Remember those books, “Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark”? The ones you begged your Mom to buy you, and she was like, “No, you’ll get too scared,” and you were like “Ugh, no I won’t, it’s not even scary!” so she relented and then you slept on the floor next to her bed for a month?

Well, we thought that in honor of Halloween, it might be fun to revisit some of the creepiest, most romantic (?), but mostly terrifying, stories.

The Bride

By Alvin Schwartz

“A young couple got married and, after the wedding, they held a reception in the bride’s grandmother’s house. All their family and friends arrived and they laughed, danced and sang, long into the night.

After the wedding reception, the guests decided to play a game of hide and seek. The groom covered his eyes and began counting to a hundred while his new bride and the other guests ran out of the room, looking for somewhere to hide.

Eventually, the groom had found everyone except his beautiful bride. The other guests began calling out her name and searched everywhere for the young woman. They began to grow more and more uneasy when they couldn’t find any trace of her.

Eventually they gave up searching and everybody assumed that the girl had run away and left her husband. As the weeks went by, the husband accepted that his beautiful bride must have had second thoughts about their marriage. He decided to forget about her and go on with his life.

A few years later, a cleaning lady was dusting in the attic when she came across an old trunk. Out of curiosity she opened it. Inside the trunk, she found the rotting corpse of a young woman, still dressed in a bridal gown. There was a wedding ring on one bony finger. It was the missing bride. She must have hidden in the trunk and accidentally locked herself inside. It was impossible to tell whether she had suffocated or starved to death, but her face was frozen in a silent scream.”

The White Satin Evening Gown

*This story appears in Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, but the version below is not the one from the book.

“A favorite story of New York literary circles a few years ago a poverty-stricken damsel who was invited to a formal dance. It was her chance to enter a brand new world. Who knew but that some rich young man would fall in love with her and lift her out of her life at the box factory. The catch of the matter is that she had no suitable dress to wear for such an occasion.

‘Why don’t you rent a costume for the evening?’ Suggested a friend. Not having thought of this before, the girl became hopeful, and that very night went to a pawnshop near her little flat, where for a surprisingly reasonable sum she rented a beautiful white satin gown with the accessories to match. Miraculously, it fit her like a glove and gave her such radiance that upon her arrival at the party she created a minor sensation.

She was cut in on again and again, and as she whirled happily around the floor, she felt that her luck indeed had changed for the better. Soon, however, she began to feel faint and nauseated. She fought against a growing discomfort as long as possible, but finally stole out of the house with barely sufficient strength to stagger into a cab and creep up the stairs into her room.

She threw herself onto her bed, broken-hearted, and it was then, possibly in her delirium, that she heard a woman’s voice whispering in her ear. It was harsh and bitter. ‘Give me back my dress,’ it said. ‘Give me back my dress! It belongs to the dead.’

The next morning, the lifeless body of the young girl was found stretched out on her bed. The unusual circumstances led the coroner to order an autopsy. It was found the girl had been poisoned by embalming fluid, which had entered her pores when she became overheated from dancing. The pawnbroker was reluctant to admit that he knew where the dress had come from, but spoke out when he heard that the district attorney’s office was involved. It had been sold to him by an undertaker’s assistant, who had taken it from the body of a dead girl, just before the casket was nailed down for the last time.” [via]

Well, that will make you think twice before using Rent-The-Runway before a date.

Happy dating, and haunting, everyone!