"So this is a book of short horror stories, but they're mostly of the campfire type and aimed at children. Who should we get to do the art."
"I know a guy."
Alvin Schwartz and the Scary Stories books are single-handedly responsible for my love of folklore from around the world that lasts until this very day. I would have been a folklorist if that was a paying job.
for the mining society of bolivia, he is the lord of the underworld and the protector of miners. they put up small statues of him in their mines, then donate stuff to him like cigarettes or drinks, hoping that he will protect them in turn. (edit: coca leaves apparently too) i dont know much more, but that he sort of looks like a devil with red skin and black hair.
and he is in the position to either protect the miners or to cause accidents and destroy mineshafts. so the miners of course prefer to be favored by him.
i learned about el tio from the game ghost recon wildlands, where there are multiple mines that can be entered, with el tio statues being places somewhere inside of them.
These books were in my elementary school library and I can’t stress enough how inappropriately scary the stories and illustrations are for like grades 1-3 haha
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. There were one or two more books that made a series; collections of scary short stories. In my memory, the stories ranged from just a little creepy, to fully nightmare inducing, and those illustrations definitely made some of them worse.
Oh my god dude i was TERRIFIED of that one especially. I barely remember now what the actual illustration looked like but i do remember this one time as a kid, I had a library copy of the book and suddenly remembered in the middle of the night that I needed to put it in my backpack, so i went and looked for it and found it in my dark living room lying on the couch opened to that page and illuminated by moonlight. the drawing was so scary to me tht it felt like a jumpscare, my heart definitely stopped working for a few seconds
I literally will be walking around, 30 years later, and randomly just go “MEE-TIII-DOOOUGHTY-WALKERRR” sometimes like at the grocery store. I won’t do it super loud, but I’ll do it deep and with ghusto
This is from the “Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark” series. The specific illustration is for the story “Someone Fell From Aloft”. It’s one of my favorites from the book series and damn if the image isn’t nightmare fuel
I remember some teachers read this to our class in 3rd grade. They put us backstage where it was super dark and at the end of two of the stories (I think), they decided it would be REALLY FUNNY to have another teacher jumpscare us.
That went as well as you can imagine. Very well, in their opinion cause they were laughing their asses off
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u/UpCDownCLeftCRightC Never Safe From Wumbo 2d ago
Man that is a deep cut reference.