn't have anything useful to suggest.

For some weeks this went on, and the girl gradually lost her fear of the young man, who never said or did anything worse than wake her in the middle of the night to ask her (or Sarah) to come out and ride with him. She started to sit at her window and try talking to him. It did bother her a little that he never answered her questions or altered his own; it also bothered her that she never saw him, for he always hung back where the shadows were deepest, and never stepped out into the light, even when she asked him to. Once she woke and fetched her mother in, so that she could hear the boy for herself, but the young man was gone when she got back.

Summer faded into autumn, and still this odd courtship continued.

Then, one evening in October, as the mother was doing some late shopping, a woman approached to ask if she and her family were living in that house out in the countryside. The mother said that she was. The woman gave her a very grave look, and asked if a young man ever came out in the evenings to look for someone named Sarah. The mother, startled, said that he had.

The woman pulled her aside. "You and your family must get out of that house immediately," she said. "Do you have a daughter, a teenage daughter?"

"Yes."

"Then you must get her out of that house right now!"

The mother asked who the young man was, and what made him so dangerous.

"I don't know his name," the woman said. "No one does, they've forgotten it, and he never gives it. But a girl named Sarah lived in that house once, more than a hundred years ago, and he was her sweetheart. One night he came to her window and asked her to ride with him, and she went with him. He was never seen again, but her body was found in the river, and I can show you her grave in the cemetery if you want.

"Ever since," the woman said, "that young man—or what's left of him—comes to the house and asks the young girl who lives there to come ride with him. And if they do go down to ride with him, they're never seen again."

The mother paled. The story was fantastic, but she made straight for home. She found the lights on and the door unlocked and open, but of her daughter there was no sign, and she was never seen again.

What she and the boy did on that ride, and how it ended, no one ever knew.

It Wants to Wear Your Skin

Not everyone who goes into high school comes out alive. There are the usual accidents and other tragedies, the usual memorial services.

But sometimes a high school classmate goes missing, and no one notices until it's much too late.

The football team and the cheerleaders were holding a bonfire at the start of the season. It was out in the country, in an open field with the river on one side and the wooded hills on the other. The sky was clear and dark, and the weather warm. The coaches and teachers who were supervising couldn't keep an eye on everyone, and every once in a while some of the kids would slip off alone to a dark corner of the field, and come back a little later looking like they'd been rolling around in the grass and leaves.

It was late—almost time to head back into town as the bonfire was burning low—when a couple of the football players with their dates took one last walk around the darkest part of the field. One of them tripped and fell to his hands and knees, and when he came back up again he was holding something soft and leathery. At first they thought it was a sheet, or some discarded curtains. It was when they got it back into the light that they discovered it was a bag of skin, still tangled up inside of some old clothes.

That ended the party in a hurry, and the next day the police were out combing the field.

"My uncle said it sounded like the work of a Yee Naaldlooshii," Michael Ironhorse some told his friends later that week, as they were hanging out in his basement after school. Michael wasn't on the football team, but the players had told him and most of the rest of the school all about the thing they had found out in the field. "It's a kind of Navajo witch or warlock," he explained to the others. "They can turn themselves into animals by wearing the animal's skin. And if they put on the skin of a person, they can turn themselves into that person."

"But doesn't that mean they have to take the skin off the person?" his friend Emily Wallace asked. Michael nodded. "Gross!" she exclaimed.

But the boys were fascinated, and they laughed and gagged as he described how the Yee Naaldlooshii would suck out and eat the insides of its victim—including the brains, which is how come it knew everything the victim knew—then peel off its old skin and put on the new skin and go around pretending to be the other person.

For awhile no more was heard about the thing found out at the bonfire, and mostly it was forgotten about, though one of the guys did ask Michael if it meant that the Yee Naaldlooshii had taken the skin of one of the football players or one of the cheerleaders and was inside the school with them. Michael just rolled his eyes and replied that there wasn't any such thing as the Yee Naaldlooshii, and that his uncle was just a drunken old Navajo who was living with his family because he didn't have anyplace else to go.

The month passed, and it came time for the football squad's third game of the season, but the quarterback, Chad Yeager, didn't show up. He seemed to have just disappeared.

A few weeks after that, one of the girls on the swim team, Tasha Franklin, went missing. She left a note, saying that she was having problems at home. Two weeks after that, Justin Bell, one of the chess players, walked into the school building and never walked back out of it.

That time, someone did find something. Justin's clothes were discovered in a trash basket inside the janitor's closet. And inside those clothes they found a complete bag of skin—torso, arms, hands, and legs, and a face with a curly mop of black hair, just like Justin's.

Now Michael's friends remembered what he had told them about the Yee Naaldlooshii, and they pulled him aside and plied him with all sorts of questions. He came back the next day with the answers that his uncle had given him. On how to spot the Yee Naaldlooshii by its red eyes that glow in a dark room, even when it is in disguise, and by the fetid breath it has after feeding. About its aversion to silver. And about how to kill it by making it breathe a burning compound of coyote dung and medicinal herbs.

They took Michael's reports very seriously, and started looking for those herbs and for some coyote dung. But they stopped a few days later, when Michael's skin and clothes turned up in a garbage dumpster in back of the comic book shop across the street from the high school.

Since then, the kids at that school have gotten used to the disappearances that happen every couple of weeks, and gotten used to the rumors that if anything is ever found of their missing classmates, it is only a soft, leathery bag of skin with nothing, not even bones, inside it. For almost thirty years it's been happening, and so far no one has been able to find a way to stop it.

And who knows? Maybe it's going on at your school too.

One of You Too

A young man was psychic in a very special way. He was very sensitive to places where anyone had been killed, or where there had been some kind of a tragedy. Sometimes it took the form of seeing glowing splotches on the ground, like ghost blood, or a shimmer in the air, or patches of icy cold that no one else could feel. He didn't often see ghosts themselves, and he didn't like to, because ghosts (he had learned the hard way) didn't like to be seen, and would try to grab him and break his neck if they thought that he could see them.

He made his living by investigating places where ghosts were rumored to haunt, but he didn't make much money at it. There wasn't often that anything could be done about the hauntings, and usually he just pretended to find nothing wrong.

One job called him out to Pennsylvania, where he was told there was a very powerful haunting.

It was late at night when he got to his destination, and he hadn't eaten, so when he saw the lights of a roadhouse just outside of town he pulled over to get a bite to eat. He didn't much like the look of the place, and as he got out of the car he had a psychic premonition far stronger than any he had ever had. But he went in anyway.

It didn't look any better inside. It was a very old roadhouse, and it looked like it hadn't been renovated in almost fifty years. The tables were crooked and the walls dusky, and there was something wrong with the lights, because they didn't illuminate anything. When he glanced into the booths, he couldn't make out the faces, only the forms, of the people sitting in them. The air stank of cigarettes, which surprised him, and when he looked around he saw that everyone in the place was smoking and blowing out great clouds of tobacco.

He took a seat and examined a dirty menu. He found he couldn't bear to look the waitress in the face, for there was something wrong with her skin. She had a terrible rash, it looked like, and was peeling. Her hair hung in filthy curls to her shoulders. He had almost lost his appetite by this point, but he ordered a bowl of soup. As he waited for it to come, he hunched up in his seat and listened. No one on the place talked, and there was no music, so that the only sound was the scrape and clink of forks against the plates.

When the soup came, he almost threw up. It smelled like smoke and blood, and when he pushed his spoon through it, it came out with bits of gristle and broken bones.

He wanted to leave, but he stopped in the bathroom first to splash some water on his face. Nothing came out of the faucet but hot air and dust. He was shaking hard when the bathroom door banged open, and an enormous man in shirt sleeves and an apron came in and glowered at him.

That's when the young psychic finally understood.

The man's face was blistered open and peeling, and his hair was scalded and smoking. The stink of something burnt but rotten drifted off him.

He and the young psychic stared at each other. Finally, the young psychic, who couldn't forget that there was a whole dining room full of things between him and the door, said, "I'm one of you too."

The ghost of the cook glared at him, but when the young psychic didn't flinch, he finally stood aside and let him pass. He walked through the dining room, forcing himself not to run, though there was now a deathly silence inside the shadowy booths, and he felt the hate-filled stares on his back. At the door he almost made the fatal mistake of leaving money to pay for his meal, but he remembered in time, and walked straight out the door instead. He walked to his car without looking back, got in, and drove the rest of the way into town.

The next day the people who hired him drove him back out to the spot where he had tried to eat. There was nothing there but a cracked and eroded foundation where, he was told a roadhouse had burned to the ground in a flash fire seventy years before. Since then, strange lights had been seen, and vagrants had a habit of turning up dead in the nearby lot with their necks broken.

The Thing in the Hallway

"It will be bad luck to work there," the grandmother told her granddaughter. She shook her head and said, "Bad luck" again.

They were sitting in the old woman's bedroom in the nursing home, talking. The young woman had come to visit, to tell her grandmother of her new job at the university, where she would be working in one of the newly renovated buildings. She asked her grandmother, who was closer to a hundred now than ninety, why it would be bad luck.

"They always had bad luck there," the old woman said. "It used to be a hospital, the university infirmary. During the Spanish Flu, back in the 'twenties, almost everyone in the influenza ward died. After that, no one who ever went in sick ever came out wholly well."

The young woman said she was sure the place had been thoroughly fumigated since then. Anyway, the insides had been completely gutted and rebuilt.

But the old woman continued to shake her head. "It wasn't the germs and viruses that made it so unhealthy," she said. "It was another thing." But she refused to say any more.

The young woman went to her first day on the job. She didn't say anything about what her grandmother had said. But she kept her ears open, and she learned that everyone in the building knew about its old history as a hospital, and its bad luck.

She also learned that no one—but no one—would stay late to work after dark. In the summer time, though school was out, the staff would stay until eight or even eighty-thirty, when there was still light outside. But in the cold of winter, no matter the crush of paperwork, they would all be gone by five-thirty, as the sun failed in the west.

But one night in November, when she had a particularly tight deadline on a project, the young woman decided to stay late. Her supervisor tried to talk her out of it, he told her it wasn't that important. But when she insisted that she had to get it done, he told her to keep her office door locked, not to open it on any account until she was ready to leave for the night, and when she left she was to go straight down into the lobby and out the front door.

Naturally, she was nervous at first as the others left, shutting off the lights and making their way downstairs. After her supervisor left, she closed and locked the door as he had told her, and bent down to concentrate on her work.

At first, all went well. She heard nothing but the soft buzz of the light and the low hum of the heating system. There was not even a creak or a pop as the building settled in the cooling night air.

Then she heard something out in the hall. Footsteps padded outside her door, soft and rapid. She raised her head and listened. Something about their rhythm made her think that the person waddled rather than ran.

Again the footsteps sounded outside, coming softly back the way they had come. Then, more slowly and stealthily, they approached again. They stopped.

The latch of her door quivered.

Then the footsteps ran off again.

Almost she got up to unlock the door to look out to see who or what was outside. She told herself it was one of her colleagues, come back to fetch something. She would go outside to the vending machine, she told herself, get a candy bar, and look around.

Before she could get up, her office phone rang. She glanced at the display. It was an extension inside the building. She picked it up and said "Hello?"

From the earpiece came a low, guttural whir, like the sound of a deep-throated insect. Then the line clicked and went dead.

She hung up and looked at the door. As if on cue, footsteps padded up to it again. This time she saw the shadow of feet through the crack under the door.

Three shadows.

Something scraped against the door, and she had the impression of someone dragging a hand down it. There came again that insect-like whistle, this time from the other side of the door. Then the footsteps ran off again.

She told herself it was a practical joke. But then she told herself that, practical joke or not, she didn't like it and she didn't want to stay around to see how it unfolded.

She was just finishing up packing when she felt the hairs go up on the back of her neck. She straightened up, and gripped the edge of her desk. Something was watching her through the window, she felt, even though she was on the second floor.

Slowly she hiked her bag onto her shoulder and walked to the door. As she laid her hand on the latch, she looked back at the window.

It was pitch black outside, but by her office light she could just make out the face that was pressed to glass, peering in at her. It was squat, like that of a frog, with frog-like eyes and a frog's gaping mouth that sucked hungrily at the window. It gripped the ledge outside with strong fingers.

For only a second she saw it before it dropped from the ledge. The bushes outside rustled.

She ran for the lobby without bothering to lock her office door behind her. Outside, she ran across the street and threw herself breathlessly into the coffee shop that she and her co-workers liked to frequent.

She never told her supervisor or anyone else what she had seen. She did a little discreet inquiring, and from one source or another she pieced together stories about a thing that had frequently been seen creeping into the windows of the old hospital and padding about the hallways at night, stealing into the patients' rooms and leaving corpses behind when it left. No name was ever given to the thing, but there were stories that some of the Indian tribe that used to live in the area had warned the university when it built the hospital that the pond that had stood on the spot had always been regarded as unwholesome.

A Game of Tag

There's a ghost car that travels the country highways outside your town. Didn't you know? Up and down it drives the highway at night. But it's nothing but a pair of high beams. There's no actual car behind it.

Be careful when you're driving on that country highway when its dark. You might see a pair of high beams coming up behind you. If so, drive like it was the Devil himself that was after you.

For the ghost car will try to follow you. With its beams turned up high it will chase hard after you, riding your fender and flooding the cabin of your car with a white, blinding light. You will see no car behind the beams, only the lights, glaring and blaring at you.

It will blind you as you fly down the highway toward that sharp turn just outside of town. You know the one. It's the place that so many people have missed while speeding in the dark. The one decorated with the little memorials of flowers and crosses to mark where a car went off the highway and into the trees with a terrific crash and crunch.

With the beams of the ghost car filling your eyes, you will miss that curve and plow through the memorials. Your car will fold up like an accordion when it hits the trees, and not even an air bag will save your life.

Then the ghost car will drive off. It has done what it had to do. It has passed the curse on to you.

Because now you are the ghost car. And you will never stop driving until you have blinded another car with your high beams, and chased them off the highway and thrown them through a windshield into the trunk of a hard, unforgiving tree.