20 Great Ghost Stories, Rare and Haunting (Avon, 1941)

"Here are twenty stories dealing with creatures of the night--vampires, the walking dead--PROFANE BEINGS..

WARNING--Not for reading after midnight!"

20 Great Ghost Stories, Rare and Haunting (Avon Publications, 1941) is a collection of spooky stories culled from the public domain. Excellent cover illustrations by Frank J. Russell (there are interior black and white illustrations as well). In researching the authors of the stories (strangely, none of which are credited in the book) I stumbled upon an excellent resource, Horror Masters, which hosts a robust library of public-domain supernatural short fiction, including every one of the stories from this collection.

Here is the complete contents of the book, with links to the original text.

The Black Cat-Edgar Allan Poe
The Flayed Hand-Guy De Maupassant
The Vengeance of a Tree-Eleanor F. Lewis
The Parlor Car Ghost-Anonymous
The Ghost of Buckstown Inn-Arnold M. Anderson
The Burglar's Ghost-Anonymous
A Phantom Toe-Anonymous
Mrs. Davenport's Ghost-Frederick F. Schrader
The Phantom Woman-Anonymous
The Phantom Hag-Anonymous
From the Tomb-Guy De Maupassant
Sandy's Ghost-Anonymous
The Ghosts of Red Creek-S.T.
How He Caught the Ghost-Anonymous
Grand-Dame's Ghost Story-C.D.
(A) Fight With A Ghost-Q.E.D.
Colonel Halifax's Ghost Story-S.Baring Gould
The Old Mansion-Anonymous
The Dead Woman's Photograph-Anonymous
The Ghost of a Live Man-Anonymous

Grandpa's Ghost Stories (James Flora, 1978)

In Grandpa's Ghost Stories (1978), a boy, frightened by the sounds of a raging thunderstorm, seeks comfort from his grandfather. Grandpa proceeds to tell three stories, each as wild and whimsical as the 1950s jazz album cover art that artist and author James Flora (a.k.a. Jim Flora) may be better known for.

But Grandpa's stories are far from soothing, since his stories are scarier than any thunderstorm, with imagery and situations that may challenge a young reader's comfort level.

In the first story, The Bag of Old Bones, a boy (supposedly Grandpa, as a child) happens upon a dusty old leather bag in an otherwise empty shack. A voice from within beckons the boy to open the sack, which contains a disassembled skeleton.

After methodically piecing together the body, the skeleton comes to life and prances around the shack, declaring:

"As soon as I find my teeth we'll have a bit to eat. It's been two hundred years since I've had a morsel in my mouth."

After finding and restoring his loose teeth from the sack, the skeleton reveals his intended meal:

"Now we'll have dinner," he cackled. "And the dinner is you. I'M-GOING-TO-EAT-YOU-UP!"

The boy narrowly escapes the skeleton and flees into a tiny nearby cave, where the second story, The Cave of the Warty Witch, begins.

The boy finds himself in a dark cave, surrounded by pairs of fiery yellow eyes.

When the cave is finally lit, the boy discovers the eyes belong to "huge, sticky, furry spiders with big, squishy mouths full of teeth" and a "mean-looking, fearsome witch." But these spiders aren't interested in eating the boy, instead hissing ominously "Be our brother, be our brother." They want the witch to turn him into a spider and join the family.

The witch casts a spell, transforming him into a spider.

"The old witch led me to a mirror. I hardly dared to look. When I did, I saw a fearful, hairy spider. It was me. I looked exactly like my new brothers and sisters."

After the witch has fallen asleep in a spider-web hammock she forced him to spin for her, the boy is able to reverse the spell and escape the cave, only to be snatched up by a huge, flying severed hand.

The flying hand whisks the boy to the site of the final story, The House of the Ghastly Ghost.

"What a house. It was built of mud, blood, old bones and bat wings. Here and there you could see a shin bone or a withered claw sticking out of the walls. The roof was made of old rat fur and dead hair. Perched on top were the bones of a long-dead alligator."

The disembodied hand turns out to belong to the Ghastly Ghost, a "monstrous white ghost" whose "eyes and mouth were just gaping, black holes in her shroud."

The ghost wants to adopt the boy as her own child.

"You are a darling, boy. You shall be my very own sweet baby." She moaned and kissed me. UGH! Her breath smelled like the wind that blows from a cave full of bats. She hugged me close. WHOOF! Her shroud smelled even worse, like a toad's underwear.

The ghost cuddles up with her new child for some quality time in front of the "ghost TV". The programs include The Open Grave Show, in which a mob of moldy old ghouls chop at each other with axes until one is declared winner...

...Feeding Phantom Faces, a cooking show hosted by a fat-bellied demon who makes soup out of a dead elephant...

...and where an old blue witch demonstrates how to "fry baby toes and eyeballs and bake a knuckle-bone pie."

All the while, a "screaming banshee orchestra" provides music that sounds like "truck brakes."

The entertainment is interrupted briefly by a commercial for Goblin Grease (used to lube up creaky goblin knees)...

...and finally The Hairy Snuffler Comedy Hour, in which "big hairy blobs with lots of teeth and claws and runny noses" eat up an entire second grade class.

The ghastly ghost is so amused by the program she accidentally drops the boy, right into the jaws of her greedy pet werewolf.

"I was knee-deep in possum tails, bug fur, lizard claws and rat teeth. And the smell--WHOOO-EE!"

Grandpa's Ghost Stories is long out of print and fetching some high prices on the used marketplace...

The Red Room Riddle: A Ghost Story (Scott Corbett, 1972)

I first became aware of Scott Corbett's 1972 ghost story The Red Room Riddle when the made-for-TV adaptation decided to crash my regularly scheduled Saturday morning viewing ritual. My fandom for children's horror stories adapted for television had been established years earlier in my stumbled-upon viewing of Once Upon A Midnight Scary (1979), the Vincent Price-hosted anthological trio comprised of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Washington Irving), The Ghost Belonged To Me (Richard Peck) and The House With a Clock In Its Walls (John Bellairs) (covered previously in a years-old blog post that's not very well written, but hey, at least the screen caps are... adequate.)

For The Red Room Riddle, Price even reprises hosting duties alongside feline puppet regular O. G. Readmore in this ABC Weekend Special presentation which aired just in time for Halloween, 1984.

Grade-school kids exploring an abandoned haunted house with nary an adult chaperone to be found? On paper, this should have been exactly my cup of arsenic. But even with my Expectations-Have-Been-Lowered-For-Television mindset, this version was lacking in atmosphere or scares, and kind of just plods along until it mercifully ends, with our lead explorers, Scott Jacoby (Bad Ronald) and Nicholas Gilbert ("3rd bully" in The Never Ending Story) left unscathed and unchanged by their experience.  For me, the most memorable thing about The Red Room Riddle was its alliterative title in dripping-blood font.  (But don't let my singular pooh-poohing steer you away from checking it out for yourself---there are plenty of first-hand kindertraumatic testimonies singing its praises by viewers other than me.)

That old Red Room Riddle font gives me the creeps!

I've said it before: most mysteries are solved in the library, and that's exactly where I went to investigate The Case of The Ghost Story Adaptation That Wasn't All That. If The Red Room Riddle's premise sounded good to me on paper, maybe "on paper" was the proper place to actually experience it, was my thinking.

Now let's get one thing straight---there is no actual riddle in The Red Room Riddle. Yes, there are mysterious goings-on that beg explanation, but anyone hoping for a what gets wetter the more it dries type plot-revolving puzzler for the characters to solve will find no such satisfaction.

Did I mention I love ex-library copies? This book filed under Mystery, because of all those mysterious goings-on that beg explanation, no doubt.

Framed as a first-person childhood reminiscence, The Red Room Riddle recounts an adventure by our narrator Bruce Cowell and new-to-the-neighborhood friend Bill Slocum on a drizzly Halloween.

Bruce's love of Halloween is expressed repeatedly, described here as "the most exciting night of the year." Apparently trick-or-treating was not yet a common practice when and where this story is set, so Halloween was instead a night of rule-breaking and mischief-making, "... when we were allowed to run loose in the dark. We looked forward to it for weeks."

Regional lore tells of a haunted house in the nearby affluent neighborhood of Mt. Alban, at which a baby's body was supposedly found years ago, chopped up and buried in the garden (unsurprisingly, the TV version leaves this gruesome detail out entirely.)

A timely conversation about belief in ghosts inspires the pair to seek out the house for "research", but really Bruce and Bill are just looking to add a little spice of the non-pumpkin kind to their Halloween gallivanting.  Guided by Bruce's fuzzy memory of having once passed by the place years earlier, the pair venture forth into the labyrinth of lanes, streets and drives that wind their way up Mt. Alban, eventually stumbling upon the house, three stories of dilapidation and jungle undergrowth.

Unlike the TV version, where the kids are left unscathed by their forbidden explorations, Bill gets scathed immediately, brushing against a thorn as they struggle their way through the unkempt grounds, leaving a bloody scar on his cheek.

While still navigating the yard, a third member unexpectedly joins their party: an aloof kid named Jamie Bly, trailed by his menacing bulldog, Major. Jamie claims familiarity with the house and offers to lead them on a tour, but there's something off-putting about his too-cool demeanor that immediately puts Bruce and Bill on edge. After making their way indoors and up a rickety staircase, they are chased out by yet another new arrival, a cantankerous old groundskeeper (who, considering the state of the grounds, should probably find another profession). While fleeing the property, Bruce thinks he sees Jamie's dog digging at a "small, age-yellowed bone...leaning sideways in the hole with the tilt of a disturbed tombstone." Is the legend of the chopped up baby true after all?

Sensing their fear while exploring the house, Jamie taunts them with an offer to experience actual ghosts in person later that evening at his own home. Despite their skepticism, Bruce and Bill appoint to meet him that evening at an intersection a few blocks away.

In the interim, they debate allowing their Halloween evening itinerary to be dictated by this infuriating stranger who obviously won't be able to produce real live dead ghosts--but may just have some other prank up his sleeve.  Ultimately the pair decide to call Jamie's bluff (but secretly, they each hope he won't show up.)

Bruce and Bill waiting for that little twerp Jamie. Illustrations are by Geff Gerlach, working in the I-Could-Draw-That style.

When Jamie does indeed appear at the appointed time and place, Bruce and Bill pivot from dread to bravado and dare him to deliver on his earlier promise. After leading them on a disorienting pretzel path through the neighborhood, the trio finally arrive at Jamie's house, which Bruce and Bill find as uninviting as the abandoned Mt. Alban house. 

Mirroring their earlier experience, Bill's cheek is again scratched as they approach the house, this time accompanied by a mysterious whooshing sound and a cold burst of air.  

And this is the point where we dive head first into the unique weirdness of Corbett's story that is sorely missing from the TV adaptation.

Once inside, Jamie's house proves legitimately spooky. Lit only by intermittent gas lamps, it's a confusing, shadowy labyrinth of lonely corridors and dark corners.  Jamie's parents are supposedly out for the evening, leaving a pair of servants as the only adults in the house. A mute maid emerges unexpectedly from the shadows just long enough to blow out the nearest lamp and then disappear again into darkness.

A huge, horrific tapestry adorns one wall, depicting the Biblical atrocity of King Herod putting children to the sword. This combined with the earlier sight of what might very well have been a murdered child's skeleton casts a foreboding seriousness over what would otherwise seem a harmless Halloween jaunt. This is another colorful detail omitted from the TV version, which ditches the whole infanticide theme entirely.

Again evoking their earlier adventure, they find themselves following Jamie up a staircase, this time to visit (drum-roll) "The Red Room". What's red and red and red all over? This unsettling upstairs chamber in which every wall, fixture and piece of furniture is covered in various shades of crimson that, impossibly, appears to still be dripping wet, prompting Bill to not so helpfully volunteer that old wooden warships used to paint their decks red to disguise blood spilt from battle.  "That's right." Jamie agrees with a knowing smirk.

The other shoe--which Bruce and Bill had been anticipating all evening--finally drops when Jamie springs his prank, locking them in the Red Room and challenging them through the red door to find a hidden red staircase somewhere near the red fireplace.  As they fumble around for a secret panel, crashing metallic footsteps can be heard from outside the room with increasing volume, and Jamie ominously warns they'd better hurry or "you'll see more than you bargained for."  

Admittedly the depiction of the room itself in the ABC Weekend Special is kind-a neat looking, even if it eschews the weirdness of the book for more generic haunted house tropes like floating candles

A tense and prolonged climax finds our heroes fleeing from a sword-wielding phantom Roman soldier down a claustrophobic spiral staircase, and a mysterious final flourish has us questioning whether any human being (or dog) Bruce and Bill have encountered since first stepping foot in the earlier Mt. Alban house is real, imagined, or something in between. It's even possible the Mt. Alban house and Jamie's are one and the same.

In a sad coda, Bruce describes trying to relay the incident to his parents years later, only for it to be dismissed as the result of a child's overactive imagination.

But Bill's scar, we are told, never healed.

The Red Room Riddle is out of print as of this writing.

Surprise visit from He Who Kills

Sometime in the mid-70s, on the elementary school playground, a friend told me a story (more of a fragment, really) about a possessed doll that had a chain tied around its waist. When the chain fell off, the doll came to life, attacking everyone in the house, until finally someone trapped it in the oven and burned it to death. I had no idea what the source of this story was (and neither did the teller, apparently) but it sounded absolutely horrifying.

It was YEARS later that I randomly stumbled upon Trilogy of Terror (1974) on television, the Dan Curtis-directed, made-for-TV anthology comprised of three short stories by Richard Matheson.

I finally discovered that the "possessed doll" in my friend's playground ghost story was none other than the Zuni fetish doll from Matheson's short-story "Prey" (1969), retitled "Amelia" for the TV adaptation.

Sure enough, the Zuni fetish doll has the magical chain around its waist. As Amelia (played by Karen Black) describes it in the original story:

"There's a golden chain around it to prevent the spirit from--escaping, I guess...His name is He Who Kills. You should see his face."

Of course the chain does fall, and the doll mysteriously disappears from sight. After some tense cat-and-mouse with lamps shutting off, and knives vanishing from countertops, the doll goes into full-scale attack mode, before finally being negotiated into the oven to meet his demise.

The Zuni fetish doll made another appearance in the sequel, Trilogy of Terror 2 (1996), although I haven't seen it, and its currently unavailable on DVD.

But I was recently watching an episode of Nightmares and Dreamscapes (2006), the horror anthology TV series which adapts short stories by Stephen King. The episode "Battleground" (based on a story originally found in King's "Night Shift") is about a professional assassin who keeps a souvenir from each of his victims in a display case. Guess what one of those souvenirs turns out to be?

The "Battlegound" episode was directed, coincidentally, by Matheson's son, Richard Christian Matheson, and, like "Prey", centers on a toy that comes to life in an apartment and plays cat-and-mouse with the lone occupant before escalating into a full-on assault.

Read the original text of Matheson's short story "Prey" here.
Read the original text of King's short-story "Battleground" here.

The Unsettling Simpsons

My name is Brother Bill and I am a Simpsons fan.

I can spout Simpsons quotes off the top of my head the way a revival tent minister can quote the Good Book (and with comparable fervor!) Sure, the show has had its ups and downs--its salad days and dry patches--and the occasional unwatchable episode, but I just can't stay mad at The Simpsons. It gives so much and asks so little in return.

The Simpsons is one of the rare (maybe only? Roesanne is perhaps another) television series to truly embrace the concept of the Halloween special. And while there have been several Christmas-themed episodes, and the occasional story set around Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, or Valentine's Day, only Halloween gets the blood-red carpet rolled out for it every year, consistently and thoroughly.

Titled "Treehouse of Horror" (the debut Halloween episode, first broadcast Oct. 25, 1990, was framed as a trilogy of ghost stories being told in Bart's treehouse, and the name stuck) these non-canon episodes reimagine the first family of Springfield in a wide variety of fantastic scenarios, evoking horror films (I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Amityville Horror, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Nightmare on Elm Street), science fiction (Fantastic Voyage, Demon Seed, The Omega Man, The Fly) classic anthology television (The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents), fantasy fiction (Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, H.G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe), and even Grimm's Fairy Tales.

Even relatively obscure horror radio drama Lights Out is referenced in one episode depicting a mist that turns people inside out.

Sometimes these episodes were actually set on Halloween, with The Simpsons telling ghost stories, throwing costume parties, or going trick-or-treating. The best "Treehouse" episodes captured the spirit of the season with macabre imagery and situations while still retaining the classic Simpsons humor.

But the series did not save all its "scary" content for the Treehouse episodes. Several non-Halloween episodes dealt with spooky subject matter (relatively speaking--it is a sit-com, after all).

"The Springfield Files" (S8,E10), an X-Files themed episode, follows Homer's nightly close encounter with a glowing, supernatural presence lurking in the woods. Contributing to the suspenseful atmosphere is the spine-tingling staccato of Bernard Herrmann-esque strings that, in a truly surreal spectacle, are coming from live symphony musicians riding together on a bus.

Bart carelessly sells his soul (symbolically represented by his autograph on church stationary) to Milhouse, and soon regrets it, in "Bart Sells His Soul" (S7,E4), a genuinely uneasy episode that manages to tap into real anxiety about loss of agency and regret. You can feel the existential desperation as Bart first begs for, then tries to take by force, a replacement soul from a frightened Ralph.

A stage hypnotist using Homer as his subject accidentally unlocks repressed childhood horrors in "The Blunder Years" (S13,E5), sending him into a days-long seizure of non-stop shrieking that manages to be both hilarious and horrifying at the same time. Peer counseling (and some "Yaqui memory tea") eventually help Homer come to terms with a long forgotten incident involving a drowned corpse in a canal.

Sometimes isolated spooky elements would creep their way into otherwise non-scary storylines. "Lisa's First Word" (S4,E10), for example, is a funny flashback episode in which a toddler-aged Bart adjusts to the arrival of his new baby sister, Lisa. But when Homer tries to entice Bart to vacate the crib by building a homemade clown bed, the results are accidentally horrifying...

...even at a distance!

It's Lisa who is afraid to go to bed in "The Girl Who Slept Too Little" (S17,E2), after a cemetery is built next to the Simpson house, casting nightmarish shadows through her bedroom window.

In "The Ziff Who Came To Dinner" (S15,E14), Homer thoughtlessly takes the kids to R-rated horror film The Redeadening when the family-friendly cartoon they hoped to see is sold out. The children cower in their theater seats as the story of murderous possessed doll 'Baby Button Eyes' unfolds.

Sometimes these moments were not scary in a traditional sense, but were funny or weird or strange in vaguely unsettling ways.

Like this uncomfortable moment when the barber, who Bart has been working for part-time, tries to pay him with an envelope of hair, grinning vacantly as a frightened Bart backs out of the store ("Lisa the Tree Hugger", S12,E4).

In "Secrets of a Successful Marriage" (S5,E22), a fight with Marge finds Homer evicted from the house and forced to live in Bart's treehouse. Lisa pays him a visit only to find her disheveled father fashioning a substitute Marge out of a shrub. "You will respect your new mother. Now kiss her!" he insists, while shoving the effigy in Lisa's face.

Homer and Mr. Burns get a severe case of cabin-fever after becoming snowed in during a team building exercise in "Mountain of Madness" (S8,E12). Hungry and freezing, they build snowmen to pass the time. But their complete disconnection from reality comes to the fore when they decide to dress the snowmen in their own clothes, a portrait of madness as they stand shivering before their creation.

In "Bart vs. Lisa vs. the Third Grade" (S14,E3), Bart becomes so addicted to their new satellite TV that he can't concentrate at school. He hallucinates a giant TV remote while his schoolmates turn into various TV characters, including a clown (not Krusty, ironically) who informs him in a matter of fact voice that will send chills down your spine, "It's finally happened, Bart. You've lost your mind."

In another example of disturbing hallucinations, Homer imagines himself becoming wealthy through pearl diving ("Saddlesore Galactica", S11,E13), waking up in a pearl-encrusted house from a pearl-encrusted bed, being served by a pearl butler who pours him a bowl of pearls for breakfast. But even in this fairy-tale fantasy, the spoonful of pearls shatters all his teeth, causing Homer to laugh like a mad man while staring at his gaping mouth in a pearl-encrusted mirror.

In "I'm Going To Praiseland" (S12,E19), Ned Flanders builds a Bible-themed amusement park to honor the memory of his recently passed wife, Maude. The tribute takes a turn for the creepy when Ned dons a souvenir Maude mask and mimics her voice.

In that same episode, we find out Ned has been preserving the indentation of Maude's body in the bed sheets.

In "Homer vs. Dignity" (S12,E5), Mr. Burns declares war on the town of Springfield, enlisting Homer in a series of cruel and disgusting pranks, which culminate in Burns posing as Santa Claus for the Christmas parade so he can throw buckets of fish guts on the unsuspecting children gathered to see him. The deliberate spoiling with liquid viscera of what should have been a beautiful moment had me flashbacking to Carrie White's prom.

Finally, this vignette from "Colonel Homer" (S3,E20) plays like a ghost story of sorts. Homer is on a long road trip and passes a restaurant sign, "Flaming Pete's; 75 Miles". The sign entices him and he clearly looks forward to arriving there.

A while later, a second road sign, "Flaming Pete's; 30 Miles". Homer is too tired from driving to react this time.

A third sign: "Flaming Pete's; Next Exit!" Homer perks up with excitement. Flaming Pete has been beckoning to him all night and they are finally going to rendezvous.

But there is no Flaming Pete's. Flaming Pete burned down years ago, on a night just like this one. Not sure who you think you saw waving to you out there on the road, but it couldn't have been Flaming Pete.

(Yea, yea yea---I understand the actual punch-line is that a restaurant with "flaming" in its name literally went up in smoke. But I tell you, there's a ghost story buried in there!)