Scary Stories from the Schoolyard

Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark and its follow-ups were easily the most popular books in any elementary school library. There’s some special thrill kids get out of being terrified by creepy images and stories, almost as if it’s a rite of passage on the way to adulthood. While the stories and illustrations from those books were amazing, some of the urban legends at my elementary school were even better. The imagination of a child can be truly twisted, so here’s a few tales you can tell on Halloween night by the light of a Jack O’ Lantern.

For years I lived with the fear of a house inhabited by ghastly ghosts just 2 driveways from my own. One day while being dropped off after a play-date with my friend Crystal, her older brother Keith excitedly pointed at my neighbor’s home and blurted out, “Hey Mom, is that the haunted house?” Confused, I asked what he was talking about. Quickly he recounted the twisted tale of terror supposedly ripped from the headlines of our local newspaper.

As the story goes a young married couple who lived in the home a few years prior had drowned themselves…in debt! After one particularly expensive vacation to the Bahamas, they returned home and realized they were financially ruined and seeing no way to get their lives back on track, they tragically chose to go out like Romeo and Juliet. Ever since then, no one could sell the house because it was haunted by the ghosts of these restless spirits.

Understandably for weeks after that, every time I passed the house I got a little shudder and found my legs moving that much faster. I didn’t know if these ghosts were friendly like Casper and personally, I didn’t want to find out! After a while though I began to go over the facts and they didn’t quite add up. See I had lived on that street all 7 years of my life and though I never really saw anyone go in or out of the house, I didn’t catch sight of any cobwebbed For Sale signs either. Plus, isn’t it more likely that one of the neighborhood kids would have told me this story already, not some newspaper reading 6^th grader from 5 miles down the road? 

The real nail in the coffin though, was that about 2 months after the incident was recounted to me a family did move into the house who had a daughter my age. Scared for her safety, but embarrassed to bring it up, I struggled with the decision to let her in on the history of her new home. One day while we were playing on her lawn I gathered up my courage, blurted out the story and asked if she had seen any ghosts. Rather than be scared by my report she simply affirmed, “that’s stupid”. So much for that haunted house! 

I grew up about 30 miles from the now defunct Movieland Wax Museum that used to be located down the street from Knott’s Berry Farm, home of the annual Halloween Haunt. As much excitement as funnel cake and Camp Snoopy had to offer, my love of Hollywood history always made me much more partial to the wax dummy likenesses of my favorite movie stars. So why do I bring this up in a scary stories article, you ask? Read on and find out.

In 4th grade, my classmate Erik came to school with a story of his trip to the Movieland Wax Museum’s Chamber of Horrors. Erik was always good for a synopsis of the latest R-Rated films like the Nightmare on Elm Street series or Child’s Play, so I was an attentive listener on the playground that morning. Our storyteller started with the list of classic movie monsters on display ranging from Frankenstein to Dracula and even Vincent Price from House of Wax dipping his victims into the melted goo that was its namesake, but these were all old-timey yawners as far as we were concerned.

Our schoolyard scare-meister then ramped up the excitement with his description of the Jason from Friday the 13th exhibit. Erik claimed that to fit with his Hockey goalie like appearance they had built a net/goal that Jason stood in front of with dry ice billowing around him. He also claimed that a mechanism had been built in to make Jason’s eye’s glow red and launch severed heads into the net with a hockey stick. Gruesome, sure, but hardly anything to have nightmares about. 

Obviously desperate to keep the attention of his captive audience, he went for the shocking ending to this tale of terror. After his Mom had left him alone in the darkness of the dungeon Jason had come alive and chased our playground pal through the maze of horror icons. He excitedly told us how Jason was slashing at him with the fury of 1,000 Marty McSorley’s!

Our brave narrator had only managed to escape by crossing the threshold of the chamber that the monsters within could not pass through, likely due to some magic spell that had imprisoned them there centuries before. As much as I wanted to call shenanigans on this story, a part of me worried that if I shouted something like, “That never happened”, that I would be Jason’s next victim after falling asleep that night. Plus, what if it was true? AWESOME!

I eventually visited the Movieland Wax Museum myself a year or two later and did not find any evidence of such horror-filled happenings. Though those terrible creatures may have feared the wrath of the souvenir Oscar from the gift shop I was wielding. And let's be real for a second, Elvira brings out many feelings in young boys, but fear ‘aint one of 'em! Now the next scary story as told by my classmate Brent had the frightening distinction of taking place near the schoolyard where the tale was told.

At the time, a new housing development was being built a few blocks away from our elementary school in what I always considered the “fancy” part of town (based solely on the fact that my family’s house was built in 1971, while these were being built 20 years later). Setting the scene on a rainy day during the previous week, Brent claimed that he and his friend, Jeff had ridden their bikes over to the construction site after school to check on the progress of the new neighborhood and were involved in a scene right out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre!

Apparently as they snooped around the skeletal structures of the homes that were covered in plastic sheeting, a naked lunatic emerged through the falling rain with a power saw and started screaming at them to “GET OUUUUUUUT!” The brave duo claimed to have defended themselves by throwing 2x4s and shovels at the maniac before mounting their bikes for a quick escape. This one actually shook me up quite a bit. I mean this could have happened to any of us, right? Plus, Brent had another person there to back up his story, how could it be a lie?

Truth be told, what actually makes the story so terrifying is the fact that their construction site serial killer was butt-naked. I mean, at least Freddy Krueger had the decency to hide his charred body under a sweater and some slacks, this sicko wanted to slice them up while his “tiny terror” was swinging in the wind! Even without the table saw in hand, the idea of this creep-o was scarier than Candyman and Pinhead combined. Forget Clive Barker or Stephen King, true horror comes from the overactive imaginations of 5^th graders.

So while you can’t believe everything you hear on the playground, there’s surely some stuff that will scare the candy corn out of ya until common sense kicks in. Now these kinds of urban legends are regional so I know you've got a couple up your sleeves. What kind of spooky stories did you hear in your neck of the woods?