What is your favorite scary story from North America?

[Judith Alexander]

I have been invited to tell a ghost story or other scary story at a festival in Germany. I can tell in English, and the story should represent / come from my culture. I have one week to figure out some possibilities, since I don't normally telll ghost stories, and to find the stories to practice in Germany between now and mid- April.

[StoryMasters • Linda Day & MyLinda Butterworth]

I like to tell 'The Monkey's Paw' by W.W. Jacobs (you can find a copy here http://www.americanliterature.com/Jacobs/SS/TheMonkeysPaw.html) is a rather haunting tell. I also like to tell Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart' (you can find a copy here http://www.online-literature.com/poe/44/). If you just want a place to spend some time online looking only at ghost and spooky stories try http://www.americanfolklore.net/spooky-stories.html

Hope this is of some help.

always a tale to tell,
MyLinda

[Judith Alexander]

Thanks, the links to the websites are very useful !! Whoever thought there is so much literature available on line?
The Schlosser books I had seen, but have no access here, so it's nice to know some of the stories are on the net. I haven't figured out if one can download the podcasts, though.

judith,
[e-mail]

[Buck P Creacy]

I love that Appilachian story... Bloody head and dry bones! Yikes... The first person I ever heard tell it was Octavia Sexton, here in Kentucky.... mercy... and I am all grown up.

[Barry Gray]

Judith

There is a great story presented by Vincent Price on radio decades ago about a lighthouse. It is called Three Skeleton Key. Terrifying, fascinating. I've told it a few times to very good responses.

Barry Gray, Nelson, BC, Canada

[Ruthanne Edward]

For a ghost story that is quite wide spread in the US, how about La Llorona? Yes, it is from the Hispanic tradition, but it is uniquely American (as in of the Americas). Gosh, now that I am thinking, what would I choose as my favourite scary story from North America. So many to pick from. I just loves me a good scary story.

Cheers,
Ruthanne

[Barry Gray]

I just googled La Llorona!!! What a fascinating story and what a wealth of info available! It's on my "research more for future use" list. Anybody checked out Three Skeleton Key?

Barry Gray, Nelson BC, Canada

[Rivka Willick]

Thank you for introducing me to Three Skeleton Key. I've never been taken by the "BOO" stories or the repetitious ghost stories. Three Skeleton Key is my kind of scary. There is something about rodents which is hard wired in me. And the last line is wonderful.

[Daniel Bishop, the Storyteller]

Sorry Judith that this is late. There are of couse many great American Ghost Stories, the Vanishing Hitchhiker is one that has made the rounds in many forms. I would say that one of my top ten is Taily-Poe (or Tailypo.) It's a southern story, but I have heard it all over the place. I like to tell it as happing right where I'm telling. There is a great version in "Short and Shivery", by Rovert D. San Souci. A nice ghost story that is truly American is the story of The Mamie R Mine. Headless ghosts, dark shadows, tommyknockers, everything you could want in a ghost story, even credibility. A good version of this can be found in "Ghost Stories of the Old West" by Dan Asfar.
Happy Haunting
Daniel Bishop, the Storyteller

[Barry Gray]

This is a story I wrote two years ago for a halloween festival. It was very well received. It is obviously filled with local geographic references to our area here in BC, but it could be adapted to anywhere. I copied it in because I haven't yet figured out how to attach Word documents. Help!


THE SPIDER ON THE HARROP FERRY

by Barry Gray


It’s been over five years now and I’ve tried to convince myself that it never happened. But I know it did. And I need to talk about it. Please don’t think that I’m crazy, because I am not. I know what I saw, and this is what I saw.
I don’t want to tell you who I am but I used to live in Harrop, in a house whose balcony on the top floor had a great view of the Harrop Ferry for about half its trip across the West Arm. After that it disappeared behind the big cottonwoods and the bend in the lake for the final two minutes of its journey. I could even check to see when the ferry was leaving the other side, throw on my daypack, say goodbye to my Mom and, if I walked fast, get to the ferry on the Harrop side just as it was ready to leave.
I did that most days because I always walked to school at Redfish just five minutes from the ferry on the other side. I knew that ferry as well as anyone, and I loved it. I loved meeting my friends at the ferry. I loved the sound of the ramps hitting the pavement when the ferry landed, even if my Dad hated it and woke up at night when they made an especially loud noise. I loved playing the jumping game back and forth between the two big concrete blocks that held the ferry’s cables. I even loved those black, greasy poles by the ramps with those piston things that let the ramps down. But I never touched them.
It was that summer, five years ago, that I lost my love for the Harrop Ferry. The love wasn’t replaced by hate, it was replaced by fear. It was fear mixed with a fascination that started in the spring and took hold of me and wouldn’t let go until that fall.
It all started when a bunch of us were watching spiders in their webs on the ferry’s railings. We always did that. Some kids were scared of them and wouldn’t get close but I always watched them. There were lots of them and many of them got pretty big because there was always a lot of food for them with the ferry going back and forth over the lake. There were always lots of flies and bugs over the water. I even saw grown-ups looking at them and talking about them. This one day we were on our way to school in the spring and a few of us were looking at egg sacks that were tucked up under the top plate of the railing. You had to lean over to see them or squat down and look up underneath. Some of the egg sacks were huge and you could see that there were hundreds of eggs in them. It was no wonder there were always lots of spiders on the ferry.
We only had about four minutes to get across so we were all running around trying to find the biggest egg sack and get the others to come and look. I found one under the railing on the end of the ferry, not the side. It was on the Harrop end of the ferry right near one of those greasy black poles. It wasn’t the biggest one anybody had found but it looked different than the rest and for some reason I didn’t call anyone over to look at it. The ferry landed on the Redfish side and we all took off up the hill and down Pipper’s Lane to the school. I forgot all about the egg sack and didn’t look at it for days. When I finally did it looked exactly the same as it had a few days earlier.
The weather got warmer and we started to see changes in the spiders’ egg sacks. We were even there to watch a couple of them hatch. I still didn’t show anyone else the one I had spotted and I don’t know why. I kept an eye on it and over a couple of weeks noticed that it just wasn’t changing like the rest of them. But I did finally notice what was different about it. It took me a while to see it but then I finally realized that it wasn’t a whole bunch of eggs like all the others. It was a single egg. It was all wrapped up in that sticky web stuff and tucked up tight under the railing like the others, but I never saw a spider near it. And it never changed.
All the others had hatched. There were spiders everywhere, just like last year and the year before. I don’t know where they all went because thousands must have hatched out. I guess some of them got eaten or fell into the water or got run over by cars. Every time I was on the ferry I would check “my” spider egg. To this day I still don’t know why but I never showed it to anyone and I never made a big deal of looking at it when others were around.
The school year finished and I wasn’t on the ferry nearly as much. But I’d still go and look once in a while. I’d get out of the car if we were going to Nelson or Balfour and I’d check on it. Right through to the end of July I watched it and during that whole time it didn’t change. I started to get a little sad about it because I thought it must have died before it could hatch. It was about the size of my little fingernail and I thought that surely if it were getting ready to hatch it must swell up first or change in some way. But it always looked the same.
It was about the middle of August that summer and I hadn’t been on the ferry in about a week. I had the urge to go and look at the egg sack so I told my Mom I was going to go and ride back and forth on the ferry a few times to cool off in the breeze out over the water. That was okay with her.
I was shocked to see the egg sack gone. Then I saw some scraps of web stuff and what must have been the casing of that egg. I didn’t mind that I had missed the hatching. I hadn’t expected to see it anyway. But I really did want to see the spider that came out of it and I couldn’t see it anywhere. I must have ridden across and back five times and I checked under every railing and looked up and down the posts and the cables for the ramps. I even checked in the little waiting room that I hardly ever went into.
I went back the next day and leaned with my back in the corner where the end railing met the side railing and watched. I pretended I was just out there enjoying the weather but I was watching the whole area where the egg had been. I waved at a few people I knew who drove on and even hung out for a few minutes with a couple of friends who were on their way to the hot springs. But I always went back to my corner and watched.
Then I saw it. It looked just like any of the other spiders on the ferry, only bigger. And it had only hatched a few days ago. I saw it crawl in under the ramps after the cars got on. I couldn’t see where it went but it was pretty close to the water before it crawled in under the ferry somewhere. I remembered my Dad telling me about the big hollow spaces under the car deck of the ferry. He had seen the ferry in for repairs when it was in the drydock at Sunshine Bay. That was probably where the spider was hiding. There must have been a hole somewhere.
I saw it a few more times in the next week and it was bigger every time I saw it. It was probably about the size of the palm of my hand by that time. I could never quite see where it crawled in. It was down in under the ramp somewhere and I couldn’t lean far enough over the railing to see. The ferry operator even yelled at me once over the loudspeaker to get off the railing. I was so embarrassed because he even knew my name. So I just stood leaning in my corner hoping to see the big spider.
I was starting to be afraid of it but I needed to look at it whenever I could. My family must have thought I was crazy spending so much time on the ferry but my Dad said it was better than watching TV. I think now, looking back on it, that the spider knew I was watching it. I don’t know why I think that, it’s just a feeling I have. It never looked at me or made any sign that it knew I was there but it seemed to become less shy when I was around. If anybody was with me I never saw it, which suited me just fine because I didn’t want to share it with anyone.
It must have been eating a lot of bugs because it just kept getting bigger. By the end of August it was easily as big as both my fists put together. It seemed to know when it was safest to come out because that was usually when the ferry was facing away from Harrop heading to the Redfish side. The people in the cars were all looking in that direction. So was the ferry operator. It was right at a time like that when I saw something that really made me scared.
The ferry was approaching land, when the operator really has to pay attention. Everybody was in their cars; a few had already started their engines. The spider had climbed up the greasy black post and was right up at the top. I forgot to tell you, one of the other things I really liked to do was to watch the osprey hunting for fish. If you were lucky you could even see them hit the water and come out again with a fish in their claws. Well that had just happened and I was torn between watching the osprey with its fish or watching the spider. Then, for some reason, the osprey lost its fish. He must not have had a good enough grip and the fish must have been struggling like crazy. The fish fell.
The spider must have been watching the osprey fly by. When it saw the fish falling towards the water, and I swear to God this really happened, that spider hooked a web to the top of that post and it swung out over the ferry’s ramp and then back out over the water. Its timing was perfect. I couldn’t believe it but I had just seen it with my own eyes. At the end of its swinging arc the spider grabbed hold of that fish, it must have been eight or ten inches long, and started to swing back. It let out more line as it was swinging back and smashed into the side of the ramp. The spider wasn’t hurt and it didn’t let go of the fish. I watched stunned as the spider dragged the fish in under the ramp and disappeared under the ferry.
I didn’t see the spider for a few days after that. Eating that fish must have triggered something in the spider because it changed. A week later I saw the spider again hauling a fish underneath the ferry. There was no osprey in sight and the spider was wet. You sometimes see spiders swimming if they fall into water but this one was wet on its back. It had been underwater. Twice more in September I saw that spider with a fish, each time a bigger fish. That was when I stopped walking onto the ferry.
This is why I ask you not to think I’m crazy: the spider was the size of a cat. Even if we went onto the ferry in the car I wouldn’t get out. My parents thought it was odd but I just pretended that nothing was wrong and they soon forgot about it.
I started watching the ferry from our balcony. I would wait for it to appear from behind the cottonwoods then I’d train my binoculars on the Harrop end of the ferry as it headed across. It was a warm fall. Three more times in September and October I saw the spider with a fish but it must surely have caught more while I wasn’t watching. It appeared to be about the size of our chocolate lab.
Then one night our neighbour’s cat went missing. They put up posters the next day at the ferry bulletin board. I heard that some people up on Lewis Road in Harrop had seen a cougar so everybody figured that’s probably where the cat went. Then some people over on Erindale Road lost their dog. Somebody called the Conservation Officer and they hired that guy with the bloodhounds to track the cougar. They shot it. Everybody thought that would be the end of it but a few more cats and another dog, one of those big German shepherds from that man who has so many, went missing in Harrop.
I was really scared by this time but did my best not to show it. I snuck out onto the balcony one night with the binoculars. The balcony was off our spare bedroom so nobody knew I went out there. It was a full moon near the end of October. I had always heard that deer and elk could swim across a lake. There was even a story going around that the ferry operator had watched a moose swim across the West Arm just upstream from the ferry. But I was still surprised to see a deer go into the water that night on the other side, just down from the ferry. I saw the deer go in and start swimming across to Harrop just as the ferry came out from behind the cottonwoods. My heart was beating like mad. The current carried the deer maybe fifty or a hundred feet downstream so I wasn’t worried about it. Then I saw the shape in the water swim out from under the ferry ramp. It swam fast, riding the current, angling back towards Harrop, heading straight for the deer that didn’t know it was coming.
I couldn’t see everything that happened because they went underwater. By that time the current had carried them right down in front of our house. I could see movement in the water in the light of the full moon. I could tell that the deer wasn’t struggling. I watched in horror and fascination as the spider dragged the dead deer into the shallow water. It was so close I didn’t need to and didn’t want to use the binoculars. I expected to see the deer hauled up onto the shore and devoured before my eyes, but without hesitation the spider turned while the deer was still floating in the shallow water and began making its way along the shore towards the ferry. It soon disappeared around the bend but my imagination saw the rest. The spider would not eat its prey on land. Its home and its world was the underbelly of the Harrop Ferry. It would drag that beast all the way, swimming with it around the docks that were between our house and the ferry. It would wait in the shadows of the last dock, just metres from the ferry, and when the ramp was up and the operator had turned to face the far shore, it would swim with four or five of its giant hairy legs, the rest holding the deer and reach the ferry before it came out from the cottonwoods.
I was wrong. It reached the ferry while I was staring at the spot I knew so well, where I had seen my beloved little ferry so often appear with its tattered British Columbia flag flapping wildly in the wind. I saw the spider drag the deer up under the ramp. What great gaping hole was there up above the waterline under that boat that would allow the spider to drag its prey into its lair? Or did it rips the deer’s limbs off one at a time and bring all the pieces in before the ferry returned to Harrop? I went back to my own room but didn’t sleep that night.
There was a hard frost in early November. I thought about the spider and wondered if it could survive a winter. Could it live on fish it caught in the dead of the night when no one saw? My question was answered a week later in a way I never could have imagined. I recalled my awe and astonishment as I remembered the night I watched the deer enter the water in the light of the full moon. It was another cloudless night and I was restless. I hadn’t been sleeping well at all lately and I snuck over to the spare bedroom with the binoculars and out onto the balcony. The cold cedar boards under my bare feet stung as I gazed out over the lake. I scanned the far side, standing first on one foot, then the other, trying to warm the cold foot by placing it on top of the other I was standing on.
What I had felt at seeing the deer a week before was like nothing compared to the shock of what I was now looking at. I had only ever seen one bear in my whole life and that was from the car. And it was a black bear. I could tell by the size and by the great hump on its back that the bear entering the water on the beach across the lake was a grizzly. I had seen many pictures and we had just learned about how bears return to their same hibernating spot each winter. I figured that bear must have been heading to its den somewhere in the mountains up behind us, towards Mill Lake.
The grizzly was a very strong swimmer. He must not have wanted to be carried too far downstream by the current so he was angling slightly upstream with the result being that he was swimming straight across. I didn’t want to look upstream to the bend in the lake for fear of what I might see. I had heard the ramp slam onto the pavement a few minutes earlier so I knew that the ferry was heading back to the other side. I didn’t want to look but I had to. The shape I saw heading towards the bear shocked me because I thought it was the bear itself. I soon realized that the spider with its heavy body and its huge hairy legs and its awesome mouth parts was the same size as the grizzly. I wondered at how many fish and perhaps what else it had eaten since that terrible night with the deer.
The bear saw the spider coming. I expected it to turn and swim downstream to the shore and move on its powerful legs across the beach, through the trees and over the tracks and disappear into the mountains. But it turned and swam toward its attacker. The half moon light was pale but I could see the water churning as they grappled with each other. Both were hairy, both were dark and I could never quite tell which beast was on the water and which was submerged by the awesome strength of the other. There was an incredible beauty to the movement, like two great dancers holding each other tightly while rolling elegantly in the cold current of Kootenay Lake. But this was no dance and these were no loving embraces.
They were straight in front of our house now. I noticed how cold my feet were. I made no move to warm them. My whole body was cold but I knew that the violent shivering that shook the binoculars in my hands was from more than the cold. I truly didn’t know how the fight would turn out. Then I saw a great black shape dragging itself up onto our beach. I glanced back out onto the water and saw another drifting slowly with the current. It was still. I looked again in horror at that spot on the beach where I had played so often.
The beast lay for a minute or two then shook the water from the fur of its great black head. It rose slowly onto all four legs and started walking down the beach away from my house. I could tell that it was limping badly with one of its front legs and that it was actually dragging a back leg. It disappeared into the trees. I’ve always wondered if that bear ever made it to its den to hibernate or if it found a quiet spot in the forest to lick its wounds and perhaps die.
The spider? I’m sure the bottom feeders feasted on that great black carcass as it hung up somewhere in the rocky depths of the West Arm. I only know that I want to be there next time the Harrop Ferry goes to the drydock for repairs. I want to see the bones.

[Rivka Willick]

One of my favorite resources for scary and weird are the Weird USA books. (They started in my wonderfully weird state of New Jersey) I'll page through one of the state books, pick one or two stories, and start looking for more on that particular scary tale. As a teller, this gives me choice and a lot of freedom to shape my own tale. Rivka