Spooky Stories


 


Spooky Stories!

I have always been a scaredy cat. I’m frightened of things that don’t bother most people, including driving in traffic, going to the dentist and arguments.

On the other hand, I can happily address a large crowd, I wear what I want and read what I want, and I drink out of the river.

On the other other hand, I used to not be scared of heights and now I am. I used to be scared of the dark and now I’m not. I used to fear being alone and now I enjoy it.

So there it is.

My relationship with spooky stories has followed two paths. When I was a child, I was prone to sleeplessness and nightmares so my parents tried to shield me from scary stuff. We were allowed to read more or less what we wanted, but since Mum bought our books, I’m sure she kept a close eye on the content.

Unfortunately, she overlooked two sources of creepy fear. We subscribed to a magazine called Look and Learn, which was a cheery compilation of educational pieces about other countries, ballet, nature and serial stories. Before that, we had Treasure, which also had amiable stories and a series called Tale from Many Lands which inspired my enjoyment of Norse myths among others.

The trouble came when Look and Learn incorporated Ranger Magazine which included some decidedly gothic serials in comic-strip or heavily illustrated form. I vividly remember at least three serials that were creepy enough to give me nightmares. I can’t remember the titles but one was called something like The Man From Yesterday or The Man Who Came Back. This was in the 1960s, and I haven’t been able to identify it. Then there was another one which might have been The Trigan Empire, (but if it was, it was just a single serial out of many). The third was Jane Eyre, done with a lot of scary graphics.

A televised version of Jane Eyre further traumatised me. I suppose Mum thought that, being a classic that was set for school, it would be okay!

Then came a truly nasty story that really was set for school. It came in a curriculum-based anthology and was called Raspberry Jam . Until today I hadn’t been able to identify that one either but thought it might have been by Somerset Maughan or one of those other mean-minded authors so beloved of educators. In fact, it was by Angus Wilson.

The trouble was that having read such stories I couldn’t un-read them and besides, they held a fascination for me.

I think what troubled me was altered states… insanity and displacement and unnatural beings.

Years later, my spooky reading took another turn when I read Ammie, Come Home, (1968) by Barbara Michaels. Now that is a creepy book, with possession, or rather, temporary overwriting, of personalities. The much later sequels, Shattered Silk (1986) and Stitches in Time (1995) were also agreeably creepy. Again, it was the altered states that caught my imagination. Michaels (who also wrote under her real name Barbara Mertz and another pen name, Elizabeth Peters) was also an expert at characters who hid their true selves behind assumed masks (altered states again) especially in the book Prince of Darkness where a sunny teenaged girl turns out to be anything but!

Other favourites of her books are Vanish with the Rose, (1992), Houses of Stone (1993) and The Dancing Floor (1997).

The books have dated, but aside from the spookiness, which my adult brain deals with better than my child braid could, Michaels incorporates unforced humour, sympathetic characters, heroes outside the common TDH mould, marvellous settings and the characters’ interests, including herbs, vintage needlework, roses and restoration. I’d love to revisit some of these books but my copies are in storage and almost none of them are available on audio, which is the way I do most of my recreational reading.

Other spooky stories that have stuck in my mind include True Believer by Douglas Hill, which is one of those “don’t think of a yellow balloon” stories, but much, much more unsettling as the protagonist tries desperately to avoid thinking of monsters which are attracted by…thoughts of them.

Then there’s The Dream Millennium, by James White (1974) in which a long starship voyage becomes an ordeal when the dreamers suffer dreadful nightmares.

Don’t even get me started on The Monkey’s Paw by WW Jacobs (1902)…

 

These three otherwise unrelated stories all play with ingrained fears: that we can’t trust or control our minds, that we will become lost in sleep or that our desires will bring us down…

Now that’s creepy.

So…there are my spooky stories, which are probably not what you might expect.

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Comments

  1. Dr Bob RichOctober 18, 2025 at 7:16 PM

    Sally, congratulations. You are the only one of us who has declared having enjoyed such reading. Helena has catalogued them, the others including me rejected them. So, maybe you are not a scaredy cat at all.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Helena FairfaxOctober 19, 2025 at 5:26 AM

    Sally, I agree with Bob - maybe you're not a scaredy cat! I hadn't heard of the stories you mention, apart from The Money's Paw. The Barbara Michaels books sound like great reads. Thanks for the interesting post!

    ReplyDelete

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