Scary Stories: Are they still getting Scared?

So, it is of course that time of year. Halloween is on its way and with it for most college students the occasional costume party. However, for me it was once much more than getting dressed up in the “sexy” version of an ordinary occupation. For me, Halloween used to be about telling scary stories and visiting the so-called haunted places in my town. My friends and I were thrill seekers growing up. We would gather our Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and read them in the darkness of someone’s bedroom with only a flashlight and the moon to aid our reading. When we would get bored of the stories from those books, we started to make up our own or retell the stories that were told to us. These stories dealt with the infamous urban legends like the man with the hook or the girl who is warned by a stranger’s high beams.

The thing that would intrigue me the most were the scary stories told about our town, Rowland Heights. These felt more terrifying because of how true they could be. There are haunted preschools, a road lined with crosses, and a supposed ghost who haunted the girl’s bathrooms in the former art room; with no truth to these stories our urban legends continued only in our amusement in scaring each other. This is what Halloween used to mean to me.

I do not have younger siblings nor do I work with children, so, I do not know what kids these days are into. Books like Scary Stories were our haven for being scared silly. Short stories in these books would often be retold in countless ways with each reader taking a different approach to the final “BOO!” Everyone listened intently to the gross and creepy details about a dog who ended up being a hairless rat infested with rabbis. These were not cautionary tales for us. No, these were for fun. With technology and the Internet now being the preferred method of finding things, I wonder if children today are searching for their scary stories using Google. I wonder if scary stories are scarier now that there are an infinite amount of authors out there to submit their stories online. Maybe, someone should try to reinvent the scary story, because we all know films today are not doing it.

Adri Serrano