Were you ever scared as a child? I used to get so scared I made Granny and Pap sleep with the hallway light on. My brother Steve really complained about that light but I complained about being scared more 🙂
In my latest video there’s two stories about grownups scaring kids. Seems like some grownup or at least someone older than us was always trying to scare us when we were kids. Not in a mean way, just in a teasing jokester sort of way. And to be honest, all us kids liked being scared. It was exciting.
I hope you enjoyed the humorous stories about getting scared. If you have a funny story about being spooked I hope you’ll share it with us.
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I would get scared at night when the whipperwill would stop hollering. Daddy told us that if the whipperwill stopped hollering that it meant there was something in the woods. I’d lay there and strain my ears to try to hear the booger if it came out of the woods. It made me afraid to sleep by the open window. My poor imagination would run away with me horribly. If we heard a hooty owl holler, we was told to tie a knot in the edge of our sheet and it would choke it to death!
I don’t want to sound like I’m on my high horse, but it bothers me to see cemeteries used for scaring people. I have always thought a cemetery should be treated with respect just like a church. I try to never step on a grave if at all possible and never let my children run across the graves. My church has always had a halloween festival and one of the things was to take the younger children on a hay ride to the cemetery and the older children would scare them. After some of my family was buried there this really bothered me but then I thought about my daddy and realized he would be having a ball if he was there so I got over it. Yes my grandparents had their bloody bones and rawhide and one grandmother was almost blind in one eye and her bad eye was going to get us. I hope I have not offended anyone by saying this about a cemetery.
This isn’t about who scared me, it’s about how we unwittingly scared virtually all the kids in the neighborhood where we lived in Georgia. We lived next to a very old family graveyard. The graveyard and our house were set high up on a hill where there was a tight bend in the road. It was impossible to see into the graveyard from anywhere but our house and yard. This is important for what happened. Our neighbors had a mostly black kitty named “Spooky.” One Halloween night, Spooky got out of their house and ran into the graveyard. Our neighbors were really worried because sometimes bad things happen to black kitties on Halloween and our road could get very busy (plus the aforementioned curve). So they came and asked us if we’d help them find Spooky. So four grown adults are wandering around in the graveyard with flashlights calling, “Spoooky!” Right about then, a whole group of children came down the road across from the cemetery. They’d been hootin’ and chatterin’ as kid are wont to do – especially on Halloween. Well, danged if all the sudden they don’t see the lights in the cemetery and then hear us calling the kitty. Never heard so many screams or seen kids scatter so quick. Poor kids! I started to run down the hill with my flashlight to tell them it was okay, but that scared them even worse! Guess word got out, because we never had another trick-or-treater. Oh, by the way, we did find the kitty and he went home right as rain.
I know what you mean. That and one other thing bothers my mom in particular. There’s an old hospital in Weston, WV that at one point was a lunatic asylum. It’s very old with gothic architecture. They do ghost tours and all that. Actually, it bothers her because she remembers people who went there. Men would get rid of their wives that way even when a woman was perfectly healthy. Back in the day it only took a signature from a man to put you in there and we know historically treatment for people with any sort of mental or emotional problem was experimental and often brutal. She went there once to see an older aunt and it was such a scary and sad place. I personally wouldn’t want anyone messing around at my family cemetery, either, and if they do I will reach out of my grave and pull them down in. 🙂
Oh, Tipper ! You know bloody bones too! I love it!
The only lasting memory I have of some scary that happened to me was a apparition that passed in front of me at our old house on Wiggins Creek. I was standing in front of the kitchen window. It was a bright sunny day outside. As I stood there something white slowly passed in front of that window. It didn’t have the shape of a “ghost” nor a person at all. It was like a pure white cloud that just drifted by. I wasn’t scared when I saw it and wanted to know what it was. I ran out the door and around the house but saw nothing that I could have mistaken for a cloud of white. Only upon seeing nothing did I start to feel apprehensive. That was about 60 years ago and just the thought of that day still gives me the willies.
Enjoyed your reading of a story by Mr. Fletcher. I think I have always been afraid of the dark and I’m not sure why except I remember one time when my Parents took us back to see our Grandparents in MS. At that time, they were still living out at the old place, which was their farm where they had raised their children. I must have been about four or five years old and I remember my Grandmother holding a big quilt in front of the fireplace, getting it nice and warm and then she wrapped me up in it. She stepped out on the porch, where during the day you could look across a huge pasture to the forest, but now it was pitch black. She said it’s time for you to go to bed and you need to be quiet because Old Blood Bones and the Scratcher Devil will get you if you don’t go to sleep. She put me to bed and I never made a sound just went right to sleep. Many years later when I was grown up I told this story to my Daddy as it was his Mother. He got a smile on his face and said he couldn’t believe she told me that. Well, then I knew my Grandmother had used those two scary figures before raising their five boys. I think my Grandmother grew up hearing about those scary figures being passed down from her Parents. My dear Grandmother was loving, kind and tough and I sure would love to set down with her now and ask her some questions. I enjoyed hearing Granny’s stories too. She is such a precious lady!
Hey Dee! You’re the only person I know that’s ever mentioned old bloody bones. I used to get all the kids that visited us in the summer and at dusky dark I’d tell them bloody bones stories. I have since had nightmares about bloody bones as an adult. Actually the same exact dream twice. That brings back an old memory.
My Uncle Dick was the one who loved to scare me and my cousins when we were kids. He came up with two characters, “Bloody Pigtails,” and “The Rawhead,” and he came up with background stories for each. Bloody Pigtails lived in my grandparents’ pantry, but she only came out at night, crying out, “Bloooody Pigtails!” in a mournful wail. Then there was the Rawhead, who lived up in my grandparents’ attic. He also only came out at night, and he was just a head, but he would bounce around and would, if he got you…well, we don’t even want to talk about that! Uncle Dick would wait until we were all in bed and then we’d hear “BUMP” (he would hit the attic door with a broom handle) and he’d say, “It’s the Rawhead!” You would think we would all have been traumatized, but we LOVED it! I have wonderful memories of the fun we had with Uncle Dick.
As a child, I loved to go upstairs at my grandparents’ house to play. I was about 5 or 6 and started up the stairs. I heard the sewing machine and looked through the bannister and saw my grandmother sitting at the sewing machine. I started on up and she turned to look at me. She had a horrid rubber witches mask on and it terrified me!! Scared to death of the old witch at the sewing machine, I turned and ran back downstairs, crying to the top of my lungs!!! At Christmas, I got an apron from her of my very own that she made for me!!! I was thrilled!! I still have it and treasure it. Turns out, she didn’t want me to see it and ruin the surprise!!! That mask was creepy!!! I’ll never forget!!
I grew up close to a cemetery and have no fear of cemeteries. I walked through it at least 2 times a day to school. We had a path through it that zigzagged without stepping on any graves.
I’ve been trying to think of a funny spooky story and haven’t came up with one yet.
Mom’s family were bad to use the booger man or ole raw head and bloody bones will get you but dad never used any of that on us children. Mom also would tell us when we were dirty that the soap man would get us or when our clothes were raggedy that the rag man would get us.
Daddy would scare us when we didn’t obey his orders to get to bed. We could have easily identified the boogerman if we had looked at the grin on his face. A simple knock on the wall would send us running to the security of the bed we shared with our sisters. Sleeping with my head under the covers was my way of not having to see or hear things in the pitch dark room.
When I was a small boy in Charlotte back in the early 50’s, we would often spend the night at my aunt’s house. We had to sleep on pallets in her dining room. My uncle had been stationed in Key West during the war, and one of the souvenirs they brought back was a coconut carved and painted to look like a pirate, eyepatch and knife in his mouth and all. It hung high on the wall in that dining room. That young, I knew nothing of pirates or coconuts. My uncle told us that the head was the Boogie Man, and I was terrified trying to fall asleep. I think that’s when I had my first nightmares. My older brother was just as scared. Years later when I was in Key West, there was that same carved coconut, and my reaction was visceral. Some things you just don’t forget.
You are the sweetest lady ever besides your dear and sweet mother!!! Please just hug and kiss her for her fans!!! The HAND on the window is very scary indeed!!! I’ve seen way too many woods cameras placed to watch wildlife pick up on some hideous and ugly scary creatures!!! These are NOT tricks or illusions and, yes, these haunts are out there from hell wondering about!!! The CHUPA CABRA is real!!! Also we have a puma on my friend’s hill and it’s been seen and heard stalking walkers below the mountain. An old timer said he won’t walk that way at night again. I HATE those wicked scary movies. My life is scary enough these days. When I was a kid, we would play in the attic mainly cause there was interesting stuff up there and we could play dress up. My grandpa would put a white sheet over his head and say he was a ghost called JARGO. We knew it was him but was it we thought? We would scream and run down the stairs and he probably laughed himself silly never letting on….
Good video, brought back lots of memories of spooky stories I heard going up. My niece and nephew (now in their late 30s) still talk about my “bloody bones” storytelling every Halloween when they were little ( they asked until their early teens to hear it at bedtime)
My mother grew up in the hills of Kentucky, pre-WWII. As one of twelve kids, she had to take her turn bathing in front of the stove before going to bed. The girls went first, and her brothers sometimes skipped the ritual. She mentioned their “rusty heels.” The beds were on the second floor of the small house. The staircase had a landing at the midpoint where it made a sharp turn to continue up. Ma said there was a hole in the wall at that landing, and as a child, she imagined all kinds of things that could be in there. Some nights, the boys made it upstairs before their sisters. From the top, they shouted to the girls, “watch out for Ol’ Raw Head and Bloody Bones- he’s gonna git ya!” Ma said she spent not a few nights sitting at the bottom of the stairs to muster up enough courage to run up past the hole, afraid that Ol’ Raw Head and Bloody Bones would get her.
My father grew up in NC and was a good storyteller, too. “Haints” were the subject of some of his tales.