Scary Stories (To Tell in the Dark)

Surtur

Surtur

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Anyone here remember these books? I remember when I got my first one, I got it at one of these events my mom used to take us too. We were dirt poor, so most of the shit I owned growing up was second hand, and sometimes we would go to these places where they would give out clothes and books and shit to kids. I remember being told I could select some books from a bin of donated books, of those books I remember two, Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales and Scary Stories 3. Now, one might not think of this book as being memorable, but holy fuck is this book burned into my brain. What was contained within were retellings of many creepy tales, all of which put most creepypasta to shame and all of it was researched and sourced, you can find the sources in the back of the book. But you know what? Those stories, while good were not what made you remember these books, it was this fucking shit:

stories-to-tell.jpg

Holy fucking shit what the actual shit!?

This is the shit that haunted my fucking dreams. And I fucking loved it. These books are why I to this day love creepy stories and folklore. So, wanting to read them again I bought the set on eBay, and I will be posting my thoughts on them later. In the meantime, anyone else here ever been traumatized by these books?
 
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I actually bought that book Sunday and look forward to reading them.

My favorites so far are the girl who stood on a grave and Harold.
 
I remember finding these books buried in the library at my elementary school and reading them. I was a glutton for anything that could scare me because I needed thrills, but I remember feeling creeped out in the school hallways that one of those illustrations was going to come, joints twitching, skittering around the corner towards me.
 
Surtur said:
Anyone here remember these books? I remember when I got my first one, I got it at one of these events my mom used to take us too. We were dirt poor, so most of the shit I owned growing up was second hand, and sometimes we would go to these places where they would give out clothes and books and shit to kids. I remember being told I could select some books from a bin of donated books, of those books I remember two, Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales and Scary Stories 3. Now, one might not think of this book as being memorable, but holy fuck is this book burned into my brain. What was contained within were retellings of many creepy tales, all of which put most creepypasta to shame and all of it was researched and sourced, you can find the sources in the back of the book. But you know what? Those stories, while good were not what made you remember these books, it was this fucking shit:

stories-to-tell.jpg

Holy fucking shit what the actual shit!?

This is the shit that haunted my fucking dreams. And I fucking loved it. These books are why I to this day love creepy stories and folklore. So, wanting to read them again I bought the set on eBay, and I will be posting my thoughts on them later. In the meantime, anyone else here ever been traumatized by these books?
Click to expand...


The horror of the rest of your post takes away from my reply of "I TOTALLY REMEMBER STINKY CHEESE MAN".
 
Yeah, I didn't read those stories when I was a kid but saw people on YouTube making fun of the stories. That's what got me interested in the book.
 
Nice to hear I am not the only one who loved these books, and now that I am back I will post some stuff. Now last week I found a set of these books, brand new and everything and came with a Spooky, Scary Skeleton Book Light. Its pretty obvious it was a set that was meant to be a part of a Scholastic Book Order, you know those flimsy things we got in elementary school and would beg our parents to buy us books we would never read? I got it for 25 bucks, which seemed like such a great deal.

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Here is the set itself, and already you may notice that something is wrong. If you don't see it yet thats ok. Also, my phones face detection actually picked up that skull thing as a face.

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The back confirms this. Not sure how old this is though, the new editions withe the gimped art were released in 2011, so I imagine all of these sets floating around on eBay are leftovers.

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A side view, confirming these are in fact the Gammell versions. You may have noticed something wrong, as a pointed out earlier. We will get to that soon.
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Here are the covers themselves, the cover art itself is very surreal and very nice. The third one is my favorite as I have no fucking clue what that is supossed to be. The second book is a bit warped due to being packed with the light.Again, something is amiss...something not right with these books....
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The backs in case you are curious. The first books has some information on it, I am assuming for reading programs.
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The light, I have no opened it yet but my experiance with book lights as a child is that they are cheap and provide little light but provide an incentive for a child to beg their parents for overpriced books.

Now as I mentioned before, something was wrong with these books...what could it be....
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Yea, these editions are digest size. For scale, those are 6 inch replica ships, so this is about an 8 inch tall book, the originals were about 11 inches. This would not be so disappointing, but the paper quality is noticeably lower, so these books feel very light and flimsy. Still, they have the original art, so i think I will gift this set to my son.

Anyways, I will go over the actual content of the books tonight, but I am very disapointed in the quality of this set.
 
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Why hello there, all my childhood trauma!

But for serious: in the back of these books, the author has listed all the numbers for the folklore tropes used in the stories. Being very curious about these weird little descriptions and numbers as a child led me to discover the Thompson Motif-Index, which, in a roundabout way, end up putting me into my current field of study. So yeah, I have a lot of affection for these. :heart-full:
 
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I love these books and the artwork for them was my inspiration from when I was young to start drawing spooky things. They hold a special place in my heart. :oops:
"The Wolf Girl" is just lovely:
wu2zxz.jpg
 
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I remember these. I remember some of them were really like "What the fuck?"
 
Still have my copies from when I was a kid.
 
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Scared the ever loving shit out of me. Just looking for this image I learned I was not alone in having to cover this image up when reading.
 
This kid on my bus would tell me he'd read them before going to bed. I would think," wow... is he nuts?!"
 
I seem to remember one of the stories being about a scarecrow that came to life, skinned its owner, and then spread the skin out on the roof of the farmhouse to dry in the sun.

I'm still amazed that these were marketed to kids.
 
I remember seeing these books in my school library when I was younger but I was always to spooked out by their covers to actually read them.
 
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