History NightmareFuel / ScaryStoriesToTellInTheDark

* One of the least scary stories in the book gets one of the most terrifying and iconic illustrations: "The Haunted House". House is haunted. PreacherMan is called in to exorcise. He meets the ghost. The ghost tells him where some treasure is and leaves her finger bone with him. Preacher Man digs up the treasure and uses the ghost's finger bone to out the guy who killed her. The ghost's killer is punished and she is put at peace. They all lived happily ever after. Now, the [[http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jUnjDDao20Q/T423CnjcIMI/AAAAAAAAHyU/2YFum7tYjcQ/s1600/001.gif illustration]], on the other hand, shows the heavily detailed face of a rotting corpse woman with empty eye sockets and a decaying mouth that weakly hangs open. Even worse, one collection put the offending illustation '''RIGHT. ON. THE COVER.'''

* ''The Curse'' tells the story of a group of frat boys who take two freshmen for their initiation. They are to stay in an abandoned house where two murders took place for an hour and not make a sound and their only source of light is a candle. When the freshmen go in, their candle goes out when they reach the third floor. When an hour passes and the freshmen don't return, the frat boys go in and try to look for them. All they find is fresh blood on the floor. Not even the police find anything. The worst part is the ending. After they graduated, the frat boys found themselves the victim of a curse: Every year, on the anniversary of the initiation, one of them either dies or goes insane. And now the narrator is the only one left.

* "Someone Fell From Aloft" has a fairly simple but haunting image of a man clutching a body as he appears to fall. It illustrates the climax of the (relatively simple) ghost story in the most sparse yet terrifying way possible. Our friend Stephen simply ''refuses'' to ever draw normal human beings in any of the images in these books, and so you get to see [[https://i.imgur.com/bo4XKrK.jpg the faint black outline of what is supposedly the guy from the story being grabbed by a laughing oily corpse and taken overboard.]]

* Stephen Gammell's illustrations are so scary, they actually got a mention in Lemon Demon's song "Nightmare Fuel".

* "Bess" is about a farmer who owns an old horse (the titular Bess) that he had raised from foalhood, but he gets a warning from a fortuneteller that Bess will cause him to die. Startled, he sells Bess to a farmer, who takes care of her until she gets so sick that he has to [[MercyKill shoot her to put her out of her misery]]. The first farmer goes to say goodbye to the horse as he pats her skull, but then a [[SnakesAreSinister rattlesnake]] which made its home in Bess's skull [[SelfFulfillingProphecy bites him and kills him]]. The fortuneteller's prediction had ended up coming true.

* "The Dream"'s illustration. The story very simply describes the mysterious woman of the eponymous dream as having "a pale face, black eyes, and long black hair". Unfortunately, Stephen Gammell took the already present eeriness of the situation and [[http://68.media.tumblr.com/54f45dcfa1b8e4510e1a114ffd3dd05c/tumblr_inline_o1hpfqOFqw1rb54cq_500.jpg cranked it]] drags it much further by giving the woman beady eyes, a jaw like an orangutan, and an alien-esque slit-like mouth. Plus, the expression she's wearing is vague, but can't quite be called a smile. Or if it is, then it's like ComicBook/TheJoker's smile; you can't tell if it's happy or sinister.

* "Sounds". Three fishermen take refuge in an abandoned house during a thunderstorm and hear a man (or the ghost of a man) murdering a woman and disposing of her body. The scary part of the story is that this is something that actually happens in {{Real Life}}.

* "The Bed By The Window". It's one of the more mundane stories, and that to some makes it even more disturbing. In the story, two bed-bound old men, Richard and George, live in a nursing home. George has a bed near the window, and he constantly describes in detail what he sees to Richard. [[HumansAreBastards Eventually, Richard gets jealous and secretly hides George's heart medication, with the intent to have him die of a heart attack. All for the bed by the window!]] [[KarmicTwistEnding It works, and he finally gets the bed in front of the window]], only to look out and see the blank brick wall of a building next door. He killed his best friend for ''nothing''. And now he has nobody left to keep him company, so he's going to spend the rest of his life alone, living with the guilt. It gets worse when you read the original story's ending: George is later revealed to have been ''blind'' and he pretended to see the things outside the window to ''cheer Richard up''. Ouch! It says a lot when in a book full of ghosts and monsters, [[HumansAreTheRealMonsters one of the more profoundly disturbing stories has no supernatural elements at all.]]

*** And the way George Irving (the narrator not the character, of course) speaks that line in the audio narration of the story is much more chilling than the way the book portrays it, the way he creepily exaggerates it.

* "The Man In The Middle," which by itself is not that scary, but its horror comes from the simple fact that, like "Sounds," it could [[RealismInducedHorror easily happen in real life]]. Two guys get on the subway assisting what appears to be a drunk friend and get off at different stops, then it's revealed at the end that the third man was DeadAllAlong.

* "Just Delicious" is one of the select few examples from all three volumes where the story outdoes the illustration. An abusive husband is unknowingly fed liver taken from a dead old woman, and the bad news for the wife is that dead woman's spirit wants the liver back. And the bad news for her husband is that the ghost is willing to settle for ''his''...