The one that Hal Holbrook told in a TV program Mark Twain Tonight called The Golden Arm (or something close to that).
Anybody remember the big picture? All I can recall is the “Who got my golden arm?” being repeated and the final “You got it!!!” screamed into the camera. I almost passed out.
There’s another from childhood I have never been able to find reference to because it involved the N-word. Had to do with Bluegummed whatever.
I get sort of put out with movies that rely on “ghost stories” that were obviously made up out of whole cloth and passed off as if they were Pop Culture. I guess the gap between Urban Legends and honest-to-goodness classical ghost stories is not a subject that’s been addressed as a serious issue. (If there’s a website that goes into much detail on the subject, I haven’t found it yet.)
Anyway, this thread can be pretty much anything about ghost stories that you feel like adding. That includes links to old threads that already said what you want to.
Before the movie, had anybody heard the Candyman story? It sounded totally made up to me and all it had going for it as a movie was Virginia Madsen. The dude playing Candyman is one of those actors I find it hard to watch, in spite of his having had some neat roles elsewhere. But I digress…
Yes, please, go ahead and mention as many duds and not-scary things as you can. To wit: Scream and all its permutations including Scary Movie.
Well, obviously Clive Barker took the Candyman concept from the authentic Bloody Mary myth (if you stand in the darkened bathroom and say “Bloody Mary” however many times she’ll come out of the mirror.) Heard that one at plenty of sleepovers.
If you’re wondering, she totally doesn’t come out of the mirror.
I have a paperback called Great American Ghost Stories that I take along for entertainment whenever I know I’ll have to kill some time at a place where they have crummy magazines, or none at all. By now I have read most of them. But few of them are “great” and most of them wouldn’t even make good Night Gallery or Twilight Zone fare.
If you know of some decent ghost stories in print or online, I’d like some titles or links.
If you can paraphrase or summarize the earliest ghost story from your own experiences, that would be cool, too.
According to the Mark Twain bios, he got the story of “The Golden Arm” from an old black guy he used to listen to as a kid. He wrote the story down in “How to Tel a Story”, but it’s probably best known from the way he used to tell it in his lectures (and which Hal Holbrook, who researched Twain very thoroughly, uhas used as part of his “Mark Twain Tonight!” show for decades now). You can find Twain’s text in several places on the internet:
I heard a redo of the golden arm but it was set in the south near a swamp and someone cuts off some creatures ‘taily-po’ and the creature comes closer and closer saying “taily-po, taily-po. Who’s got my taily-po”