Wednesday, April 27, 2011

HPVIIb, Scary Stories, and Schaumburg


So, yesterday on facebook I posted about getting goosebumps while watching the trailer for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2. On a side note, here it is:


Amazing, right? Anyway, a friend of mine read the update and at first thought I was referring to the Goosebumps series. Now, I was not allowed to read the Goosebump series as a child, and for good reason: I would have had many a sleepless night. Well, that's not quite true; I did read some at school, and they weren't really all that scary. But do you know what books are burned into my mind: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Now, the stories were scary enough, but the illustrations were terrifying. I google imaged them, and I still think they're pretty scary. Here's a few of the best:



This last one is from a story I particularly remember. In it, a bride and groom throw a great feast after their wedding. As a part of it, they decide to play hide-and-seek. The bride went up to the rarely used attic and hid in a trunk. When the trunk latched close, she found that she was locked in the trunk. She waited patiently for the party to find her, but no one ever found her or heard her muffled screams. The party figured she had ran away, and she was not found until years later, when someone opened the trunk to find a skeleton wearing a wedding dress. I just imagined being stuck in that trunk, wasting away. Now, that will give you some goosebumps as a young impressionable child!

I'm currently sitting in the hotel lobby of O'Hare Hyatt Woodfield waiting to go out to eat with my dad. He's in town (I use town loosely since he's up in Schaumburg) for his denomination's (or association) annual conference. So, I'm reading some feminist liturgical theology while I wait in the lobby. I should put it between the pages of a different book on Christian leadership or something so I don't get in trouble. I'm looking forward to some Giordano's with Deano and his compatriots!

The big weekend will begin shortly: thesis defense and marathon! I'm nervous/excited/ready for all of it. Now, I'm going to go walk around the hotel because I'm feeling a little sleepy at the moment. Later.

4 comments:

  1. Is that the same book with the story about the girl who always wore a ribbon tied around her neck and at the end when she takes it off her head falls off?! If so..I know exactly what you are talking about and they were scarrrry

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  2. I remember reading those stories with Elsa when we were little and you are right about the pictures being worse than the stories. Remember the rat that was mistaken for a hairless dog?? Gross. Or the pimple that turned out to be a spider egg on someone's cheek? A couple years ago I got the book as a Christmas present so I now have a hardback copy of it if you ever want to borrow it.

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  3. Oh, man! I can't believe you wrote about the Scary Stories illustrations...this is an ongoing source of conversation among a group of my friends who grew up together. (I even recently emailed that first picture above to my friend.) How is it possible that those books were given to children? I used to get mine through the Scholastic book mailings. So not right.

    We later discovered that the illustrator is from the Twin Cities, and subsequently tried to track down his house and leave him some kind of note describing the extent to which his drawings scarred us for life as kids. I must've blocked that bride story from my brain, but it is appropriately horrifying.

    Also, the HP trailer is great, but I do not remember that, "Come on, Tom" scene from the book...

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  4. Alli borrowed some Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark during our ResCov camping trip 2 years ago and we were all cracking up at how un-scary they were compared to our collective memory of them in grade school.

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