Wonderful Sausage

Wonderful Sausage is a scary story about a butcher in New Orleans who murders people, grinds them up and sells them as meat. It is based on a supposedly true story recounted in Gumbo Ya-Ya as "The Ghost Who Walked The Sausage Factory". A different version of this story appeared in More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.



The Story
One dark, rainy Saturday afternoon, a fat and jolly butcher named Samuel Blunt had an argument over money with his wife, Eloise. Blunt lost his temper and killed Eloise. Then he ground her up into sausage meat and buried her bones under a big flat rock in the backyard. To keep the murder a secret, he told everyone she had moved away.

Blunt mixed his new sausage meat with pork, then seasoned it with salt and pepper, added some sage and thyme and a bit of garlic. To give it a special flavor, he smoked it in his smokehouse for a while. He called it "Blunt's Special Sausage." There was such a demand for this new sausage that Blunt bought the best hogs he could find and started raising his own pork. He also kept a sharp lookout for humans who might make a tasty sausage meat. One day a nice, plump schoolteacher came into his shop. Blunt grabbed her and ground her up. Another time Blunt's dentist came by. He was a little, round man, and into the grinder he went. Then one by one, the children in the neighborhood began to disappear. And so did their kittens and puppies. But no one ever dreamed that Blunt the butcher had anything to do with it. Things went on that way for years. Then one day Blunt made a big mistake. A fat boy came into the butcher shop. Blunt grabbed him and started to drag him off to the sausage grinder. But the boy broke loose, and ran out of the shop, and Blunt chased after him waving a big butcher knife.

When people saw this, they realized at once what had become of all the missing children and grown-ups and kittens and puppies. An angry crowd gathered at the butcher shop. No one knows for sure just what happened to Blunt that day. Some say he was fed to his hogs. Others say he was fed to his sausage grinder. But he was never seen again, and neither was his wonderful sausage meat.