Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

     Every year since I was a child whenever Halloween rolls around I always think of the Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark books written by Allen Scwartz.  They are short stories that are sometimes humorous, scary, ironic and sometimes just flat out silly.  I have the collection of all three books in one volume and a few Halloweens ago Lisa and I took turns reading each other different ones before going to bed.  Well to my surprise this year we found and audio book form of these books.  So we got them for cheap and decided to give them a listen. One of the ones we listened  to was very first one of these stories I ever heard.  When I was a kid our teachers sometimes would take us to the school library for story time.  Our library had a big multi stepped circle that had three or four steps and all the kids would gather around and the teacher would be in the center and read from books.  Well during October one year our teacher read a few short stories from one of the books.  But the very first one was called The Bride.

     The Bride is a story about a bride (obviously) on her wedding day (again, obviously) who during a game of hide in go seek hides in a trunk in the attic and is accidentally locked in.  Well the idea of this terrified the crap out of me.  Just the mental image of that gave me shivers.  Well after the teacher was finished the story she said there was a drawing.  There was a drawing with all the stories.  So she passed around the book and we all looked at the picture.  I was instantly scared.  This image just left me speechless which was something hard to do to me back then.  The image still is burnt in my head.  And still gives me the creeps to this day.  And here I am uploading it to my blog.

     Would that not scary you as a child?  Give you nightmares?  No?  Well what about if after hearing that story and viewing that picture you were spooked by a kid who was hiding in the closet waiting for someone to open the closet door so they could jump out for a quick scare.  Needless to say it made a lasting impression on me.  So much so that it still can scare me to this day.  As mentioned in on of my previous posts, This one here to be exact., the effect of this story and the incident with the closet still had an effect on me in 2003 when I saw The Ring for the first time and they got to the point in the film where they were discussing finding the body of a girl who was only in the first ten-fifiteen mintues of the movie and while describing how the body was found this quick image bursts on the screen.

     See the resemblance?  So did I.  I instantly stopped the movie for a minute just because it was so shocking to me how it matched my memory of the drawing from the story almost exactly.  Yeah some of the smaller details changed but basics of it all is still there.  Over the years I have read many different versions of The Bride and always compared them with the original one I heard as a kid.  It still creeps me out and I can still remember the feelings I had as a kid when first hearing it and this will be the version that I will tell to my kids in Halloweens of the future.  I think I will leave out the part that daddy was a big chicken when it came to opening closets for many years.