We all love scary stories, right?

It might be a little disingenuous to generalize an entire group of readers, but if you frequent the site often, it’s safe to assume that scary stories at least interest you. By ‘scary stories’, I don’t just boil it down to creepy books or shorts that you’ve read, for it can include media such as scary movies, horror games, or even horror-inspired music. Different mediums, yet they all serve the same purpose of telling a story to the consumer in the most emotionally effective way possible.

Sometimes though, the best scary stories are the ones you just tell your friends and family on any other night. No loopholes or anything; just a simple act of verbal storytelling to unnerve the listener(s). It all seems so much more real when you’re hearing these stories from a close figure in your life. There’s a level of trust that adds to the supposed reality of the stories and the best horror media is able to replicate that feeling with simplicity and ease.

This is one of the most appealing aspects of the classic children’s horror novels: the “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” series from Scholastic. The books, which were common during school book fairs for millennials, presented themselves as a collection of short horror stories, often incredibly short in length yet tightly packed with visceral horror imagery quite uncommon for children’s books at the time.

Oftentimes, the stories themselves were only mildly creepy, but thanks to the illustrations from Stephen Gammell, readers were rewarded with overwhelmingly disturbing imagery to go along with the stories and enhance their scare factor. Almost all of the stories in this trilogy of books have this going for them, but there’s a handful of stories that manage to pack a hard punch in both illustration and writing.

Some of these stories have come to live on as part of the series legacy, acting as the icon and indicator for the books in the years to come. Other are much less-known, but feature genuinely terrifying stories with horrific and sometimes downright depressing implications and resolutions. These stories were told in a simplistic manner, but the content itself was surprisingly mature and even complex in its execution. They’re the kinds of stories that made their mark as some of the most frightening tales in the entire trilogy full of scary stories.

Before we move on to the list, let me just state that this list is based on my own personal experience with the books. As I’m sure you’ve heard, different things scare different people, so what scared me may not necessarily do it for you. I will make my own arguments for why I think this list is justified, but this is not to imply that you’re wrong for finding something else scarier (or not even liking the books). It’s my list and I hope there’s enough variety here to satisfy fans of all three books. Now enough wasting time!

15: The Haunted House

The story with possibly the most infamous image to come out of the trilogy and it’s last on this list?

Let me explain myself. The Haunted House contains easily one of the most frightening pictures out of all the books and it’s an image I still haven’t removed from my head. Who can blame me though? The close-up of a ghostly woman’s rotting void of a face is something you’d expect to see from a David Lynch film or the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. But in a children’s book, it’s both terrifying and jarring to see such brutal imagery.

Here’s the thing though: the story from the first book itself is not as frightening as the image, unfortunately. It’s most definitely unsettling, as the story focuses on a man staying in a supposedly haunted house by himself, only to encounter said ghost and discover why her spirit haunts the house. But the page-turn jump scare doesn’t measure up in terms of pure scare for the latter half of the story, which turns into more of a supernatural mystery drama.

I don’t mind the switch-up, but it’s the prime reason why this story is as low as it is here. That being said, the image alone grants the Haunted House a spot simply for its sheer horror. It’s one of the stories I would purposefully skip just to avoid seeing her melting face again. Any story that can make me do that is sure to get highlighted, even if the rest of the story pales in comparison to the initial terror.

14: High Beams

Another infamous story, though this one has continued to enjoy a life in drivers’ deepest fears. It’s undeniably a classic in both the “Scary Stories” books and as a real-life cautionary tale for unaware drivers. If you have a license and a vehicle to drive, then chances are this story might’ve lurked in the back of your mind as you drove through a lonely road in the middle of the night. Hell, I just thought about it last week.

The story, as you’ve probably remembered or guessed by now, is about a woman driving at the late of night minding her own business when a car pulls up behind her and begins flashing its lights towards her. It continues to do this for the next hour or so until the woman arrives home, with the car still closely following. She begs her father to call the police, but when they arrive, the driver drops a bombshell.

There’s a man with a knife in the backseat, ready to pounce at any moment.

Describing this story, I feel like we took a time machine to the 1990s. It’s so incredibly old-school in its approach and simplicity. A mysterious car following the main character while flashing their lights has that element of realism that grounds the story to reality. It’s easy to imagine some weirdo flashing their lights at you in the middle of the night for no reason, so the resolution here becomes even more terrifying as a result.

It’s not the most visceral, but it is among the likeliest of scenarios in all the stories in the series, making it among the most timeless as well.

13: Sounds

Another example of brilliantly simple storytelling, Sounds from Book 2 benefits from its short, less-than-two-page stinger of a short story. There are no named characters to attach to, as the situation of staying in a creepy abandoned house is the main draw for readers to project themselves in. Similar to the Haunted House, there’s something sinister brewing in this house, though the execution of this story’s final punch flows more smoothly in comparison.

The version in the book follows a few fishermen caught in a storm who decide to take up shelter inside the abandoned home. A good idea in thought, but their safety is cut short when they start hearing strange noises coming from inside the house. They may not be alone, but what else could be in the house with them? Who’s making all of those running noises? What’s with all the screaming? Most of all, why the hell is there blood dripping from the ceiling? Whatever it is, the fishermen are not safe from this unknown threat.

Sounds is exactly what the title suggests: a story relying on strange sounds to build up the tension inside the dark house. The setting is already perfect with a strong storm outside and a dark interior to hide the horrors of the night from our unsuspecting characters. Plus, the idea of hearing what is possibly a murder happening right above you is honestly much scarier than encountering a withered, but ultimately longing ghost. There’s no clean resolution here and the fact that this is one of many tales inspired by real-life stories spread throughout the 19th and 20th centuries makes it feel all the more real.

12: Alligators

This is a tale that I’m surprised to see isn’t as popular as some of the most notorious stories from the trilogy. Easily one of the vaguest stories in the book, Alligators takes a radically different approach to the feared animals than Alexandre Aja’s Crawl. Instead of a typical “humans vs. alligators” fable, Alvin Schwartz spins this story into a creepy, campfire tale that makes perfect use of mass town skepticism and old-school urban legends.

Once again, no names are given to any of the characters, yet this story feels like something you hear from your grandfather with his years of wisdom to convince you of its truth. Alligators tells the story of how a local woman ended up going “crazy” after the disappearance of her husband and two sons. She mentions that her husband and sons loved going to the river to swim, sometimes staying the whole night and eventually never coming back. But she suspects that they turned into alligators and her suspicions are strengthened after an alleged attack near the river where she claims that a giant alligator accompanied by two smaller ones tried to drag her into the river to eat a raw fish.

Beyond the obvious corny concept of a human turning into an alligator, the idea of your entire family abandoning you to spend time elsewhere and eventually vanish is just plain uncomfortable. What’s worse is nobody believing what you think you saw because of the improbability of alligators turning up. The natural dismissal of the idea is highlighted by the story’s main phrase, “Everybody knows.” A whole town is passive on alligators because there just aren’t any nearby. Everyone knows that that kind of thing simply doesn’t happen. It’s as if the situation never existed and the poor woman’s fears are never put to rest, likely to haunt her for the rest of her days.

Fun, right?

11: The Thing

No, there’s not a John Carpenter to be sighted here and it’s not a tale of an alien lifeform terrorizing the human population. I think. Truth be told, The Thing always stood out to me as a strange story in Book 1 simply due to its ending and implications. You’ll see what I mean when I summarize the story, but The Thing is a classic case of facing your mortality with a large glob of uncanny valley thrown in there to make the experience feel so much wrong.

The Thing switches the formula up by having the characters named, the two main ones being named Ted and Sam. As Schwartz describes, they are very close friends and one night, they’re sitting on a bench talking their lives away. In comes a strange “thing” strolling out into the road, its figure kept a secret by the darkness of the night. They peer closer to take a good look at the figure, only to see that it looks like a rotting corpse. Needless to say, they make a run for it and though it follows them, the thing eventually goes its own way.

The story is not finished there, but I’ll leave the final parts of the story for any of you to read and catch up on. I don’t need to spoil what happens to justify its place on the list. Plain and simple, it’s horrifying to see a figure like this following you with unknown intent, especially in a public area like a road with a bench nearby. It makes one wonder exactly what is out there lurking in the night and what connection it might have to us. This concept is hammered in our face further by the final twist, which suggests that the connection between our own identities and the creepy unknowns of the night might be stronger than we wish it to be. The story leaves the reader thinking about what may be out there looking for them and that’s more terrifying than any “boo” story to me.

10: Oh, Susannah!

This story definitely kept me awake for longer than it should’ve during my time living in a college dorm room. Much of the year was spent in the library doing homework (watching YouTube), so I would normally come back to the dorm room a bit late to my roommate either dead asleep or doing his own thing. Now by this point, the memories of “Scary Stories” had mostly faded from my mind, but for some peculiar reason, the tune of “Oh, Susannah!” kept creeping in the back of my mind in this scenario.

Gammell went extra hard on the illustration for this story, depicting a strange sight where a man in a rocking chair seems to be floating in the air flying a bloody kite(?) of sorts, all while an unholy figure floats above him with unknown intentions. Does it have anything to do with the story? Who knows, as the story itself focuses on a college student who comes home from a late night at the library to the sound of her roommate humming the tune of “Oh Susannah!” However, she discovers something grisly as she turns on the light: the sight of her roommate’s decapitated corpse.

The correlation between the image and the story is unclear, but together it made for an unsettling story where there is no clear ending resolution. The story ends with the living student swearing that she’s in a nightmare and that when she wakes up, everything will be alright. We don’t see WHO killed her roommate or if the perpetrator is still in the room (it’s heavily implied with the humming) and the story just ends there. To be left with such a gruesome ending all while being paired with one of the most abstract images in the entire series makes for a genuine horror story for anybody living with a roommate, myself included.

9: The Bed by the Window

This one hits me a little bit different than the ones I’ve discussed so far. The stories mentioned have all had an element of either supernatural or violent horror to rely on for their scares. The Bed by the Window, from book 2, opts to go for a different and far more depressing route. There is no supernatural presence in this story (at least there doesn’t appear to be), nor is there anything truly gruesome happening in terms of shock and gore. But the short tale of karma hitting back in the worst possible way justifies its spot here with a sad resolution to an easily avoidable situation.

The story is centered on George and Richard, two friends at a nursing home who are bed neighbors at night. George has the bed by the window and constantly chats with Richard about the beautiful and bustling nightlife outside his window. He describes scenes of happiness and a busy social life and this fills Richard with jealousy, so much so that he opts to knock the pills for George’s bad heart to the floor when he has a heart attack. When George dies, Richard finally gets the bed, only to see that the sight from his window is of a plain brick wall.

The reason for the brick wall ending is never explained (a common theme if you haven’t noticed), but we are nonetheless left with an ending is which an old man’s dreams are shattered by hard reality. We never know if George was lying the whole time, but Richard still opted to kill his own friend instead of waiting it out and letting George die in peace. His selfishness cost him both his friend and his chance to live out the remainder of his days projecting himself into the openness of the outside world. It’s terrifying to think that the guilt from his heinous crime will follow him until the day he dies and while some might say it’s justified, the lonely nature of the story’s ending still forces us to consider Richard’s point of view and the fact that he will never get to experience the pleasures that George happily rambled on about.

Feel trips can be pretty scary too.

8: The Dream

After 7 entries, we finally get to a story from the third volume of the “Scary Stories” trilogy and I’m going to just say right here that this volume is my personal favorite of the whole bunch. To me, it not only contains the most frightening illustrations from Stephen Gammell, but Schwartz’s collection of short stories are among the most grisly, disturbing, and just plain terrifying of the trilogy. In fact, my number 1 spot is a story from this book (though it’s likely not the story that you might think it is). Nonetheless, this volume enters the list with a bang in the notorious short tale, The Dream.

The story is pretty simple at its core – a painter named Lucy who travels from town-to-town is on her routine to travelling to another town for work. However, she has a dream the night before about a pale woman with black eyes telling her that this is an evil place she must flee from. This inspires the woman to travel somewhere else out of fear, only to see that her detour destination looks awfully similar to the place in her dream. It’s so similar that even the same pale woman is there to give Lucy a friendly visit.

The story may not be overly long or detailed in the cases of other stories in the books, but the feeling of remembering something from a dream you’ve had and seeing it in the real world is a jarring feeling. It’s as if the dream is a premonition of things to come and this feeling is something I’ve had happen to me multiple times (pale woman excluded, thank goodness) and apparently, it’s a common phenomenon, making this story feel so much more real despite its supernatural undertones.

That and the image of the pale woman staring directly at the reader is prime nightmare fuel and is enough justification to put this story on the list, a la The Haunted House.

7: The Red Spot

Keeping on with the third book, we have a story specifically designed for all of the arachnophobes out there. The Red Spot is another example of simple storytelling – just a woman who is curious about that weird red bump on her face. Simple, but effective and guaranteed to enter the nightmares of anybody who has even the most minor fear of spiders and other creepy crawlies. It’s the kind of horror that’s both practical and of the body type, making for a story that is both somewhat realistic and nauseating at its mere thought.

A red boil is already something gross to imagine, as the possibility of a large pimple or cyst is likely the first thought one might have in this situation. In the case of the story’s main character, Ruth, the initial conclusion is that the spot is a simple spider bite that will go away with time. But time only causes the spot to grow larger over the next few days, coming to a head when Ruth bathes and the hot water causes the boil to burst, letting loose tons of baby spiders from the fresh hole on her cheek.

No pus to be found as the spiders make for an even more horrific replacement. The mere sight of a spider is enough for some arachnophobes to flee in terror, but to have them burrow under your skin and populate to the point of bursting from your cheek? Forget about it! Gammell’s illustration of the woman’s terrified face looking on in horror at the spiders crawling all over her face further adds to the body horror that Schwartz masterfully weaves into a simple story about a red bump on a woman’s cheek. It’s only half a page long, but it more than leaves an impact long after you turn to the next story.

6: The Bride

Getting married is touted as being one of the most important days in any couple’s lives, along with the first baby, the honeymoon, and the long-awaited day when the two finally share a Netflix account. Of course, marriage also comes with its fair share of fears: Will this relationship last? Will kids really be the best thing for the marriage? What if he/she/they also want to leech off of your Shudder and Hulu accounts as well? Many fears to be had, but the idea of the bride going missing on the night of the reception is a different kind of fear, one that’s realized in Book 2’s The Bride.

The story is as follows: a happy couple finally tie the knot and later that night, attend the reception and host some games for everyone to play. Hide and Seek was the main event and the bride, in a fateful attempt to be crafty, decided to hide in her grandfather’s trunk in the attic. But the lid soon slams shut on her head, knocking her unconscious and leaving her locked inside as everyone tries to no avail to find her. It isn’t until years later when a maid in the house finds her corpse, rotted down to a skeleton and frozen in a scream.

Isolation can bring out a person’s worst fears and for the bride, the fact that she was in the house the whole time and yet nobody could find her in spite of her cries of help is both terrifying and heartbreaking. This wasn’t a case of cold feet, yet the whole town eventually treated it as such, not knowing that the answer was in the attic, gradually losing hope of anybody ever finding her. This is a story especially for the claustrophobic people, I’ll tell you that much.

5: The Wendigo

By now, stories of the Wendigo have become quite mainstream, thanks in large part to the popularity of Creepypastas and the acclaimed survival-horror game, Until Dawn. The lore of the Wendigos seems pretty cut-and-dry, as the stories generally revolve around this strange humanoid creature that preys on human flesh to survive. Pretty gory and disturbing on its own, but back in the 1980s when the first “Scary Stories” installment came out, the Wendigo had a bit of a different story to them. The Wendigo is a perfect indication of the legend’s evolution over the years.

In the book, The Wendigo exists as an urban legend told among Native American tribes, describing a creature that takes a hold of you and drags you until your feet are burned to ash, followed by lifting you into the sky and dropping you. It sounds rather silly, but it is a fate bestowed upon an unfortunate Native American man named DeFago, who gets taken while accompanying an American hunter through the rough and snowy area of rural Canada. He goes missing afterwards, until a year later when that same hunter meets a peculiar man wrapped in a blanket.

This one gets a pass here for its use of the classic folk tale of the Wendigo, which was a very prominent story back then (and still is thanks to the internet). Most of the stories on this list were popularized by the book series, but the Wendigo have existed as their own entities for many years. The story can get a bit cheesy with DeFago crying out “Oh, my fiery feet, my burning feet of fire…”, but the story’s ending leaves both a shocking image to visualize in your head and a sad finish to the story of a poor Native American who just needed money.

4: The Dead Hand

One of the lengthiest stories in the third book, The Dead Hand is a story that still carries an air of mystery to it. To this day, I don’t exactly know what the creature in the story is supposed to be. The story’s characters describe it only as one of many unsightly creatures that roam the swamp near a village at night. There’s a glimpse of one at the end, but it’s so shrouded by mystery and panic that it’s still difficult to figure out what it is. But it’s this mysterious element that gives The Dead Hand an advantage in the scare department.

The village in the story is populated by folks too afraid to go outside at night, all except for Tom Pattison, a wisecracking man who reveled in scaring his fellow neighbors who were still afraid of the creatures. So afraid he was that he decided to take on a bet where he’d stay in the swamp for a night to prove that there was nothing there. Except when he actually goes through with it, he’s confronted by an unseen force that drags him into the heart of the swamp. The only thing we as readers are able to visualize is a moldy-looking hand, a “dead hand”, grabbing Tom. Tom is eventually found alive, except he’s gone insane while missing his hand, unable to even speak from the horror that he experienced.

Acting as a bit of a warning for young people who want to act out, The Dead Hand is a classic cautionary tale of what happens when people disobey the rules set out for the whole community. Tom is a typical wiseass who gets what’s coming to him towards the end, but the feeling that the young man, who really just found the whole thing ridiculous out of understandable skepticism, spent the entire night getting tortured by God-knows-what to the point of insanity is just plain cruel. He had some fun with people and this resulted in his hand getting ripped clean off. Even though it’s a cautionary tale, the implications of the ending make it so much harder to stomach, which ironically benefits the story at the end.

And yes, Gammell’s work is a little extra terrifying here.

3: Harold

You knew this was coming at some point on this list. The mascot for the Scary Stories film adaptation is the mascot for a great reason: Harold is fucking nightmare fuel. Even with his original appearance in the third book, Harold’s look is just menacing and grim. Gammell amps the horror of Harold with his demonic scowl, unkempt body and hair, and the bloody stumps on where his feet should be. He just LOOKS like something you want to avoid and that’s something the characters of this story should’ve done.

Harold follows two farmhands named Thomas and Alfred who are in the midst of a two-month stay at a tiny hut in the mountains, where they tend to their cows when it gets too hot back at home. Out of boredom from their routine, they create a scarecrow in the mold of a farmer they despise called Harold. The scarecrow is often mistreated by the farmhands to kill the boredom and this results in Harold gradually growing and eventually being able to move around. The farmers decide to leave the mountains early, but the story doesn’t end there; for those who haven’t read it, I will leave it at that because it contains what is arguably the most grisly ending of any story in the book trilogy.

Reading this story felt dirty because of how the story concluded, which greatly confused me at the time. I was used to the stories having some explicit content, but Harold drives the explicit nature into another level that I didn’t think was possible for children’s literature. The ending was so messed up that I am a bit scared as to how the filmmakers will handle Harold’s story in a PG-13 environment. The story was integral in pushing the boundaries for children’s literature and the final image is Schwartz at his most straightforward and morbid. There’s no room for a vague explanation as we are explicitly shown what happens. Part of me wishes I didn’t know, but the story definitely wouldn’t have had as big an impact on me without it.

2: The Drum

Making its appearance in the second book, The Drum operates on a similar level to The Dead Hand – a cautionary tale of what happens when one disobeys. Except while the latter contained a supernatural element that might dampen the experience for non-believers, The Drum plays that fear with both a straight face and serious attention to reality. The things that happen in this story aren’t too morbid and they don’t reach the bloody heights of Harold or The Dead Hand, but the implications bring a level of domestic horror that might inspire feelings of sadness and anger more than fear.

The Drum tells the tale of two girls living with their mother and baby brother. They love them with all their hearts, but that’s put to the test when a mysterious drum catches their eye. The owner of said drum says that they can have it if they misbehave at home, so the girls oblige by being rude to their family and being messy. But each day they come back, they are told to act even worse, further straining their relationship with their mother, who promises that something very bad could happen to them if they continue to act up.

With this following in the same formula as the other Scary Stories, you know that something terrible happens at the end; but while the final shot is certainly creepy and a callback to an ominous line earlier in the story, the real horror is the consequences the girls have to pay simply for letting childish desires get the best of them. Obviously, their behavior is something one should not tolerate, but the end results are simply sad for the girls and once again speaks to the mindset of a social climate that favored obedience over rational thinking and parenting. The Drum is a bit relic in that regard, but the story’s treatment of the children is horrific, especially with the final lines indicating what is to come for the girls just for being…well…children.

1: Maybe You Will Remember…

T-H-U-P-P-P-P-P-P! was almost the #1 spot here for shits and giggles, but I guess an honorable mention will do.

In all seriousness, Maybe You Will Remember is a story that seems to have flown under the radar for many readers of the “Scary Stories” books and on one hand, I don’t really blame that attitude. The series is filled with so many frightening and chuckle-worthy stories that it’s inevitable that a couple of hidden gems would go unseen by readers. It’s strange since the story is based on a classic urban legend from the 19th century, which was then made into a film called So Long at the Fair that was based on this concept. But for me, the “Scary Stories” version is what creeped me out the most.

So if you don’t know the story, it goes something like this. Rosemary is on vacation with her mother and they decide to stop by a hotel in Paris for a few days since Rosemary’s mother was feeling a little sick. They had separate rooms and Rosemary hires a doctor to look after her. The doctor mentions that the only medicine available to help her is at his home on the other side of the city. She takes a taxi, but soon realizes that the taxi is purposefully driving in the wrong direction and taking long routes. By the time she gets back, nobody at the hotel remembers her or her mother, forcing Rosemary to debate on whether she is sane or not.

Now is a good time to listen to the audio of the full story linked above before I discuss the rest of the story. Don’t worry, it’s only about 7 minutes long.

The most frightening aspect of this story isn’t the strange behavior of the hotel staff or Rosemary’s grip on her sanity – it’s the truth of what happened to her mother. As it turns out, the doctor quickly diagnosed her with a form of the Black Plague, which meant that she was going to die very soon. In order to avoid panic in Paris, he opted for Rosemary to be driven all over the city while the hotel staff disposed of her mother’s body and painted the room a different color. The staff were ordered to not “remember” Rosemary or her mother, resulting in a classic case of gaslighting as Rosemary’s mother quite literally “disappeared” from existence.

Bloodthirsty scarecrows, swamp creatures, bloody hands, ghosts, and even Death itself have nothing on this story of mental manipulation. To have your entire world thrown for a loop after a long taxi drive must be one of the most maddening experiences in the world. Rosemary, fully aware of her memories, is led to believe that her mother, who she had just seen alive earlier in the day, was never there in the first place and the fact that this resulted from a fear of panic is all the more sickening.

It’s the kind of story that’s heartbreaking, disorientating, terrifying, and unbelievable at the same time. People disappear all the time and often it feels as though maybe they’re somewhere out there safe and sound. But not knowing where any of these missing people are is a constant source of stress for their loved ones and even more for Rosemary, who knows that her mother was in the hotel when she left. But everyone around her simply refutes her claim knowing that her mother will never come back to her.

This is something I equate to losing a parent at the mall, only for everyone at the mall to say that they don’t even know who you or they are. So instead of being safe with your mom/dad, you’re left to wander around in a state of panic and desperation. Rosemary’s mental manipulation at the hands of the hotel staff is indicative of just how little you may actually know about the things around you. What else is hiding in plain sight? Who is being honest with you and what are people keeping from you?

Maybe You Will Remember is a story that left me paranoid, angered, and scared out of my mind all at once. I can handle monsters and ghosts and serial killers, but when the culprits here are an untimely disease and a seemingly innocent doctor, there’s just a feeling of helplessness that drives the story to a frightening new high. It’s by far the most twisty story in the “Scary Stories” series and while it’s not as famous as some of the other stories, it’s easily the most upsetting and this is something I thank Alvin Schwartz for.

At its heart, “Scary Stories” was all about upsetting the readers and then making them cringe, laugh, and jump. These stories ran the gauntlet in terms of variety and tone, which Schwartz balances perfectly with the help of Stephen Gammell’s amazing illustrations. No matter how much some of the stories have aged, they all have a special place in my heart and I hope they have one in yours too.

Each of the stories have their own unique charm and these were the stories that got this author, but what were some of yours? What were the stories that scared you the most?