The summer of 1984, at a sleep-away camp in the Tennessee mountains, the counselors–earnest, well-scrubbed Christian kids–would tell us ghost stories around the campfire. If I had been older, I would have recognized most of them as fairly standard urban legend stories: the hook-hand, the spider eggs, the vanishing hitchhiker. When I was younger, I had heard almost the same stories at sleep-over camping trips run by the YMCA, so they didn’t bother me all too much.
But on nights when the counselors left our 16-kid cabins to drink or fuck or sneak off to the McDonald’s in the little town nearby, one of the kids that had been at the camp before told us The Story, an oral tradition that had been passed down kid-to-kid for who knows how many years. A horror story that carried a lesson in socialization and proper behavior. Here’s how I remember it…
There was a boy a few years back who had nightmares. His name was Timmy. He would thrash around in his upper bunk bed and call out. He kept all the other kids awake and they would be exhausted the next day, not having any fun, doing poorly at the archery range or falling asleep by the pool.
At first light, Timmy would jump down from his bunk and race to the bathroom facility, someways down the mountain that had been dotted with camper cabins. His bunk-mates understood that this meant Timmy was too afraid of the dark to go to the bathrooms at night. But this lead to Timmy finally having a nightmare so bad that he peed the bed, the urine soaking not only his mattress but also dripping down on the kid below him. Everyone was disgusted when they found out what had happened and so when the cabin counselor took Timmy down to the bathroom to get him cleaned up, a plan was hatched.
The next night the counselor was gone–like that very night we were hearing this story–all the boys in the cabin woke Timmy from his usual nightmare, rolled him in his bedsheets and carried him out into the woods, never saying a word. The carried him far from the cabins and the lights around camp and tied him up in a tree. Not to a tree, up in a tree, dangling a few feet off the ground and gagged him. Timmy begged and squirmed and screamed into his gag, but the other boys left him there, not telling him if they planned to return. They went back to the cabin and all fell asleep.
Timmy couldn’t get loose and he couldn’t cry for help. There was no hope anyone from the camp would find him by accident. He hanged there limp and defeated.
And then something licked his foot.
He looked down. As quiet as ghosts, a pack of wolves had surrounded the tree he was suspended in. Another lick of his foot. It almost tickled. Timmy screamed. The closest wolf finally bit his foot and tore away a few of his toes. He could feel the other wolves lapping at the blood. This drove the wolves in a frenzy, more of them biting his feet, worrying off their own pieces of Timmy, tugging as they pulled his flesh away. Timmy screamed until he had no voice left.
The wolves continued eating Timmy, bracing against the tree to eat further and further up his legs. Finally jumping to bite into Timmy’s knees, dangling there until their body weight tore off another chunk of the boy. They ate Timmy down to just stumps.
After the wolves were done, they wandered away into the woods. Timmy was quite insane from pain and shock at this point. But all the terrible tugging of the starving wolves had loosened the ropes and he finally fell into the mud his blood had made at the base.
Using his hands and arms, Timmy dragged himself into the woods, vowing revenge. He would go back and kill the boys who had done this.
The boys from the cabin returned the next morning and found blood and chewed bone at the base of the tree. They assumed that Timmy had been entirely eaten and realized they would be in huge trouble if it was discovered what they did. They climbed the tree and took down what was left of the ropes, they threw the chewed bones in different directions and piled leaves and loam over the blood at the base of the tree. They made a pact never to talk about this to anyone else as long as they lived. And then they went to the cafeteria to eat breakfast.
When it was discovered that Timmy was missing, the summer camp organized a search for him, assuming this troubled little boy had run away. When they found nothing, they called in the state police. The state police interviewed the counselor, who lied and said he had been in the cabin all night; when they interviewed Timmy’s cabin-mates, none of them confessed to what they had done. When the state police finally left empty-handed, the panic and unrest in the camp died down. Buy this time, summer was almost over. The boys who left Timmy to the wolves were about to go home to various states.
On the last night of camp, Timmy got his revenge. He dragged himself into his old cabin, his half-healed leg stumps leaving tracks of mud on the floor as he smothered the boys one-by-one, quietly to not wake the others. But just the boys on the bottom bunks. He couldn’t reach the ones on the top bunks. They were safe.
The next morning, the surviving kids woke to find the muddy drag tracks on the floor. Their screams woke the counselor and he freaked out at finding all the boys in the bottom bunks dead. The survivors of the massacre instinctively knew this was the work of Timmy.
They warned the other kids at camp that Timmy was still out there and he could get you if you slept in the bottom bunks.
What a fantastically gruesome story, right? 36 years later I still think about, maybe more than I should. I know that the boy in my cabin, in his upper bunk, didn’t tell it just like I did. I’m sure I’ve added details and embellishments to where the story is just as much as his at this point. But I know it was about a boy left in the woods who had his legs eaten off by wolves, and the revenge he extracted.
So many plot holes, but, then, this was a child’s story told to children. Terrified in our bottom bunks, we didn’t think about the distinct lack of wolves in 1980s Tennessee, or effects of traumatic limb amputation and blood loss on a 12-year-old, or the camp somehow covering it all up and not being sued out of existence.
Do any of you have one of these? Or local urban legends? Please share in the comments.
Nope. I did not go much to local version of camp. When I did it was not a pleasant experience. scary stories were not really a thing. We would sit round the fire and tell jokes mostly.
Off course there was always the danger that the gypsies would come and steal us so we had no need of scary stories.
“Stolen by gypsies” used to be one of the stock gruesome endings of a genre known as cautionary tales. Having the bad children eaten by bears was another favorite ending.
Not to be confused with the parody version.
My mother would say she would sell us to the Gypsies/Banshees
What she didn’t tell you was she tried, but they weren’t interested.
I am not sure why my parents did not send me to camp, maybe because i was not a social kid and they thought I would not have a good time. A while back I though that id=f my parents forced me to socialize more like that as I kid I would have become more social, but now I doubt it. It is mostly innate.
Yeah, you really can’t force it. At best, you turn introverts into introverts who are really good at reading social situations and charming the shit out of people, and at worst you get a sociopath or a catatonic. Making an introvert an extrovert by sticking them in crowds of people is like trying to turn a car into a boat by pushing it off a pier.
*stares blankly*
I’m good in a crowd and I can soeak publicly with no problem. I like the attention (shocker, I know).
BUT I can only do that for a couple of hours and then I need a month alone to recover from it.
That’s about my speed. I’m not bragging when I say I’m great with people, meet new people easily, interact with groups with no problem, can speak publicly pretty well, the works. And I sort of enjoy it. I just can’t do it for more than a few hours before I need to take a break for a few days.
I’ve been told the big introvert thing about me is that when I’m stressed out about something I have to be alone to calm down. The more stressed out or anxious I am the worse it is when I’ve got people around me making noise or interacting with me. It’s like I’ve got to have all my psychological batteries charged up and ready to go in order to deal with other people.
Reading now it does not seem that scary, but I imagine in the right context it would be different.
Not all horror stories are about garlic and wooden stakes.
I never went to camp.
Camp was too urban a setting?
but you are pretty camp. Or you like camp movies. Or something?
“Meatballs” is the best camp film ever. (The joke, I killed it)
Vote Bernie and remedy that.
They’ll teach you to concentrate.
I only went to “day camp” a few times. Hated it. The kids were mean AF.
Later my German teacher set up a weekend camping trip for the class which we repeated a couple more years. Absolute blast each time.
I don’t remember any of the ghost stories told around the campfire. If someone told them to me again, I’d remember.
I do remember my first horror film: The Hitcher.
I also loved Lois Duncan’s books (she of I Know What You Did Last Summer), which were all the rage.
Oooohhh, Summer Camp stories.
At the camp I worked at it was a farmer called “Cropsey” who was pissed at all the campers trespassing his land during nature hikes.
The closest to a local urban legend was Bunny Man who I became aware of in college through friends from Fairfax.
Yeah, I’ve heard Bunny Man. There’s a Goat Man in the area too, isn’t there?
Goat Man haunts Crybaby Bridge someone in Maryland.
My Crybaby Bridge is actually called Governor’s Bridge, and we didn’t have a Goat Man associated with it. Just the usual crying baby and ghostly lady, along with some other random things.
Cropsey is the basis for The Burning.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082118/
Which was the first movie role for Jason Alexander, Holly Hunter, and Fisher Stevens. From a story by Harvey Weinstein.
There’s your horror story.
The legend of the Ether Bunny?
It ended by waking up with a headache and a sore asshole.
Just scared the cat with my guffaw. Today, you win the internet.
As I don’t have any of my own and not really know many scary stories I can submit some neil gaiman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imLja6Emezo
No Bram Stoker?
Nah, we just got the standards.
Plus a snipe hunt every year.
Oh, the Great American Snipe! I have hunted many of those in my day.
Also, forest faeries.
It turned out the forest faerie was just an out of work edit faerie.
I was disappointed.
Luckily, they made my favorite campfire story into a movie. *Watch at least until 2:40. If you can make to 5:35, even better. And thanks for the Story, SF. That’s a good one which I’ll tell the kids next time we go camping.
are there subtitles?
Can’t find any. It’s the kid’s dad going to grandma’s house after getting drunk.
BG: It’s dad coming home drunk.
Is this the same – film? I’m at work and can’t check.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Tower:_Mom_and_Me,_and_Sometimes_Dad
You went to camp in Japan?
He takes his family camping often.
That story sounds like a variation of Thump drag.
https://www.scaryforkids.com/thump-thump/
Do any of you have one of these? Or local urban legends? Please share in the comments.
One similar story we told as Boy Scouts was of Judge Palmer.
Judge Palmer was a particularly hard and cruel judge and even harder and crueler scoutmaster. After a while the boys decided that they would get back at the Judge by playing a prank on him. They knew that every night he would take an evening shit before retiring to bed. So they went into the shitters and cut the seat wider.
Well that night when the judge went to take his nightly, he fell right into the shitter and drowned. The boys, shaken by what had happened swore themselves to secrecy.
A year past and the boys returned to the same Camp. One night the youngest boy woke up to use the john. After 30 min without returning the other boys began to worry. They sent the oldest out to go look for him. Another 30 min passed and still no sign of either boy. With only 3 of them left, they agreed to go together. they looked around the camp, and saw no sign. So they headed down to the outhouse. When they opened the door they found the decapitated bodies at the feet of Judge Palmer, axe in hand.
They say to this day Judge Palmer lurks around Camp Outhouses waiting for boys to wander in alone at night.
Classic. Guaranteed to inspire bowel blockage in many a young Scout.
SF’s story sound like a variation of Thump Drag.
https://www.scaryforkids.com/thump-thump/
At Scout camp, we would tell stories of the old man who lived on the other side of the lake. He would roam around and kill trespassers with his hatchet. Pretty standard fare.
However, we had one kid so amped up that when David Smalls put on the obligatory rubber mask and grabbed his hatchet so we could project his shadow onto the poor kid’s tent, the kid came roaring out with a hatchet of his own and chased David halfway across the camp while we were screaming for him to stop.
Coincidentally, I was the victim of the “carry his cot out to a ravine” prank while I was passed out one summer evening. I woke up a couple hundred yards from camp with no idea where the hell I was. Still don’t know how they managed to not wake me up.
Roofies.
It was more likely I was drunk.
David Smalls grew up to be a cop and it’s your fault.
I never went to summer camp, but we’ve got some local ghost stories for sure. Of course, there’s a Crybaby Bridge everywhere, but our local one is Governor’s Bridge Road. It’s a two-lane road that tapers to a one-lane bridge, so right off the bat it’s a nerve-wracking area. One of the stories is that a woman who had a baby out of wedlock killed herself and her baby by jumping off the bridge, and another one is that either the woman was pregnant at the time or that she just killed the baby. At any rate, the result is that if you go to the bridge at night and turn your car off (there’s room to pull over on either end of the bridge) you can hear a baby crying, or you can hear a woman crying. There’s the mother-as-a-hitchhiker bit, too.
In the woods around that same area there was rumored to be an abandoned house inhabited by a Satanic cult and/or cannibals. There was also supposed to be a pack of feral dogs that had been living and breeding in the woods for generations, as well as a ghost dog that would appear in front of cars to scare them off the road. I suspect in the latter case it was local dogs that didn’t become ghosts until after jumping in front of the car. My dad used to go fishing down there all the time, and while he was not a superstitious man he kept a pistol on his hip for the feral dogs, so I actually do believe that bit of the story a little bit.
And, of course, downtown Annapolis like any historic town with old buildings is supposedly haunted as shit, but it’s all just “There’s a person in a window, oooo!”
Oh yeah, then there was this place. I never went myself but I knew a bunch of people who did. I believe it’s gone now.
There’s also this place. I haven’t gone in there, but it’s supposed to still have power and everything and it was only closed down in 2004, so it’s still in pretty good shape apparently. There’s a sign as you drive past with the hilariously tasteless slogan, “Committed to Excellence”.
Marginally related: Every teenage girl’s rite of passage.
Wow…..lots of incest in that story. I don’t think I ever read anything quite that f’ed up as a teen.
It’s classified as horror, and it is. But for some reason, it became a YA classic.
“If you get locked up together long enough you are gonna hook up with your sister”
Yep, that’s creepy.
The horror part was the grandmother locking them up and poisoning them with powdered donuts. The moral of the story: Never eat powdered donuts provided by grandma.
I spent the weekend visiting my aged grandmothers. They are so sweet and kind it’s really tough for me to picture a granny as the nemesis. The whole abandonment angle of that story is f’ed up too.
I vaguely remember most of the girls in my class read it when we were 15-ish.
I read when I was a little younger than that. Just thought it was a horror novel. I was like, “Dude, that’s your sister!” I was shockable back then.
I was shockable back then.
I don’t believe you.
He had a tens unit attached to his sac while he read it.
Shockable!
Bobarian, dude, you are on a roll today.
I remember selling tons of those to tweens in the 80’s, when I worked at a bookstore.
Lifetime did a series adaptation of the books…not that I watch Lifetime.
It’s cool bro. In the before internet times I used to tune in for the Lifetime originals about MILFy stepmoms. They usually had pretty decent foreplay scenes for 1997.
It was probably the worst movie I ever recall sitting thru.
This was terrible.
Wiki said Wes Craven was going to write and direct but they thought his vision was too creepy.
I generally don’t see movies made from books I’ve read, especially ones I like.
I should’ve held to that policy, because Atlas Shrugged was a traumatic experience.
I bastardized this one: https://www.scaryforkids.com/viper/
the way i tell it, it’s about a girl stuck alone in an office building being followed down the hall by some noise that sounds like a wet shuffling and a high-pitched wail. when she shouts “who’s there?” the reply is “the viper”. the little girl runs down the office hallway. finally the little girl gets trapped in an office as the noise gets closer. then the door to her office opens and a little man is there with a bucket and squeegee and says, “i’m the viper. i’m here to vipe the vindows.”
And the “vipers” name…. Pie
I remember, being a child of the 80s, that there was an episode of the GI Joe cartoon that did this.
Sf’s story sounds like a variation of thump, thump, drag.
And with a little of The Licked Hand thrown in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Licked_Hand
I wish I knew enough about the Folklore Index to attach a number.
Great story, SF, never heard that one (first time to camp I was 19, different horror stories). I did drive by the parade field one morning at Ft Monmouth and saw a GI bunk, with sheets/blankets by the flag pole. Had to be story there, for all those involved.
My guess, overslept and missed formation.
hiking/bushwhacking in the GW Nat’l Forest i stumbled across an old bus that must’ve been there for decades. no roads anywhere close. it must’ve been driven back in there and abandoned. trees had grown up all around it. creepy as shit.
On the East side of Cleveland, the story was always told of the Melonheads who roamed the Kirtland woods. They were orphans (or kidnapped children depending on the telling) who were taken in by a doctor. The doctor experimented on the children by injecting (water/alcohol/formaldehyde/etc) into their heads. The children’s heads would then expand and get soft (pulsing in some tellings). Eventually the children were able to rise up against the doctor, killing him and burning his cabin/house to the ground. They still roam the woods of Kirtland looking for others to bring into their folds.
Of course, like any old city, we’ve got our share of urban legends.
They grew up and turned into Browns fans?
Nah, this story was told back in the day the Browns were decent. They became Indians fans in the 80’s.
Not a ghost story, a prank instead.
Both my son and daughter were in scouts when we lived in Arizona. My wife was a girl scout leader and had made arrangements for the troop to spend the weekend in a cabin in the Arizona wilderness. I borrowed my friends Dodge Caravan to help transport some of the girls to the cabin.
For those of you that haven’t lived in the desert, the low humidity means there is no scattered light, and it is totally dark when you are long distance from civilization. On a moonless night, the sky is pitch black. The only light you have out on the road is your headlights. As you go over a hill, it looks like you are driving into a sea of ink until the vehicle points down and the lights hit the road.
So I had 7 girls about 9 or 10 years old in the van. As I crested a pretty big hill, I screamed. Within seconds, all seven girls were screaming as loud as they could. I stopped screaming, and they eventually stopped screaming. In the quiet, I hear this faint voice saying: “I saw it . . . I saw it . . . I saw it. . . .”
Fifteen minutes later, we reached the cabin. The girls grabbed their gear and bolted for the cabin. I kissed my wife on the cheek and told her to have a good weekend.
Good times. Good times.
LOL
I’ve experienced how the desert seems to swallow up headlights at night. My biggest fear was hitting a free range angus cow at 70 mph.
I spent 3 years at FT Irwin. Night Vision was almost useless. If there was more than a quarter moon, you could see better with the naked eye, but if there was no moon, there was so little light that NVGs didn’t have anything to amplify.
On those nights the only light you saw was the beacons at Tiefort and the Pioneer sight and ambient light from the main post. If it was winter and there was some cloud cover, you’d pick up light from Barstow, Baker and Las Vegas, which is almost 120 miles, straight line,
Thermals worked great though.
That’s awesome.
So about that pitch black desert thing … how is it if you are walking on a moonless night? Not running. Do your eyes adjust to the terrain or do you have to watch every step?
I don’t know as if I ever attempted it without a light source on a moonless night. Most of my experience was doing military training exercises though so you always had white/red light and/or night vision. Based on my experience with Nevada rattlesnakes and scorpions I don’t think I’d enjoying trying it.
So, cactus, snakes, scorpions, black widows, brown recluse, gila monsters, javelina, . . .
You just don’t go walking around in the dark in Arizona.
Barrel cactus alone would make that a no-go for me. Those things can penetrate a vibram sole like a wet paper bag.
Everything in the desert is trying to kill you.
Especially the guy making you dig the six foot long pit…
We always had flash lights when we were out with the kids. So I am not sure.
I only remember going to one camp and it was only a couple days long. I don’t remember any ghost stories.
Sorta related, I used to go drinking here: http://www.nepaparanormal.com/page52.php
Supposedly haunted.
My Dad always told us one about an abandoned old Iroquois woman who dresses in white buckskins and referred to as the “white lady” living alone in a long house. She turns out to be a vampire and preys on early settlers at night. She’s eventually tracked down and burned in her longhouse but you can still see her white apparition walking the edge of the fields at night, blah, blah, blah
Extremely derivative but it scared the shit out of us kids.
The White Lady is a very old ghost story.
And here I was thinking I was teeing up a perfect Elizabeth Warren joke.
We have a lot of local “haunted house” stories. Stull, Kansas houses the gateway to hell. There was an old abandoned asylum kids used to sneak into. A distant cousin of mine was on the show “Sightings” in the 90s. He claimed his house was haunted by a girl that frequently scratched him. Being a non-believer and natural skeptic I don’t believe any of this bullshit.
My hometown had an old sanitarium that had been abandoned in the 1960’s. Picture the hotel from the shinning in a state of decay. In the basement teenagers elaborately graffiti-ed a “Welcome to Hell” mural around the entrance way. It was an amazingly scary place to explore. Now they’ve boarded it up and from what I’m told it’s become extremely structurally unsound. Sad because snooping your way through it was a right of passage if you grew up there,
Nostalgia lead me to google search said sanitarium:
“A grant from NYS for $2.5 million was approved in Jan. 2008 to renovate the former ….. Resort”
Guess how much renovation the tax payers got out of that grant….
A few rounds of RFQ responses, all of which were too expensive.
Probably exactly right. $2.5M would’t even scratch the surface of that place would need to be structurally sound, let alone viable as a hotel (unless cramped 1800’s quarters come back into style and Western NY ceases to be a economically depressed back-water). I’m sure some grifter got a nice little chunk of public funds they scuttled off with.
We had an abandoned mental hospital in Northville, MI that we used to sneak into in high school. It was pretty creepy. It was also close to a small park with a waterfall that was great to retreat to with the girls you took to hook up.
We had this place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Livingston
There were the run-of-the-mill ‘escaped prisoner stalking the woods’ stories and as a result almost no one would go there. That made me happy because I grew up on a farm adjacent to it and had 50K acres of woods to myself. I didnt give a shit about old German soldiers, I had a 12 gauge and would hike and camp quite often by myself. I think it has been only a few years since those irrational fears have evaporated from the public consciousness and people started going back in there.
Well, if he’s still around he’s got to be in his nineties by now.
According to my grandparents, German POW’s were commonly housed and used for domestic labor in my neck of the woods. Far from being feared or hated, everyone I know who interacted with them had favorable opinions of them as workers and as people. Evidently many returned with their families after the war.
Your average POW was just a conscript on the other side of the fight, so they’re just going to be ordinary people.
I watched “They Shall Not Grow Old” not too long ago (HIGHLY recommended). I found it interesting that Bavarians were especially liked by the Allies and treated very well in captivity whereas Prussians were hated and dealt with much more harshly.
Not sure if that dynamic carried over to WWII.
My Grandfather drove an ambulance in WWI, and much preferred the Germans over the French. He told my Grandmother we were fighting on the wrong side.
Which turned out to be true in Suthen’s case.
Woods, Bayou, Tree Farm, same thing, right?
Never went to camp, but when I was a kid there was a ghost story all the kids in the neighborhood knew. Western Henrico County used to have coal mines back in the 19th century, and the woods I grew up playing in had occasional sinkholes from them. There was supposed to be a ghost that haunted the woods behind the 7-11 on Gayton Rd, of a kid who had a sinkhole open up on him, he fell deep into an abandoned mine shaft, he died, and his body was never found.
I’ve never seen a ghost, though when I was younger I hoped to. When I was stationed at NAS Pensacola, several times a friend of mine and I went to old Fort Barrancas, which is located on base, at night because it was supposed to be haunted. Never saw anything.
Dear Glibertarians Commenters:
Let’s work out a good deal! You don’t want to be responsible for posting thousands of links, and I don’t want to be responsible for destroying our Family Friendly Rating— and I will. I’ve already given you a little sample with respect to that video of the guy fucking a snake.
I have worked hard to solve some of your problems. Don’t let the world down. You can make a great deal. Sugarfree is willing to negotiate with you, and he is willing to make concessions that they would never have made in the past. I am confidentially enclosing a copy of his letter to me, just received.
History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way. It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen. Don’t be tough guys. Don’t be fools!
I will call you later.
Sincerely, Heroic Mulatto
The finest, classiest letter ever!
I can only imagine the faces on his advisers faces when he told them “leak this to the press”. “Ummm…it sounds like Baron wrote this, sir.” “No. I wrote it. I only asked for his help with some of the spellings.”
Wait did i miss an item of real life hilarity?
It’ll all be over soon, anyway. Yahoo assures me that his impeachment strategy is crumbling.
Honestly surprised that Yahoo still does anything other than fantasy football. Imagine being a corporate press reporter, which is bad enough, but you’re also a corporate press reporter for a search engine that most people forgot still exists.
Altavista?
I wonder if Ask Jeeves is still around and if they have e-mail. It would be bad ass to give someone your email address and it ends with @askjeeves
Ask Jeeves became Ask.com a long time ago.
Anyone remember Excite?
Billy, Don’t be a hero!
We had ‘Horse Thief Jack’ and ‘Mary Jane’s grave’ both told at the local summer camp. It’s been many years but from what I remember The first was an outlaw and when the town people finally massacred his gang his body wasn’t found, some bloody tracks led to a cave in the woods and no one that entered came out, some dogs were sent in and only their heads came rolling out, the cave was dynamited shut but the nest day the rubble had been moved and supposedly “one eyed jack roams the woods seeking vengeance with one glowing red eye, so obviously the counselors would put a red filter over a flashlight and creep around in the woods after the campfire tale. The latter was just a name on a grave in a cemetery that bordered the camps nature trail, at first it was just a camp story about her being a witch or something, but then as the first kids to hear the story became teenagers they would go to that graveyard at night to scare each other or more likely drink smoke and fuck, the grave took on a lore of it’s own and if you sat on it it was bad luck and one group of kids died in a car wreck coming back from the grave and the driver supposedly pissed on the grave, so that added to it, of course the roads out to the graveyard are twisty country roads with few or no lights and the guys were drunk but it was probably the ghost of Mary Jane.
“but the nest day the rubble had been moved and supposedly “one eyed jack roams the woods seeking vengeance with one glowing red eye”
One Eyed Jack was Jesus?
Not raised very religiously I never thought of that as a kid but did just now retelling it. Maybe I’m mixing up my fairy tales, like I said it’s been many many years since little Hyperbole sat around the big bonfire and heard the tale.
Maybe Jesus was a campfire tale spun by Roman soldiers to scare new recruits, that people started taking seriously.
Your GIF……I just noticed it and it’s superb
Thanks. I can’t take too much credit, I stole it from somewhere on the intertubes.
Roman soldier: And then on the third day, he rose from the dead. They say he lives within all of us.
Roman recruit: Stop Flavius. You’re going to give us nightmares.
Roman soldier: Honest to Jupiter, it happened. My wife’s friend- her husband was suppose to be watching the cave he was buried him.
He still bleeds from his wounds as he roams the land searching for those who condemned the innocent man. He drove one to suicide. And he raises more of the dead.
I got chills.
New Remy, New Remy!!!1111!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpHiDsnqOSA&list=PL02D02B9A144182DB&index=1
Remy and Stossel must account for about half of all Reason’s views. Fruit sushi probably makes up another quarter of views.
Remy and Stossel are the only clicks I will give them most of the time. Both manage to get their point across without having to equivocate and signal that they on the virtuous side.
That probably explains why Stossel and Remy have that warning at the bottom “The views expressed here are those of ‘xxx’ and do not necessarily reflect the views of Reason Magazine or the Reason Foundation”.
I remember when they started adding that to Stossel columns.
Really?? You know you’ve lost your way when you worry what people will think if they associate you with John Stossel. He’s not an anarchist or even a hardcore libertarian, he’s just candid about government ineptitude and media bias.
How do people not remember that? I’ve mentioned that a few times and people are always surprised.
From a Stossel article at the bottom:
“The views expressed in this video are solely those of John Stossel; his independent production company, Stossel Productions; and the people he interviews. The claims and opinions set forth in the video and accompanying text are not necessarily those of Reason.”
Hmmm…maybe there is a CYA legal component to that that I’m not aware of but, if not, that is truly baffling, or should be, but nothing surprises me about them anymore. I look forward to stopping over pre-election to read the “Vote libertarian, or Warren, whatever…..just not orangemanbad” article.
It’s definitely some legal thing. But, they just started doing it about four years ago.
Didn’t it start when Stossel spun up his own media company? I always associated it with that.
Dang it. I thought you meant THIS Remy.
/maybe NSFW
One Eyed Jacks was a fucked up movie.
It was a decent porno, but I can understand why true connoisseur of the form might take a dim view toward it.
Are you talking about the original or the reboot?
Who needs horror stories when we are living in the daily horror story that is the Drumpf regime? Family separation, concentration camps, abandoning allies, violence in the streets, the rise of white-supremacy, Russia hacking our elections, attacks on the media, such as serious journalists at CNN (which prides itself on sticking solely to the facts) sowing distrust and discord among the population. And none of that has been taken out of context in the slightest. If you want horror, look around. ///democracydiesindarkness ///TrumpRussia ///savethekurds
It’s copyright infringement to directly quote NYT/WaPo/Slate/Salon/Vox/HuffPo/etc/ect/Ect without siting your sources
Fiction writers want their credit, dude.
“Democracy Dies When Repeating CIA Talking Points”
So many plot holes, but, then, this was a child’s story told to children. Terrified in our bottom bunks, we didn’t think about the distinct lack of wolves in 1980s Tennessee, or effects of traumatic limb amputation and blood loss on a 12-year-old, or the camp somehow covering it all up and not being sued out of existence.
Still helping the camp cover up The Timmy Incident all these years later, huh?
Curses! Damn you, Warty Hugeman!
I don’t have a good ghost story, but a horror movie scared the snot out of me when I was 5, and I wonder if all y’all can help me identify it. (Yeah, identifying a movie from a 44-year-old memory developed as a kid is going to be a challenge, I know.)
Mom dropped me and my sister off with babysitter who lived in a green trailer. I don’t know that I ever saw this girl before or since. She was nice enough, and let me watch whatever I wanted on TV while my sister took a nap. Flipping through the three channels available, I settled on a schlocky 50s horror movie. There was a small airplane that crashed in the woods. The occupants didn’t die, but instead were turned inside out. The local teenagers had a make-out spot not far from the crash site, and of course several pairs were up there making out one night when strange noises began emanating from the woods. At first the boys were having fun scaring their girlfriends, but then even they became concerned as the noises became louder and closer. Weird shapes could be seen at the tree line, but every time someone pointed a flashlight in that direction the object melded into the forest. The boys decided whatever it was didn’t like bright light, so they parked their cars in a circle with the headlights facing out. The noises grew closer still. Worried teenage girls clung to their boyfriends. And then, one by one, the batteries in the cars started to die, and the headlights got dimmer and dimmer. The noises grew louder. And then! And then!
I was too terrified to watch the rest. I had nightmares for weeks. Anyone know what this movie was? I’d love to see it again.
It’s funny how edgy horror movies were mostly just morality tales designed to scare teenagers away from premarital sex.
‘The second penetration happens a monster, maniac or alien is goingto brutally murder you both in some horrifically painful fashion. Keep it in your pants, Timmy.’
All of the classic slasher tales hold to those rules, look at the rules for the final girl.
Which is why I loved Cabin in the Woods, I thought it was a great spin on the genera.
*genre* ……I no spell so gooder today
Don’t assume the gender of the genre.
I enjoyed it as well. I’ve got a draft of an article for some other horror films that may be of interest to the people here as well.
I had nightmares for weeks. ….. I’d love to see it again.
Humans are weird.
Now you know the thing that scared the daylights out of me at 5 years old is going to turn out the be the cheesiest movie ever made when watched as an adult. I’d really like to see it again, just to find out how much of a crybaby 5-year-old me was.
If I were you, I’d watch the movie again, build a time machine, and then go back in time and call 5 year-old me a “bitch”. It would be for your own good.
I have a similar tale. I was 6 and my parents had forbidden me from watching Hammer’s Dracula: Prince Of Darkness. I sneaked out of my room and watched anyway. The opening scene, where a peasant is suspended over a well (into which Dracula’s ashes have been dumped) and has his throat slit. It put me off horror films for the rest of my days.
When I was about eight years old, I use to take a swim class at the local park district. One time, while changing into my swim suit in the locker room, the lights inexplicably went out. It was pitch black for about twenty seconds at the most. Then when the lights turned back on, I got a brief glance of an older guy completely naked. He quickly pulled up his swim trunks and left, but it was too late. I saw everything. It turned me off from dudes for the rest of my life. The image was seared into my brain.
Some things just stick with you forever
You had me at ‘green trailer”.
Was the babysitter hot ?
No idea! But let’s say yes. Definitely yes.
Wait a teenage girl alone in a green trailer. That wasn’t a movie. The monster was MS!!!
Was!?
Sounds like “Invasion of the Saucer Men” or the remake “The Eye Creatures “.
Bright lights like head-lights and flash bulbs caused them to disintegrate.
Oooo, both of those seem like a possibility! Thank you!
“The Eye Creatures” was terrifying at 6 yrs old. It was a cheesy joke by the time I was 9 and watching all the Hammer horror films.
Their’s a kneed for, Ted’s, on this thred.
That should wake him up.
I actually didn’t know what movie he was describing.
Carpe Donktum ?
How long before a federal judge in Hawaii rules that Turkey cannot agree to a ceasefire with Syria and that endless wars and occupation must continue indefinitely?
bwhahahahahaha
he’s probably right though.
Listening to the brief bits of news about the Kurds that i hav heard, i realize how much i have been red pilled. I keep hearing Reporters and Politicians talk about how the Kurds are being slaughtered and there are “reports of war crimes”, and i can only think about how many time that exact same propoganda has been used to get the Americans to go to War. Think Cuba and the Spanish American War, World War 1. Does that make me a terrible person.
Also think how fast they got to ceasefire was interesting. Wonder how fast the Syrian Civil War would stop if we just left.
ISIS isn’t coming back, so long as we don’t start funding and arming them again. We all know that.
But, the Kurds made a deal with the Syrians and the Russians the other day, so I figure that really forced the Turks to at least mouth support for a ceasefire. This whole thing is a farce.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-syria-security-turkey-sdf/sdf-commander-trump-did-not-oppose-deal-with-damascus-to-fend-off-turkish-offensive-idUKKBN1WV2I6
Despite all the hand wringing by the usual douchebag suspects this is good news. The conflict is drawing down and hopefully it’ll be brought to a close soon.
The somewhat neutered Islamists of the Free Syrian Army on one side and honest-to-goodness pink commie Kurds on the other. I don’t see any other appropriate action other than to watch from the other side of the world with a big tub of popcorn.
I was a camper, then dish dog, then assistant cook, then head cook, then counselor, then boathouse director at a YMCA camp in northern Minnesota.
I don’t remember any scary stories, but we used to do elaborate theatrical plays on the beach for the campers. I was usually buried in a wooden box on the beach and would pop up to surprise/scare everyone at a key moment in the play.
My best line: “Forgive me, Father, for I have sand!”
*sand flows through my up-stretched hands*
*narrows gaze*
There was an urban, well, rural legend about a bridge a few towns over nicknamed Nigger Nat’s. As I remember it, the story is that a black guy from the 30’s fell afoul of the wrong people and they hanged him from that bridge. So of course, haunted, and if you park there in the dead of night he’ll take control of your car and try to drive it off the bridge. Naturally, I had to give it a try. Nothing happened.
Well, he knew you were down with the cause, so you’re one of the “good ones”.
It was because he and his friends had the good sense to call the bridge “N-word Nat”.
Keep hope alive
Dude, is there anything you HAVEN’T tried?
Heroin, gay sex, sky diving…I’ll let you know if I can think of more.
Living in the French Quarter for many years, I grew to loathe the Haunted History tours and the constant patter of outright lies from the carriage drivers/guides. New Orleans has such an amazing history that it seemed (to me, YMMV) insulting to make up lies about it. The claim that Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shoppe, an otherwise wonderful tavern, is the oldest bar in America were particularly annoying. It’s not even the oldest bar on Bourbon Street.
I thought Lafitte’s was famous for being the oldest building, not the oldest bar.
Hence my disdain for the tour barkers. Seriously though, the building was erected in the 1830s and was a residence until the 1940s. There are only a couple structures that survived the Great Fire of 1794; the oldest is the Ursuline Convent from 1745.
Werebear Nuns have no tolerence for heat.
Every tourist town has “Abraham Lincoln was born in this log cabin that he built with his own two hands!” bullshit stories to lure in the marks.
I use to live in central Illinois for a couple of years, because I’m a cultured man of refined tastes. I lived in this apartment complex that was built on this big piece of land in front of a mansion that was once the home of one of Abraham Lincoln’s early financial backers (some railroad magnet at the time). Around Halloween there were regular ghost tours around the apartment building focusing on the supposed paranormal sightings of old timey abolitionists and antebellum supporters of Lincoln who still haunted the area (because everything in central Illinois needs to have an Abraham Lincoln or Adlai Stevenson tie-in). The regular tours of people visiting the apartment area was a real pain in the ass, so I always made it a point to parade around the apartment naked with all the shades open when the tours came around.
I cannot say how many people were traumatized by this, but I have no doubt that there were many.