Let me tell you a story...

I don't know what is scarier: the witch or those turkeys.

So, outside of my hobbies of writing this blog, cooking, writing horror, and gardening, I also do storytelling. In fact, I am now an official member of the Ann Arbor Storytellers Guild. With this sort of group, it’s a little different than telling tales by writing. You need to keep in mind things like pausing, making it sound natural, and other important details that just aren’t relevant to the written story. Often, we first hear horror stories as children listening to someone repeat an old fairy tale or campfire story that has been passed down through the ages and regions it has wandered into. So today we are going to explore these twice-told tales, in their various forms and applications. What we can learn from them and especially why you should take advantage of reading or hearing them in this modern age.

So there are roughly three types of modern folktale that have branches into our favorite genre. There is urban legends, the type of story you hear from a friend from a friend who heard it from their aunt that it really happened. Babysitters being attacked by people dressed as clown statues, lover’s lanes rendezvous that end in deadly or almost deadly circumstances, and those of poisoned candy given out on Halloween. The majority could happen in theory even if they haven’t. Normally these are tales passed around through chains of kids and can lead to social panics if not careful (look up the Satanic Ritual Abuse cases if you need an example of urban legends and rumors getting out of hand). They often take place in suburbia and focus on the fears of the group in the area. As these tales tend to be moral/allegorical in nature dead children, teens having sex, or the consequences of being irresponsible are themes that are often found.

I counted the legends in this movie once in 11th grade, I think I came to 14 or so.

Another type are campfire tales. The difference between urban legends and campfire tales is where and how they are told. Often it is one person telling the tale to a large group in a setting like a camping trip, where everyone is out in the woods or some other rural setting and listening to the one storyteller. The idea is usually to scare someone with a story before everyone goes to settle in for the night, often as a right of passage to the younger ones in the group. They are made up on the spot sometimes, other times they are old legends that are passed down with some details changed. Mostly they tend to be regional and warn you not to go to certain places or make you aware of certain creatures that may be roaming in the woods nearby. The idea of them, above all, is to scare over inform though. That’s the biggest difference between urban legends and campfire tales in my experience. Urban legends are a warning; campfire tales are good fun.

Lastly, there is your older tales, your legends, myths, and ghost stories. These often fall into telling a story of an older time, a time before cell phones and electricity. More often than not, this group tends to have a bit of truth to the tale, but not always for the reasons you’d expect. Their truth is not that the story is true, but that people have disappeared in the area under circumstances unknown, children have gotten lost following something, or that someone had a tragic end in the hotel nearby. The higher potential of truth among the legends and myths, even those that seem unbelievable, is what draws the listener in deeply to hear the tale spun.

So what can we learn from these stories? Why should we even read them at all? I find it comes down to a lot of factors. First, as writers, knowing as many legends as possibly opens up a lot of different forms of inspiration and background knowledge. A passing reference to a legend of the region you are writing about is always a good idea if you want to add to the credibility to a story. Also, hearing a campfire tale of a monster that comes from a certain region of the world could always give a lot of inspiration in terms of telling your own tale about said creature. I love hearing new tales for these sorts of reasons, and it’s partly why I joined the Storytellers guild. There is one thing I love just as much though, as this is doubly true with horror legends more than any other genre: you can learn a lot about a group from their urban legends and campfire tales. Korea, for example, has a lot of urban legends that relate to someone taking part in some crazy beauty fad and ending up destroying themselves. German horror stories, especially the older fairytale legends, deal with loss of children or in some cases, the fears of poverty and being forced to send your children away so that you can eat. Everywhere in the world also seems to have some story of a ghostly creature that is the lost soul of an abandoned child. Cries of babies in the wood or monsterous mothers who seek your children to replace her own are themes you find universally across the world. Allegories for tragedy is what a lot of those legends seem to be.

One last thing to explore, is the stories that turn out to be painfully true. They seem too unreal, that no one would poison children on Halloween but it has happened at least once. Known as “The Candyman” or “The Man who Killed Halloween”, Ronald Clark O’Bryan was a man who ran up too many debts. Desperation brewed a cruel plan within him, when he took his two kids and two of their friends trick or treating he took with him a handful of pixie sticks laced with potassium cyanide. When one house wasn’t responding to the cries of “Trick or Treat!” from the children, he told them and another parent who was watching the children to continue ahead. A while later, he produced the deadly candy and gave them to the four children and another child he knew from church. His son, Timothy, while deciding what to eat among his Halloween candy chose the ill fated treat and washed it down with kool-aid, claiming it “tasted bitter”. Shortly later he was vomiting and dead within the hour at the tender age of eight.

There was a panic in the neighborhood as everyone heard what happened. Eventually the culprit of the pixie sticks was revealed and all of them recovered (though not without a scare of being unable to find a stick until the child’s mother found it unopened in her still sleeping son’s hand). The finger started to be pointed at Ronald when he claimed he didn’t remember where he got the sticks from, odd for a man who only went down two streets. Things got worse as the man who owned the unresponsive house that night was revealed to have been an air traffic controller who was at work until 11pm Halloween night. The truth revealed itself quickly after that, for he put out a life insurance policies on his children totalling $60,000 over the year that his wife didn’t know about. Ronald had placed a call to the insurance agency asking how quickly he could get the money the morning after his son’s death. Further, he had been trying to buy cyanide shortly before Halloween night. His main reason for trying to poison other children was to cover his tracks, relying on the old urban legend about candy poisoners to allow him to commit a cruel crime, at least, that is what the police thought. He claimed until his dying day that he was innocent, and in fact his defense used that legend to help defend him. For the record, no stranger has killed a child with poisoned candy, only those who knew the children.

What are your favorite urban legends? Let me know in the comments and honestly, that one is among my favorite tales as that was always a concern as a kid. Though really, it was more of an excuse for my parents to eat some of our candy.