Write a Spooky Story for Halloween

Are you sufficiently spookified? We suspect not.
Halloween is coming. Would a good spooky story help get you in the mood?

Why not write one? Here’s a contest for the best spooky story in 200 words or less.

Fabulous prizes await the spookiest writers. Three winners will receive a 4-pack of the Raymond Bial spooky story collection (the four books you see to your right: The Fresh Grave, The Ghost of Honeymoon Creek, Shadow Island, and Dripping Blood Cave) plus your choice of any two additional books from Crickhollow Books.

The spooky-story categories:

• Best traditional setting (graveyard, old house, etc.)
• Best non-traditional setting.
• Judge’s choice (maybe the oddest story? The most unforgettable story?)

It’s simple.

1. Write a short spooky story in 200 words or less.
2. Post the story as a comment to this post (i.e., below, in the “Leave a Reply” box).
3. Optional (does not affect your chances of winning, just your chance of hearing about more good books): Sign up as a fan of Crickhollow Books on Facebook.
4. Wait to find out if you win the Ray Bial collection and your 2 bonus books!

Deadline to submit your story: Sunday, October 30.
Winners announced: Monday, October 31.

Share the news with friends who love spooky stories . . . or good books. Here are some of the Crickhollow Books you could choose:

• A War of Her Own (great historical novel set on the WWII homefront in Texas)
• How To Write Your Best Story (oh, wouldn’t this have helped for this contest? Ironic that it could be a prize!)
• Plank Road Summer (wonderful middle-grade chapter book about the plank road days of the 1850s in the Midwest)
• A 1000-Mile Walk on the Beach (a woman’s trek around the entire perimeter of Lake Michigan)

Crickhollow Books is the sponsor of the contest (and of this SpookyWeb site).

Fine print: You retain the copyright to your story.

Can’t Get Enough Ghosts?

Perhaps you can relate to this opening line from a December 2010 review of Dripping Blood Cave & Other Ghostly Stories from Midwest Book Review:

It’s annoying when you can’t go a week without encountering more ghosts.

How true! Thankfully, Hank and Clifford, the teen ghost-magnets in Raymond Bial’s collection of fictional stories, don’t have to wrestle with that problem.

No, they have plenty of ghosts to wrestle . . . indeed, a constant cavalcade . . . mostly due to their own curiosity (and Clifford’s slightly inflated image of himself as a heroic ghost-buster).

Best of all, the stories of Hank and his bantam sidekick Cliffie offer a perfect solution to any lack of ghosts in your own life.

You can read about ‘em . . . and chuckle instead of trembling with fear!

The Midwest Book Review concludes:

Dripping Blood Cave & Other Ghostly Stories is a fun collection, and not one to be missed.

Have a deficiency of ghosts? Here’s the cure!

Graveyards, Books, and Halloween

What are you reading for Halloween?

Me? I’m relishing (re-relishing, if that’s a word) Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book.

It’s wonderful storytelling (& won the 2009 Newbery Medal for children’s literature), offering an enchanting view of life in a graveyard, filled with (mostly pleasant) spirits.

It’s about a very alive child, orphaned, raised by the kindly and spectral inhabitants of a cemetery. It is, per the New York Times, “by turns exciting and witty, sinister and tender.”

But it’s worth reading just for the perfect line with its reference to “it takes a village to raise a child . . . “:

“It’s going to take more than just a couple of good-hearted souls to raise this child. It will,” said Silas, “take a graveyard.”

Okay, now you’ve read it, but the rest of the book is pretty good, too!

Here’s a link to some free videos of Gaiman reading from The Graveyard Book at MouseCircus.com, taken from live readings in bookstores.

According to the Washington Post:

The English-born Gaiman got the idea for The Graveyard Book more than two decades ago when his son, Mike, needed a place to ride his tricycle. They ended up in a Sussex churchyard, where Gaiman watched the boy pedal happily among centuries-old gravestones and thought, “You know, he looks really at home here.”

And thus, an idea for a story is planted.

This is a story that needs to be read by all spooky-story lovers!

Ghost Stories and Caves – A Natural Union of Spooky Things

Here’s a link to a short piece by Raymond Bial, the author of Dripping Blood Cave and Other Ghostly Stories, explaining how the idea for the title story in that collection of linked fictional stories came from a real-life cave in southern Indiana, in Spring Hill State Park, not far from Bloomington.

Many caves around the country have given rise to ghostly tales . . . in local legends or invented by inspired storytellers!

As Bial says,

. . . I was making photographs for my book Frontier Home (Houghton Mifflin) at the restored village and gristmill at Spring Mill, and exploring the surrounding hills and hollows with my wife Linda and our daughters, Anna and Sarah.

We hiked through the woods, rowed out on the lake, and rode horses along the trails. One day, we also took a boat ride on a creek that flowed through a very spooky cave. According to local legend, Native Americans once hung deer haunches in this cool (literally) cave. It didn’t take much to turn this into a colorful image in my mind! I imagined blood dripping into the water and flowing out into the creek.

Click here for the rest of that piece by noted children’s author Raymond Bial.

The line between invented stories and local legends passed down over the years and embellished at every telling is a fine one, of course. When it comes to real-life caves, there are few that have not inspired a spooky tale or two.

And of all the limestone caves in the Midwest, Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave is the largest . . . and also has perhaps the greatest number of ghost stories.

According to the book Down in the Darkness by Troy Taylor, Mammoth Cave has a plethora of eerie stories, including some reported by park rangers and other reputable sources, of “unexplained sounds, strange lights, bizarre noises, disembodied footsteps and of course, apparitions and spirits.”

Here’s one of the odd Mammoth Cave accounts from Taylor’s book (and found on his Prairie Ghosts website):

One such ranger has served as a guide in the cave for a number of years. She told me that weird things often happen along the route leading from the historic entrance to the cave. One day, she had been leading a tour group into the cave and had stopped to point out a site along the passage. She paused to wait for everyone to catch up and noticed a man in the back who was lingering behind the rest. He was wearing a striped shirt, denim pants and suspenders, but that was all she remembered. After her discussion, the group moved further along the passage and she looked for the man again, but he was gone. There was no one else in the tour group who matched the description of this man, so she sent another guide back a little way to look for him. The man was never found.

Is it just the cool air found deep in such a cave that makes you shiver . . . ?

The Canterville Ghost – Traditional English Spook Meets Progressive American Family

The Canterville Ghost is a classic example of the humorous ghost story, far more funny than spooky. Written by Dublin-born Oscar Wilde (who also wrote the supernatural tale The Picture of Dorian Gray), and first published in 1887, it’s a delightful parody of the spooky story.

The story begins when American Minister to England, Hiram B. Otis, and his family move into Canterville Chase, a grand old mansion, despite warnings that the house is haunted. Mr. Otis doubts it, but figures he’ll buy the place, ghost and all, at a bargain price. The family includes Mr. and Mrs. Otis, their 15-year-old daughter Virginia, rambunctious twin boys, and older son Washington.

Indeed, after the family moves they see bloodstains reappear on the carpet after being washed, and they see strange apparitions. But the Otis family just doesn’t find these things all that spooky. When the resident ghost, a theatrical 300-year-old fellow named Simon, tries to scare the family in a diligently traditional manner, Mr. Otis just responds with practical solutions, while the young twins set out to make things miserable for the poor ghost, laying trip wires, assaulting him with pea shooters, setting up butter slides and traps.

Here, for instance, in comparison to Charles Dicken’s ghost Christopher Marley clanking down the hall to the bedroom with his ghastly clanking chains . . . the Canterville ghost tries to pull off the same, with inferior results.

At eleven o’clock the family retired, and by half-past all the lights were out. Some time after, Mr. Otis was awakened by a curious noise in the corridor, outside his room. It sounded like the clank of metal, and seemed to be coming nearer every moment. He got up at once, struck a match, and looked at the time. It was exactly one o’clock.

He was quite calm, and felt his pulse, which was not at all feverish. The strange noise still continued, and with it he heard distinctly the sound of footsteps. He put on his slippers, took a small oblong phial out of his dressing-case, and opened the door.

Right in front of him he saw, in the wan moonlight, an old man of terrible aspect. His eyes were as red burning coals; long grey hair fell over his shoulders in matted coils; his garments, which were of antique cut, were soiled and ragged, and from his wrists and ankles hung heavy manacles and rusty gyves.

‘My dear sir,’ said Mr. Otis,’I really must insist on your oiling those chains, and have brought you for that purpose a small bottle of the Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator. It is said to be completely efficacious upon one application, and there are several testimonials to that effect on the wrapper from some of our most eminent native divines.

‘I shall leave it here for you by the bedroom candles, and will be happy to supply you with more should you require it.’

With these words the United States Minister laid the bottle down on a marble table, and, closing his door, retired to rest.

For a moment the Canterville ghost stood quite motionless in natural indignation; then, dashing the bottle violently upon the polished floor, he fled down the corridor, uttering hollow groans, and emitting a ghastly green light.

It’s a fun-to-read spooky tale. There’s a lovely little edition available from Candlewick Press, and The Canterville Ghost can also be found online (e.g., an illustrated version at Project Gutenberg).

The Loup-Garou of Vincennes, Indiana

This Week’s Spooky Thing is . . . the Loup-Garou!

The loup-garou (name comes from Latin lupus, for wolf) was a version of the werewolf, brought to North America by early French voyageurs and settlers. The supernatural creature was an enchanted, afflicted person, turned into a hairy beast, roaming the woods at night in search of its prey. If the right thing was done (as in the tale below from Vincennes, Indiana), the loup-garou might be released from its spell.

And, like other scary creatures, the legend was mostly used to scare young children into obedience: “If you don’t behave, the loup-garou will get you.”

Here’s a legend collected in the 1920s by Anna C. O’Flynn, who taught school in the old French section of Vincennes. It comes from an unpublished  WPA manuscript circa 1937, The Creole (French) Pioneers at Old Post Vincennes. The loup-garou stories were told to O’Flynn by Pepe Boucher, with a bit of a French Creole dialect.

They appeared on the website Folklore, Legends, Tall Tales: An Interactive Casebook for Knox County, Indiana, created by Richard L. King, Reference Librarian, Shake Library, Vincennes University (Vincennes, Indiana). King transcribed and lightly edited the stories for the web posting.

Charlie Page’s Loup Garou Story
As told by Pepe Boucher

Page was a dare-devil kind of man who hunted in the woods and feared nothing. He carried a dirque, or a big long blade knife, that open and shut with some kind of spring on its back. All he did to open the blade was press his finger on the back and puff! it was open.

There be plenty of Indians in those days and they knew Page and his beeg knife. Still Page and the Indians be pretty good friends; they know he not be afraid of them or their medicine man. In fact he not think of Heaven nor Hell with fear.

One night he was going home out past Vinegar Hill, a great big black dog stood in the path and growled and gnashed his teeth at Page. The dog did not seem to know that Page never got out of any animal’s path so there it stood even when Page said “A bas chien,” [Down, dog!] then wagging his hand said “Au Revoir.”

Other dogs get out of the big man’s way when he wave his hand. Mais [But] this one come advancing with hideous howls and gleaming red eyes that be like coals of fire in the black of the night. Then Page he be mad at the dog and he said “Bete Noir Vole! Vole!” [Black beast, got lost!]

Mais the black beast did not fly away from him nor turn its eyes from his. With a great leap it came nearer to him by five feet. Then Page cursed and lifted his big foot to kick it in the jaw. With a stealthy pantherlike movement the great frothing beast sprang at his throat.

You bet this time he tried to kick and get his knife to finish the dog whose hot breath was singeing his hair – whose great paws were tearing his shoulders and whose fangs were near his neck. With one of his powerful arms he grab the neck of the dog until his tongue hang out. The shaggy hair on the dog’s neck be lashing his face and his eyes blazing with madness. The loup garou be trying to bewitch Page.

He know now it be loup garou.

Click here to read the rest of this tale and other loup-garou legends of the Vincennes area, on Richard King’s site.

Dripping Blood Cave – Great Title, Fun Stories!

Sometimes, it’s just fun to be an indie publisher!
Especially when a book has a great title . . . and is so much fun to read!

Dripping Blood Cave and Other Ghostly Stories is a new collection of humorous ghost stories by noted children’s author Raymond Bial of Urbana, Illinois.

Perfect for middle-grade readers, the eight stories in Dripping Blood Cave feature the adventures of young teen ghost-magnets Hank Cantrell and his fleet-of-foot, ’fraidy-cat sidekick, Clifford Hopkins.

Together, Hank and Cliffie encounter a host of spooks, haunts, spectres, and apparitions, around the mythical town of Myrtleville, somewhere in rural Indiana near the Wabash River. Join the plucky fellows, and their sweethearts Rosie and Mary Ethel, for some fun, not-so-scary adventures . . . facing (and learning valuable lessons from) the ghosts of the past.

Praise for earlier books in the Hank & Clifford series:
“Readers will find the suspense satisfying and the main character a sympathetic hero.” – Booklist
“A page-turner . . . will keep readers looking forward to further exploits of these two ghost sleuths.” – School Library Journal

DRIPPING BLOOD CAVE
And Other Ghostly Stories
by Raymond Bial
Crickhollow Books • October 2010
Trade Softcover, 200 pages, 6” x 9”
Juvenile Fiction / Humorous Ghost Stories (for ages 8–12 and up)
$13.95 • ISBN 978-1-933987-13-2
Available from your favorite bookstore online or around the corner!

Bial is the author of more than 100 books, including acclaimed photodocumentary books Amish Home, The Underground Railroad, Where Lincoln Walked, Nauvoo, Ellis Island, and others. His previous ghost stories include The Fresh Grave, The Ghost of Honeymoon Creek, and Shadow Island.