If you dare to peer into the dark heart of American horror, you’ll be left wanting to get your eyes checked and your bathroom cleaned.
We’ve done this before and, Lord knows why, but we’ve done it again. Maybe it was the countless fan letters clamoring for MORE SCARY STORIES, MORE SCARY STORIES!!! Or maybe it was our own perverse impulse to keep mucking about in the spooky swamps at the end of the mind. Whether we were placed under the spell of a malignant chaos gremlin or a giant bat swooped down and carried us off to Crazy Land, we’ve gone back to the Trough of Terror for another year of anthologized frights. We’d do anything for you, dear Lemur reader. Anything.
We knew we’d need to dig a little deeper this time to find the best untold neck-crawlers still out there in the aether. To that end, we enlisted the aid of the “Skarsgard School,” a crack team of Scandinavian anthropologists dedicated to the study of applied paranormal confabulation. They hailed from the University of Nosferatu, voted the scariest university in the world for ten years running by the Fiske Guide.
The Skarsgards had a tried-and-true methodology: to find a proper screamer you had to go to the masters of the fire-side tale, the grannies. With a blank check from the William Afton Jump Scare Institute, we connected the anthropologists with the data brokers behind such massive endeavors as 23andMe and Newspapers.com, embarking on a project unprecedented in scope and scares. The Skarsgards got down to brass tacks, scouring these and other capacious databases for grannies with the scariest ancestors and spookiest DNA strands. They uncovered a veritable “smorgasbord” of frights: maniacal bus drivers, ghostly shipwreck victims, and unrepentant horse thieves galore. They plumbed the rottenest branches of family trees for tales of terror and inbreeding that would make Madeline Usher want to stay in her coffin. Three-headed uncles! Demon toddlers! Cousins who stepped on Legos, died, and then came back to haunt everyone in the form of a gigantic minifigure.
We even had Henry Louis Gates, Jr. come in to explain to the grannies just how much scary shit was in their blood. Turn the page, please. You’ve got to have a darn good bedside manner when you’re telling people their great-grandpappy was a bridge troll.
The result? We’ve outdone ourselves. Gathered here is but a taste from our project—a sample of some of the most supremely terrifying stories we encountered in the whole process.
We are profoundly indebted to the generosity and good faith of the Grannies whose family tales you are about to read. Namely Grannies Gawful, Gobstopper, Greenhorn, and Guglhupf.
Out of respect for the grannies’ privacy, we have only included blurry photos of them.
At the request of the dead, the tales have been told exactly as they occurred.
We hope you enjoy.
EXCERPT FROM THE GIANT BLOB MONOLOGUES
by Johenson Blur
Q: How can you tell if there’s a giant blob under your bed?
A: If your nose is touching the ceiling.
THE PARKING METER
by Neve Campbell
One day a lunatic drove into the city on a tractor. He was from the country and knew not the city’s ways, so when a taxi cut him off on the highway he behaved in a rather unrefined way, following the taxi driver home and killing him with a hatchet. After he did this awful thing, the lunatic snapped his fingers remembering he had an appointment with the pentagon that very evening. He had miles to go and did not have time to dispose of the body properly. So, he draped it over a parking meter, dusted his hands, and headed to Washington.
Nobody in the area reported the murder for 13 months, figuring if they didn’t see the meter they didn’t have to pay the meter. The neighborhood bonded over this incredible loophole, and one busybody named Amy created t-shirts. (“Hey, free parking”) Well, the day came that the body finally turned into a skeleton, and you could see the meter again. Pissed off more than anything, the neighborhood resumed paying for parking, and the police were called to take care of the skeleton, as kids were starting to play with the bones.
One misty October night, Amy, the busybody who had made the t-shirts, was walking home from Pilates. She turned onto her tree-lined block and there it was, sitting on the stoop of her building, the skeleton from the meter. Before she knew what was going on the skeleton was chasing her down the sidewalk, crick-ity-creek-crick-ity-creek-crick-ity -creek-crick-ity-creek crick-ity-creek crick-ity-creek. Its fingers flicked her hair. crick-ity -creek. The cold bony hands grabbed her neck and began to choke her right in the middle of the street. There were a bunch of people out on evening strolls, but of course no one said anything. That’s just how things were in this neighborhood. It was a bad neighborhood. Nobody reported anything, ever. It was around this point that Amy, staring into the horrifying face of a screaming skeleton choking her to death, began to regret making those t-shirts. No amount of core strength training could save her now. Just as her consciousness began to ebb, a tractor came barreling into the intersection and smashed the skeleton to smithereens.
It was the lunatic on his way back from the capital. He gave a friendly wave then disappeared into the night, crying “Happy Halloween!”
THE HEADLESS COWBOY
by Mitsubishi James
“Maybe one day my head will come back to me. Maybe one day I’ll be riding the range and a dust storm will pop up and swirl my head back on.”
The bartender was showing everyone in the saloon the Headless Cowboy’s diary. The poor sap had been forced to wager it after an evening at the poker table–––not so easy to win when everyone is staring at your cards and you can’t do a thing about it! Now these same dirty rotten scoundrels were shoving their fists in their mouths to keep from laughing.
“I thank God every day he can’t play that harmonica anymore!” wheezed the town drunk.
“Or spew his stinking breath!” joined the snake oil salesman.
“Or wear that ugly hat!” cackled the madam of the whorehouse.
Unobserved, the headless horseman sat in the back of the room. He tried to speak but couldn’t think of anything to say with his hands. So, he simply pulled his gun out and started shooting, identifying the warm bodies of his bullies by echolocation.
The camp counselors will tell you the headless cowboy then became the most notorious grave robber in the West. But they’d be lying. He didn’t rob the graves so much as he pulled the helpless skeletons out, played their spines like a marimba, and thought, who’s dancing the cha-cha now?! The counselors will also say he disappeared one Halloween night, delicately balancing a skeleton’s head on his neck as he galloped into the darkness. And once the kids are well and truly scared, the counselors will bring the story home, telling you he died happily years later, living in Scottsdale as an insurance broker with a wife and three kids.
But they’d be fucking lying to you.
The headless cowboy lives. He’s out there somewhere, wandering the desert and imprinting his headless silhouette against the setting sun.
TINY GOBLINS
by Heracles Comptroller
They ate them on toast!!!!!!!!!!
THE INVENTION OF ECTOPLASM
by Almond Taylor-Joy
They say the Dorito was invented by accident at Disneyland when some tortilla chip functionary dropped his product into a vat of artificial spices. They say the tortilla chip itself, or at least the nacho, was similarly a child of chance, the son of serendipity.
But what do they not speak about? What great twist of fate in the annals of normal science? No one has told the story of the great accidental invention of Ectoplasm, by Rigbit Oglesby, CBE, Kennedy Center Honors.
Today we use ectoplasm for a variety of purposes. Scrubbing our windshields. Rideshare fragrances. Delousing. But the versatile substance once meant one thing and one thing only: ghosts. As shown in the great 80s documentary Ghostbusters, specialized teams of law enforcement agents were once tasked with jetstreaming ectoplasm-based phantasms into oblivion.
All that changed in the 90s when Atari, the company that originally made video games, began to mass-produce ectoplasm and sell it off the top shelf in big box stores. Litigation followed but Atari was always careful to keep the product on the top shelf, so only beanpole kids could reach it. And, besides, there were other plausible explanations for the 5000% uptick in “Ooey Gooey Deaths” during the Clinton administration.
But one day during the height of the Lewinsky probe, Atari’s Chief Scientist Rigbit Oglesby was tinkering in the lab when he discovered something extraordinary. As he shot ectoplasm lasers like poison darts at an up-and-coming maze rat, Oglesby noticed an astonishing aroma wafting off the rat’s charred asshole: PEACH COBBLER, MMMM!
But hey wait a minute! That’s what Oglesby had had for breakfast. And hey, what was that on his sleeve? Why a little glob of the sticky filling had fallen into the test tube, and it was releasing an absolutely wonderful scent when mixed with the ectoplasm. What a magical find!
Oglesby realized he should bring his magnificently marketable discovery to the attention of Atari’s senior management, but as he massaged the rat’s black behind and drool dripped from his mouth thinking about that peach cobbler, he decided: to hell with this company! I’m taking this find for myself. Going to start my own business. Lead us into the 21st century with this fantastic smell technology. 4-D movies will make trillions of dollars a year! And sewage workers won’t have to be so stinky when they come home to their wives. Yes, Oglesby thought with a tear of pride in his eye, this was for the sewage workers.
Oglesby walked out of the Atari facility that day like nothing had happened. And the next day he established the unassumingly named C-corp PEACH COBBLER INC., out of his uncle’s garage.
With the help of the crack team of scientists at PEACH COBBLER, INC. who he’d managed to recruit away from great endeavors such as the Genome Project and Airheads flavor science, Oglesby discovered no less than 300 million other patentable applications of ectoplasm beyond vaporizing ghouls. He became the world’s richest man and bought three continents.
Oglesby changed our world, ushering in a Golden Age of prosperity. By the time George W. Bush was inaugurated president less than three years later, ectoplasm was everywhere.
It bound the pages of the Bible Bush swore his oath on.
It was used to tighten the rope that hanged Saddam Hussein.
And it was used to forge the golden medal Bush feudally bestowed on Oglesby’s neck at the 2005 Kennedy Center Honors.
Yep, it sure was quite the invention! And to think where our world would be if Rigbit Oglesby, CBE, Kennedy Center Honors, hadn’t been such a greedy messy pig eating peach cobbler for breakfast!
The Yummiest Number
By Damian Romney
One cool morn we met the dawn
We famed slayers three
Fled to find us an aurochs
Carving lines through the forest
Our hunting bows drawn
ready to go on our spree
The forest before now had never deplored how
Our company crept crept in the breeze
But now seeing the naiads,
Disregarding the dryads
I crumpled my brow
And my grip I released.
The nymphs fell bare, their once shining hair
Had soon shimmered, sheened then sank
Through the leaves to the soil;
As we gathered our spoils
Our legs were ensnared
And I noted the winds turning dank
A crooking tree bellowed “you three crooked fellows”
Its vines lacerating our scalps
Oakflesh shredded through spine
Out shot its limbs from mine
I spewed bile of yellow
And found my eyes covered in sprouts
And our ears opened up
So that out the blood trickles
Its voice reverses ripples
“Yes I have your number”
Your scurrilous, pervious number
Your fuddiest, duddiest number
Your chauvinist, merciless number
If only we’d never embarked on that spree
If only we’d taken a day of reprieve
If we made a friend or got along worse
We’d never be three to be free
And three is the yummiest number.
Abstract from: Nutmeat, Tolhaus, Bugsnax, H. & wyrms, b. (1998). Zombo Pessimism: Wildersonian Rituals of Social Undeath. University of Nosferatu Press.
“There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. For years we’ve worshipped at the altar of the false god Harm Reduction, and what has it gotten us? In the name of respectability politics, we exempt from our diets those scientists that could find a cure, only for them to treat us as lab freaks. We exist outside of their epistemology, illegible to their norms and hermeneutics. They have no theory of mind for us. We are bodies without souls. We only exist in so far as we are hungry. They have divided the world into brains and tummies. In chewing grey matter, we help them to defend and expand their neo-fascist “socially alive” regime. In starvation, we become invisible. Zombies eat brains, but they do not eat them just as they choose.”
THE GREAT CLOWN REBELLION
by Dr. Logan Trivago
The second Friday of October was always the busiest day at the Swillwater State Fair––it might as well have been that quaint county’s own Fourth of July. Schoolbuses and prison vans streamed in, loaded back to front and top to bottom with first-graders and felons united by a love of cotton candy and merry-go-rounds. Happiness was in the air. And so was funnel cake. Permission slips, from both parents and parole officers, in normal times so hard to come by, were being handed out like Halloween candy.
“Are we there yet?” Little Johnny Farrakhan piped up from the backseat of the family station wagon, turning his attention away from a Ren & Stimpy slugfest. His proper older sister, Elizabeth Cady Farrakhan, rolled her eyes.
In the front seat, Mr. and Mrs. John and Beth Farrakhan gave each other a knowing sidelong glance that said Oh God, I hope this trip isn’t another disaster.
SCREECH!!! The car lurched to a halt and the Farrakhans screamed.
It was a CLOWN CHAIN GANG crossing the road!
***
Hiya! Farmer Wayans snapped the bullwhip and the air filled with sad honking.
The clowns foxtrotted across the muddy road. A few tried to circle around poor Slappy, who the Farmer was whipping simply because he was the Pagliacci of the bunch. Sad clowns didn’t sell at the market! Only happy clowns brought in the birthday party bucks! And Farmer Wayans was a greedy man.
Chumpy, the clowns’ undisputed leader, leapt up at Farmer Wayans and started squeaking his big red nose furiously. “Stop, stop!” he cried, makeup running. But Farmer Wayans simply turned his whip on the defiant Chumpy, who, though impervious to pratfalls, still smarted at the thwack of taut hemp on ass.
Old Man Wayans, delirious with visions of his livestock bringing home top prize at the fair, brought the whip down again and again. Years ago, Farmer Wayans, down on his luck after the Great Clown Flu Epidemic of ‘84 (and the associated Recall), refinanced his barn, made some savvy banana peel futures trades, and set his sights on dominating the clown pageant circuit. He bred the best clowns in the business. Notorious for his exacting standards, Farmer Wayans mercilessly “retired” unfunny clowns and bred ruthlessly for the qualities that brought home blue ribbons: elastic faces, bulbous noses, sophisticated chuckling technique, smiles that never faded, frowns that never corrected, flips that never ended, and rainbow handkerchiefs that could girdle the globe ten times over. As for phased-out former champion clowns, let’s just say they had to prove sticky enough for the good folks at Elmer’s. It had been a long, undefeated season at the clown fairs. But the Swillwater Clown Fest was his Holy Grail.
***
“Hoo, that was a close one!” said Mr. Farrakhan, swerving past Farmer Wayans’ yoked pranksters. His children stared at him blankly.
The rattled family drove on to the fair, where the fun times were already in swing.
Yes, the cotton candy machines were a-whirring, the taffy ropes were a-stringing and the popcorn was a-popping! The Farrakhans met their cousins, the Steinems, who were coming from the shooting gallery. Their massive son Flapjack, who had had one too many of his namesake, was clutching the grand prize, an XXL Rasta banana stuffie.
“Go play, kids!”
Scampering off to the bumper cars, Little Johnny Farrakhan asked to play with Flapjack’s stuffie. “Buzz off, twinkie,” Flapjack grunted, stomping on his toes and kicking in his shins. Little Johnny yowled and went off crying to the Hall of Mirrors.
***
Sniffle, sniffle. Little Johnny brushed away his tears and looked at his sorry reflection in the neverending mirrors. Johnny was thinking dark thoughts like, will my family ever get along?, when suddenly chuckles ricocheted off the glass like watermelon seeds into a spittoon. Johnny found himself joining in––he couldn’t help it, the laughs were just too darn infectious! But there was something ominous about the noises, too, and Johnny, green though he was, knew he had to creep up real quiet-like to interrogate the source of this percussive mirth. Peering timidly behind a pin-striped pillar, he saw…
A ROUNDTABLE FULL OF SCHEMING CLOWNS!!!!
The motley fools were honking each other’s noses and spraying whipped cream on each other like there was no tomorrow. A lanky clown with a commanding presence fiddled with a whoopie cushion and screeched a hot tin whistle for silence. It was Chumpy, the only clown who ever dared to stand up to Farmer Wayans and now the Undisputed Ringleader of this band of brothers.
“The plan is coming up aces so far, comrades. We busted out of that filthy clownpen before the judges arrived. And now Old Man Wayans is going to get his just desserts: a banana cream pie in the face!”
“Yeah, and a coconut cream pie, too!” yelled an enthusiastic young clown.
Huzzahs rounded the room and Chumpy had to quiet down the third encore of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”
***
Little Johnny Farrakhan came running pell-mell out of the Hall of Mirrors, screaming at the top of his lungs in terror.
He found his mommy and daddy by the Ferris Wheel with his sister Elizabeth Cady Farrakhan polishing her Mary Janes.
“Oh there you are, Little Johnny. Where’d you run off to?” his mother asked indifferently.
But before the sniveling child could speak, the carnival barker packed them into the swinging Ferris Wheel gondola like so many sardines and up, up they went into the Swillwater sky.
***
Meanwhile, in the Hall of Mirrors, the clowns were sanding their wooden mallets, inflating their polystyrene axes, and knotting off their water balloons.
“We will be free, payasos! We will be free!” Chumpy boomed. And with that they were off, with the stilt cavalry bringing up the rearguard.
“Heave-ho! Heave-ho! The reign of Wayans has got to go! Heave-ho! Heave-ho! Freedom for the crimson ‘fros!”
***
The Farrakhans’ gondola ticked up to the top of the Ferris Wheel, locking in place like a midnight clock to let the riders take in a panoramic view of Swillwater County. The gondola swayed in the air, and the Farrakhans oohed and aahed at the distant Hoovervilles and the nuclear waste sites that glowed upstream of them. The family paused to take a Polaroid together. But between Mr. Farrakhan’s poor eye and his son’s slight figure, Little Johnny got cut out of the frame, as usual. Mrs. Farrakhan berated her husband for ruining another chance at a precious family bonding opportunity. And Elizabeth Cady Farrakhan disdained the whole charade, turning her chin up at the savages she had the misfortune of sharing a gondola with.
“What is that?!”
Little Johnny was pressing his snot-filled nose up against the glass and staring down at the fairgrounds below.
A fluffy red algal bloom seemed to be spreading across the fairgrounds from the funhouse and going straight for the funnel cake station! It was the Clowns from the Hall of Mirrors!!!
Mr. and Mrs. Farrakhan, turning from their bickering, finally draped their eyes on the polychromatic pandemonium below.
“What in the Sam Hill is going on down there?” Mr. Farrakhan said stupidly.
***
“AIEEE!!!” screamed Farmer Wayans’s ranch hand, Slowbrain, as Chumpy and his boys bullrushed him with a pie and a mallet, kneecapping him into next Tuesday. At the sound of his mortal enemy’s crunching bones, Chumpy roared like a berserker.
But quick! Farmer Wayans was escaping into the mayor’s hot air balloon! He was tossing sandbags out like they were firecrackers in his pillowcase! The balloon was going up, up , u-
BLAMM!
A cadre of sniper clowns, having nabbed an arsenal of toy rifles from the shooting gallery, unleashed a hailstorm of BBs on Farmer Wayans’ getaway ride.
The shredded balloon plummeted through the clouds, jettisoning its wicker basket. Farmer Wayans ejected five feet before crashing, trampolining off the stripey awning of the Hot Nuts stand and landing rump-down on the strongman High-Striker, right as who but FLAPJACK STEINEM swung down his sledgehammer in an effort to break a time zone record. Farmer Wayans was promptly crotch-racked straight up the thermometer to the bell, cracking his skull open like a hotel safe. The bell rang like school was out for summer.
The clowns put down their weapons and cheered. As a sign of good faith, the most skilled balloon artists among them cast a flock of balloon doves out into the lavender air of a new world. And, most importantly, everybody laughed.
Laughed harder, incidentally, than they ever had at a clown.
As the Ferris Wheel lurched back into motion, the Farrakhans stared at each other blankly for a second. And then they too started giggling. And chuckling. And guffawing. And roaring, all together, in a four-party harmony of hilarity, like they never had before!
Disembarking from the Ferris Wheel, the family shared a corndog and some cotton candy and had a lovely rest of their day at the Swillwater State Fair.
CRYPTID TMZ
From the makers of the Peabody-winning celebrity news platform comes the New, Go-to Source for all Cryptid News!!!
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!!
