After her husband is distracted away in the night, a naive new homeowner gets two-fingered by a pair of rock hard spirits. This is a nice, spooky little tale from the October 1975 issue of Ripley's Believe it or Not #58, and yeah, it's not really about what you think it's about after reading my intro sentence.
"Believe it, or not..."
6 comments:
I don't know if there's a name for this general type of urban legend story, but it's the same plot that runs stuff like Resurrection Mary, the after the fact "proof of ghost." In Mary's case, it's visiting the cemetery the next day and finding the coat draped over the headstone, and here it's the missing fingers.
I would have liked there to be some sort of resolution to this one? Who murdered them? Why do they murder others? etc but we just get the urban legend ending.
I always like the very workman like art in these. It's not splashy, it's nothing special, but it gets the spooky story told.
Feels a bit like a knock-off of E. Nesbit's "Man-Size in Marble".
I thought this tale sounded familiar, it is a retelling of the story "Man Size in Marble" by E. Nesbit. At least in this version the wife survives the encounter.
Even though this tale is more fiction than fact, the art and story make up for the lack of evidence it actually happened.
Not to stray off the subject, but there was an urban legend of a boy who went to get water from a well during the winter, but mysteriously vanished. The only footprints found were that of the boy, no one else. Many believed this tale to be true until it was traced back to a work of fiction of Ambrose Bierce. Sometimes people confuse fiction with fact, especially when it comes to ghost stories.
I just wanted to point out that I don't care if these stories are fact, fiction or 'based on a true story', I enjoy all of the tales here on THOIA.
Thanks as always, Karswell.
Ambrose Bierce wrote a set of articles called "Mysterious Disappearances," which included that story about the well.
He didn't exactly endorse the stories, but they were still written as paranormal articles about real people, which makes him an early "Fortean" writer.
(Of course, the weird thing is that he himself disappeared!)
It's impossible to read the last line of this story without hearing Jack Palance's voice saying with that big delivery, "Believe it - or not."
So hold on. The ghosts haunt the house, like all the time, but on one day each year the statues rise up off the grave and also make their way home, too. The the clock strikes midnight on (uh, right after) All Souls' Day and, poof, the stones are back on the tomb where they belong. Okay. But the house is still haunted, yeah? Douglas and Mary still live in a house haunted by the ghosts of murderers.
I have to admit I'm impressed with the chutzpah of these two. I mean, it's hard to idly pooh-pooh the local folklore when you've actually been choked out by the brittle marble hands of a long dead murderer. By the end of this, those two are true believers. But apparently they're staying in the new house.
So why does the story think this was "never to happen again"? I mean, supposedly it's gonna happen every November second like clockwork. Maybe Mary took the sledge hammer to the both of those rock stars right then and there. I can tell the Vicar would pitch a fit about that, but the ends justify the means.
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