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By: Garin Kilpatrick

The following five short stories are Halloween classics and are certain to send chills down your spine. From vampires, to skeletons, and headless horsemen, this post has it all. Once you’ve read it let us know what your favorite Scary Short Story is in the comments below!  Happy Halloween from Eduify!

1. Dracula

Dracula By Bram Stoker is available to read online in it’s entirety, free from Google Books.  Dracula was not the first vampire he is probably the most famous vampire of all time.

Dozens of books and movies have been inspired by the original story of Dracula. Structurally it is an epistolary novel, told as a series of diary entries and letters.

2. Frankenstein

The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, is generally known simply as Frankenstein. The Modern Prometheus is the only novel Mary Shelley wrote.  Mary did also edit several of her husband’s works, and write other short stories of her own.  She started writing Frankenstein when she was 18 and the novel was published when she was 21. The first edition was published anonymously in London in 1818.

The title of the novel refers to a scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who learns how to create life.

Victor creates a being in the likeness of man.  The monster of Frankenstein has become contorted through his portrayal as a popular Halloween character.  The real image Mary Shelley painted of The Modern Prometheus was in the image of man, but larger than average and more powerful.  In popular culture, people have tended incorrectly to refer to the monster as “Frankenstein”.  In the novel Mary chooses to leave the monsters name unspoken.

3. The Tell-Tale Heart

“The Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe that was first published in 1843.  This story follows an unnamed narrator who insists on his sanity after killing an old man with a “vulture eye”. The murder of the old man is carefully calculated, and the murderer disposes of the body by dismembering it and hiding it under the floorboards. Post murder, the narrator’s guilt begins to manifest itself in the hallucination that the man’s heart is still beating under the floorboards.

The painting below, by Harry Clarke, was inspired by the story.

4. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a story by Washington Irving, first published in 1820.  The story is set in 1790 in a Dutch settlement called Sleepy Hollow. It tells the story of Ichabod Crane, a lean, lanky, and extremely superstitious schoolmaster, who competes with Abraham “Brom Bones” Van Brunt, for the hand of 18-year-old Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter and sole child of a wealthy farmer.

As Crane leaves a party he attended at the Van Tassel home on an autumn night, he is pursued by the Headless Horseman, who is supposedly the ghost of a Hessian trooper who had his head shot off by a stray cannonball during “some nameless battle” of the American Revolutionary War, and who “rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head”.

The identity of the Headless Horseman is left open to interpretation, but the story implies that the Horseman was actually Brom Bones in disguise.

This story also inspired a movie called Sleepy Hollow, by Tim Burton, featuring Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci.

5. The Screaming Skull

The Screaming Skull by Marion Crawford was Published in 1911, but the story is no less scary today.

The story starts like this:

I have often heard it scream. No, I am not nervous, I am not imaginative, and I never believed in ghosts, unless that thing is one. Whatever it is, it hates me almost as much as it hated Luke Pratt, and it screams at me.

I will not spoil the story, but keep in mind that you might find the ending hard to swallow.   Something like the price of the skull pictured below.  The diamond skull, for the love of god, cost $20,000,000 to produce and was recently sold by the artist to an investors group for $100,000,000.

Feedback

What is your favorite scary story?  Let us know in the comments below!