Whenever lunchtime chatter turns to creepy stories, a friend of mine brings up a book she read in elementary school – a book, she says, not a short story. It involves a woman character who wears a ribbon tied around her neck. At the end the ribbon somehow comes untied and her head falls off (it was the only thing holding her head on).
My friend says it was a picture book, which seems very unlikely; she probably means “illustrated”. It should be at least eight or nine years old…Has anyone heard of this book? It sounds intriguingly twisted, to say the least.
Well, the title would probably be “The Velvet Ribbon.” That’s the name of the story we used to tell at slumber parties and such, and a Google search turns up several versions (but I didn’t check for books).
I read a version of that story about 40 years ago, and it wasn’t new then. It’s a common legend (anecdote? or whatever). It may well have been done as a picture book, but if so it wasn’t original to that book.
A version of that story appears in an illustrated book called “In a Dark, Dark Room: And Other Scary Stories,” by Alvin Schwartz. In the book, the story is called “The Green Ribbon.”
It must be a rather old story, since my grandma told it to me in the 1950s, and she said that she had heard it when she was a little girl.
I heard it as ‘The Yellow Ribbon’, and it was an illustrated version that used those artist mannequins to show what happens. Creepy stuff, although at the time I didn’t realize it was that creepy.
I remember hearing this story read on a Scholastic record when I was young, and hearing the thunk of the head hitting the floor as the woman’s voice faded off in echo, crying something like, “I told you not to touch the ribbon. . .” Choice stuff!
The version I heard was “The Golden Screw,” about a boy who had a golden screw where his bellybutton should be. Eventually, he undoes the screw . . . .
. . . . and his ass falls off!
The version I read as a kid was called “The Black Velvet Ribbon” and was included in the first “Tales for the Midnight Hour” book. I used to love those books!
I’ll bet a shiny new dime she was thinking of The Rainbow Book of American Folk Tales and Legends by Maria Leach, World Publishing, 1958.
A great, heavily illustrated book that I loved as a kid, and made sure to have around for MY kids. Contains all the standard U.S. folklore stuff…Paul Bunyan, Mike Fink, Annie Christmas, Joe Magarac, etc…plus tons of great urban legends, regional lore, “screams,” the bad-man stories of Railroad Bill and Stagger Lee, and the folklore of all 48 states. AND “The Yellow Ribbon.”