History Literature / ScaryStoriesToTellInTheDark

* AndThenJohnWasAZombie: The ending of [[spoiler: "The Thing".]]
* {{Anticlimax}}: The endings of "The Viper", a comedic story, and "The Babysitter", a scary one.

** [[spoiler: The husband]] in "Just Delicious".

* TheCakeIsALie: "The Drum" and "The Bed by the Window"

* CatGirl: "The Cat's Paw" has a truly macabre example.

* DarkerAndEdgier: ''Scary Stories 3''.

* DeadAllAlong: [[spoiler: The protagonist]] in "Something Was Wrong".
** [[spoiler: The women]] that that the narrators of "The Wreck" and "The Bus Stop" pick up.
* TheDeadCanDance: "Aaron Kelly's Bones".
* DeadlyPrank: "The Dead Man's Hand."
--> "The prank had worked, but nobody was laughing."
* DeathByDespair: "Cold as Clay".
* DeathGlare: The ghost in "Hello, Kate!" gives one to the protagonist.

* DownerEnding: Quite a few stories.

* FeralChild: The Wolf Girl.

* FrightDeathtrap: Averted in "The Girl Who Stood on a Grave", as the death was an accident.
* FromNobodyToNightmare: "Harold". Boy howdy.

* GovernmentConspiracy: More like a local government conspiracy, but this is what happens in "Maybe You Will Remember..."

* ImAHumanitarian: "Wonderful Sausage".

* MamaBear: Addie Fitch must've ''really'' loved her cat. Of course, it may have been [[{{Familiar}} more]] than just a cat to [[AllWitchesHaveCats her]].

* ParentalAbandonment: "The Drum" gives us one of the worst possible examples of this at the end.
** DisproportionateRetribution: Even after the mom gave the girls one more chance, she ''still'' abandoned them. Boy, that lady has trust issues.

* SpidersAreScary: "The Red Spot". Gammell's illustration is horrific, natch.
* SwampsAreEvil: "The Dead Hand"

* TomatoInTheMirror: "Something Was Wrong"

* VoluntaryShapeshifting: [[spoiler:"Alligators"]]
** [[spoiler:"The Cat's Paw"]]

* WickedWitch: Addie Fitch in "Such Things Happen." [[MaybeMagicMaybeMundane Maybe]].
* WildChild: "The [[RaisedByWolves Wolf]] Girl".
* TheWildHunt: "Faster and Faster".
* YouCantFightFate: "Bess" and "The Appointment".

** The cats in "Wait Until Martin Comes." Despite being abnormally large, they don't do anything to the man, because they're waiting for their friend Martin. What they're planning to do is uncertain, but the man isn't willing to find out.

* {{Wendigo}}: Well, "[[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin The Wendigo]]", even though in the Sources section in the back, Alvin Scwartz makes it [[CultureChopSuey sound more like a Greek mythological Siren than an evil spirit of cannibalism]]. This is because the story is an altered version of Creator/AlgernonBlackwood's 1910 short story "The Wendigo", which doesn't much resemble the original folklore either.

* VeryLooselyBasedOnATrueStory: "Bess" is based off the Primary Chronicle's account of the death of the medieval Varangian ruler, [[KievanRus Oleg of Novgorod]].

* VeryLooselyBasedOnATrueStory: "Bess" is based off the Primary Chronicle's account of the death of the 11th century Varangian ruler, Oleg of Novgorod.

* LighterAndSofter: The last story is always a lighter version of the first story. All three books' end portions have a comedic collection of the supernatural.

* MassiveMultiplayerScam: In "Maybe You Will Remember", a girl, Rosemary, and her mother are on vacation in Paris. Rosemary's mother is ill, so Rosemary is sent to get medicine, but ultimately has her time wasted by the driver on the way back, and when she returns to the hotel, nobody recognizes her, telling her she has the wrong place. Her mother is gone, too, and when Rosemary asks to see the room they stayed in as proof they were there, the clerk shows her a completely unfamiliar setup, making Rosemary wonder what happened to her. [[spoiler: In the appendix of the book, the scenario is explained. Rosemary's mother was sick with the plague, and the doctor, recognizing it, knew she would be dead very quickly. Rosemary was put on a wild goose chase for the medicine and given a driver who would delay her, with the doctor and hotel staff working to dispose of her mother's body and re-decorate the hotel room while Rosemary was away. With Rosemary unable to verify that she was in the hotel, and unknowing that her mother died of plague, the hotel avoided any negative publicity that would have occurred if anyone were to find out a guest had the plague. The hotel's PR was saved, but Rosemary was left doubting her sanity.]]

** "Sam's New Pet." Some clueless tourists bring home a rabid(but non-malicious)"sewer rat" they mistake for a hairless.

Using little more than black ink and water, Stephen Gammell has given us some of the most notoriously terrifying pictures you'll ever see in a book. So much so that the Scary Stories are on the American Library Association's list of most challenged books (ie, MoralGuardians demanding they be pulled from library shelves), being the number one most challenged book for over a decade.

* BittersweetEnding: In "The Bad News", both protagonists die, but they end up playing baseball in Heaven.

* TheCallsAreComingFromInsideTheHouse: "The Babysitter".

* GoneHorriblyRight: The "Dead Man's Hand" story is all about medical students trying to play a scary prank on their apparently unshakeable colleague. They manage to reduce her into a nervous wreck instead.

* HeroWithBadPublicity: The ghost[[AmbiguouslyHuman (?)]] in "The Dream" may well be cringe-inducing to look at, but to be fair, she did save the girl in the story from some unknown gruesome fate, so...
** The truck driver in "High Beams" is a straight example.

** "Bess" starts with horse raiser John Nicholas going to a fortune teller who tells him that his favorite horse will be the reason behind his death. John is unconvinced and laughs the idea off. [[spoiler:At the ending, said favorite horse has been put down and reduced to bone. John gets fatally bitten by a rattlesnake who had living inside the horse's skull.]]

* DemBones: Skeletons make many appearances: "The Thing", "Aaron Kelly's Bones", "The Bad News", "Is Something Wrong", "What Do You Come For", whatever the hell that thing is in the sky in the illustration for "Oh Susannah" etc.

* GrotesqueGallery: Every picture in the series counts, but "The Haunted House" and "The Dream" especially.

** There's also "Thup-p-p-p-p-p!", one of the "funny" stories, which features a young girl who is stalked by an eyeless ghost that appears in her room and disappears whenever her parents appear. [[spoiler: The story ends with the ghost simply BlowingARaspberry [[PokeThePoodle at the girl]]]], but the illustration still falls into Surreal Horror territory, depicting the ghost as a bizarre creature almost resembling melting wax.

* HeroWithBadPublicity: The ghost(?) in "The Dream" may well be cringe-inducing to look at, but to be fair, she did save the girl in the story from some unknown gruesome fate, so...

** Two of the funny stories in Volume III, "Is Something Wrong?" and "T-H-U-U-U-U-P!", have two of the most [[https://www.popsugar.com/entertainment/photo-gallery/36151560/image/36151570/Something-Wrong terrifying]] [[https://www.popsugar.com/entertainment/photo-gallery/36151560/image/36151573/T-H-U-P-P-P-P-P-P-P]] in the series.

** Two of the funny stories in Volume III, "Is Something Wrong?" and "T-H-U-U-U-U-P!", have two of the most [[https://photobucket.com/gallery/user/KaBlamoid4Life/media/cGF0aDovc2t1bGxfaW5za3kuanBn/?ref= terrifying]] [[https://photobucket.com/gallery/user/KaBlamoid4Life/media/cGF0aDovc2MyOXZwNC5qcGc=/?ref= pictures]] in the series.

* InsistentTerminology: The story and cast keep calling Harold a doll instead of a scarecrow. This may be due to its folkloric inspiration, "Literature/{{Sennentuntschi}}", being a doll. She's sometimes constructed like a scarecrow, but meant for company, not for keeping crows at bay.

* InsistentTerminology: For some reason, the story (and also the characters) keep calling [[TitleDrop Harold]] a doll instead of a scarecrow.

** The knife salesman from "No Thanks", possibly. He's just described as "a man" in the text.
His appearance in [[https://www.popsugar.com/entertainment/photo-gallery/36151560/image/36151581/Thanks the original illustration]] suggests otherwise.