I think I remember the story about the girl with the ribbon holding her head on. Ack.
Anyway, the one for me was this book with folktale-like stories in it. There was some sort of witch woman and she turned a man into a tree and he was cut down and taken to a sawmill.
Ack, ack, ack. That story still freaks me out just typing that.
I musta misunderstood the question or I grew up a lot faster than the rest of y’all, but okay…
Let me try one more time, then.
Hansel and Gretel was a pretty bad one. They got lost in the woods and got caught by this witch who lived by herself and was cannibalistic and probably had a bunch of dildos on account of how ugly she was and all, and she kept H & G in a cage and fed them, so they’d get fat and she could chow down on 'em, but a hunter found them, did the witch on account of he was horny and all, and then he shot the witch and released the kids.
Yeah. That one shook me up pretty bad, I reckon.
I don’t think I could ever eat a person, ya know?:dubious:
Your dear old uncle Quasi:)
That’s totally it! I didn’t really remember the end, though.
Wait Till Helen Comes and The Dollhouse Murders freaked me AND my wife out when we were little kids. We were delighted to discover that when we started talking about scary kids’ books one day.
When I was eight or so, I read a book called Nobody’s Fault, about a girl whose brother is always playing pranks on her, so one day she puts a snake in his drawer. Only while she’s doing that, he’s outside mowing the lawn and he falls off the riding lawn mower and it runs over him and kills him. Naturally, she spends the rest of the book guilt-stricken over the fact that, if she hadn’t been sneaking around pranking him, she might have heard him crying for help and whatnot. Talk about traumatized – I spent weeks designing lawn mower systems that would automatically shut off if you fell off them after I read that book. (“Designing,” as used here, means “Drawing pictures with lots of text and arrows pointing to features the little kid doing the ‘designing’ wants to point out.” Of course.)
Another book that scared me was Ida Chittum’s Tales of Terror, which featured a crazy girl who liked to torture animals slicing up lizards with a pair of sewing scissors, and drowning, reviving, and re-drowning puppies. Jeez, Ida Chittum! Way to freak out a poor little kid who picked your book up off a library shelf in the children’s section!
Finally, one short story totally scared the crap out of me as a kid, but I don’t remember what it was called or what book it was in. It was set in the old west, and it involved a guy coming to another guy’s house and learning that the other guy had a weird monkey-like creature on his back that had dug its fingers and thumbs and toes into his back and was bonded to him permanently, and it at least partly controlled him. The end of the story had the guy throw himself off a cliff, and the main character watched as the monkey-creature pulled itself away from the shattered corpse and started climbing up the cliff toward him, eager to hop onto HIS back and sink its digits into HIS back. He flees on horseback or by carriage or something, and the last scene had him looking back and seeing the monkey-creature climb up over the cliff edge and start loping down the road after him, never to stop or rest until it found him and attached itself to him.
Good LORD, that was scary. That gave me nightmares for months. (And if anybody knows what that story is, let me know so I can avoid it.)
Hmmm, thanks. None of the cover images I’ve found online match my recollection of the edition I had, but that doesn’t prove much. The title and author don’t ring a bell either, though.
This thread reminds me that my fifth-grade teacher read us Sherlock Holmes stories now and then. I remember the edition she read from had a very stark, creepy B&W picture of the poisoned sister by candlelight in the hallway from “The Speckled Band,” and another of a pale sinister hand reaching out from under the bank vault’s stone floor in “The Red-Headed League.” I can still see those pictures in my mind’s eye.
I’m going to come right out and say it: “The Dynamite Book of Ghosts and Haunted Houses.”
Yes, Dynamite: those of us of a certain age demographic will perhaps remember the groovy 1970’s-era kid’s magazine that offered “Hot Stuff,” Wacky Packages stickers, and pinup posters of Erik Estrada. However, they also periodically published books through Scholastic Paperbacks, generally spotlighting one of the magazine’s regular features or columns: “Magic Wanda’s DYNAMITE Magic Book,” “Count Morbida’s Fang-Tastic Activity Book,” “The DYNAMITE Book of Bummers,” and so on. All brought to you by the friendly neighborhood Bookmobile, because Reading Is Fundamental.
Anyhoo… other than Count Morbida and a keen 3-D Wolf Man poster, I don’t recall the magazine having any particular emphasis on horror; but at some point they also published the aforementioned Book of Ghosts and Haunted Houses, written by Margaret Ronan, illustrated by Arthur Thompson.
Now, I was no stranger to horror fiction even at that age. Poe, Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, Algernon Blackwood, Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling anthologies-- all good, red meat. Sure, many of the stories gave me the shudders-- wasn’t that the point? But I kept going back.
So I probably wasn’t too impressed by the appearance of this slim paperback volume, with its competently if cartoonishly depicted haunted house on the cover. “THE BOOK YOU ARE HOLDING IS 100% DYNAMITE!” read the inside title page. Ooo, terrifying.
“WARNING: Do not read this book if you are home alone!”
I read the book while I was home alone.
How to explain? Something about this book struck home hard, in a way that I find impossible to analyze or describe clearly. Undoubtedly anyone else reading this book would see it exactly as it is: an unremarkable collection of mildly spooky anecdotes, written for children. I’m not sure why it affected me so memorably, but there it is.
The stories themselves run the gamut from old folklore to modern-day settings. About the only ones I was familiar with beforehand were the story of the Winchester House, and an account of the Vanishing Hitchhiker-- the others were new to me. The writing has a dry, journalistic quality, phrasing the anecdotes as if pieced together from interviews. One story tells of a house haunted by a red rubber ball that appears from nowhere, bouncing back and forth endlessly on the cellar stairs. Another tells of a little girl who disappeared in a snowstorm during Colonial times, and the trail of child-sized bloody footprints that still sometimes appear in the snow outside her home.
At the back of the book is a short list of haunted houses around the United States. (The entry for New Hope, PA: “Every building in this town is said to be haunted, but the folks who live there don’t mind.”)
I stumbled across a dog-eared copy recently at a library sale. Though it’s probably been over a quarter-century since I saw it last, I recognized the book instantly, mixed in among a pile of terminally fatigued Sweet Valley High paperbacks. It was a strange sensation to peruse it again, vividly recalling that sick thrill of anxiety that kept me from going into the basement alone for weeks, for fear of hearing the THUD, THUD, THUD of a rubber ball come bouncing out of the darkness. (Fortunately I live in Florida now, where there are no cellars.)
To my knowledge, I never read anything else by Margaret Ronan. However, in this marvelous internet age we live in, I now discover that she was a reasonably prolific author of children’s books, with approximately 50 entries at Amazon.com. Of these, it appears that her most popularly reprinted work was the vastly tedious-sounding “Arrow Book of States.” However, I am delighted to find that almost all of the others are seriously fucked-up kid-lit.
“Dark and Haunted Places.”
“Curse of the Vampires.”
“Master of the Dead.”
“Death Around the World: Strange Rites and Weird Customs.”
“House of Evil and other Strange Unsolved Mysteries.”
“Hunt the Witch Down: Twelve Real Life Stories of Witches and Witchcraft.”
“The Hindenberg is Burning! and other Dirigible Disasters.”
Is this not the best list of children’s book titles EVER? Honestly, I ask you. This list nails Encyclopedia Brown to the wall and flays him ALIVE.
Apparently she also has a story in the anthology “Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories for Late at Night,” alongside such illustrious peers as Roald Dahl, Cyril Hume, Evelyn Waugh, George Langelaan, C. L. Moore, Margaret Millar, and Ray Bradbury. This is exactly the sort of anthology I devoured as a kid, so maybe I have read something else of hers after all. More research is needed.
Sadly it appears that her most recent publication date was 1985, so it seems likely that she is no longer with us. Nonetheless, I feel it necessary to declare:
MARGARET RONAN, I LOVE YOU. You are a horrible, beautiful fucked-up probably dead old woman. You scared me shitless and I want to marry you. I need a woman who understands the importance of dirigible disasters. I need a woman who knows the Strange Rites and Weird Customs of Death Around the World. I don’t know what the hell your deal was, or what you were trying to do to the children, but I am in serious awe of your freaked-out bibliography.
MARGARET RONAN, you were GLORIOUSLY FUCKED-UP and I thank you for it.
“The Blind Fury,” by John Saul. I read this in about 3rd or 4th grade. My parents only cared that I was a voracious reader; they didn’t really police WHAT I read. Still bothers me, but not as scary as it used to be.
My best friend’s dad was reading her “The Fellowship of the Ring” when we were both nine, so of course I had to check it out. The ringwraiths frightened me so much that I refused to sleep by myself for two weeks. My mom finally persuaded me to give it another try when I was thirteen, and I loved the whole trilogy then.
Elendil’s Heir, was the book Hurry Home Candy?
Oh, oh, oh, I just did this a couple of weeks ago, during a Livejournal discussion of whether or not It was gruesome that ran off track. I’m not writing it all up again, so I’m going to quote myself:
Since I already said mine…
Of Mice and Men This book is just so frigging SAD. It didn’t traumatize me or anything since I read it when I was an adult(ish), but I will never read it again.
Yes! That was the book. …and I am now wondering what book the Amazon reviewers were reading, because I know I never found it to be ‘engaging, touching, and mysterious’. Just a gothic tale that I kept reading, waiting for it to get better. :dubious:
Oh! Didn’t Roald Dahl’s “The Witches” have a bit about putting children into a painting? And one of them was a girl who was trapped in a painting of a house in a field, and she just kept on aging all the way to old age in a few weeks in front of her parents’ eyes? :eek: At least, I think it was a Dahl book.
Yes, that was the Witches. You misrembered, though, I think. I’m pretty sure that she aged at the exact same rate she would have otherwise. So she was in there for years. And one day she disappeared, having probably died.
Personally, that seems a lot more creepy to me then it happening in a matter of weeks.
The title doesn’t ring a bell at all, and I have the feeling that if I actually saw the title I’d recognize it immediately. The plot sounds about right, though. Thanks.
Let me add, I’m not eager to re-read the book at all. I haven’t been trying to find it.
My primary school art teacher read us When The Wind Blows and scared me half to death. For years. I had forgotten the title, but I think we talked about this subject on the SDMB another time and someone provided the title for me. It’s about a couple who survive the initial nuclear attack on London only to succumb to radiation sickness later from drinking contaminated water (or something… I was very little when I saw this book last).
The Silver Crown also scared the bejesus out of me. Our grade 6 teacher read it to the class. I had a lot of trouble dealing with the main character losing her family in a house fire at the start of the book.
I had a copy of that book too! I wish I could remember what it was called.
And, add another vote for Night Shift. The Graveyard Shift short story (the one with the rats) was seriously creepy.
Wow and here I thought I was probably the only person who had ever read Tailchaser’s Song. Loved it actually and still read it about once a year.
But as far as ‘creep’ factor goes, Flowers in the Attic completely disturbed me as a kid. Hell, I can’t even remember the storyline, plot or characters. Something about kids and drinking blood or SOMETHING. But all I know is I will never ever read that book or even read an synopsis of it ever EVER again.
1984 itself. Tried to read it for the first time when I was in grade 6. It wasn’t the political brainwashing or anything, I could handle that (I was a child, I had five examples just from that week of people trying to control me). It was one of the main character’s flashbacks to the utter poverty in which he lived as a child, and at one point the simple ordinary (though hardly laudable) act of taking his young sister’s chocolate bar elicits a cry that makes him sure she’s dying … I couldn’t keep reading. I didn’t pick it up again and finish it until years later.
shudder Still creeps me out. No other book ever had that effect on me.
Well, I was going to say that The Martian Chronicles,* while not traumatizing, did give me a few cases of the cold creeps, but I just remembered another one…
It was a children’s guide to the solar system, printed on thick cardboard—I remember the thing being almost as tall as I was, and I couldn’t have been more than seven or so. Anyway, it featured a lot of handy scientific information…including several panels detailing the effects on Earth of the sun expanding into a Red Giant, several billion years in the future. :eek: I still remember the phrase “one last, perfect day” being used at some point. :eek:
Now, as near as I could, I had as good as could be expected concept of how hideously far in the future that was (which in itself wasn’t sobering at all, really), and I wasn’t expecting the sun to start burning out the next day or anything…but just the thought of the cosmically horrifying end to the world to come (complete with illustrations), and that it was a scientific inevitability and that there was nothing that could be done to stop it led to at least a few teary nights.
Everything as good as gone already. All for naught.
Fuck.
I think I got over it (somewhat, anyway) either by noting some minor mistake made in the book, and using that as a desperate rationalization that maybe they were wrong about that part; or simply holding out hope that, at that point in the future, whatever was passing for civilization would have the ability to “repair” the sun, or relocate the Earth.
Which…thinking of it now, is also probably unlikely, given the timescales involved. It’d be like expecting the nations of the world to unite to find and save the rock the first proto-bacteria clung onto before it erodes. If it ever even occurred to them, they wouldn’t give a shit.
Double fuck. 
*About that one…why exactly did all the black people who’d fled the eternally 1955 south go back to Earth when the nukes started falling? I mean, I assumed they did, since you don’t hear or see any of them on Mars after the planet gets re-abandoned. Who or what the hell exactly did they have to go back to? Did they all die in the attempt to get to Mars, or after arriving? Just hiding? Fall into a plot hole?
Ya know, a coupla years ago, they made a movie… 
The Other by Thomas Tryon.
Read it in elementary school 'cause I found it on my older sisters bookshelf.
It still scares me.