Boo Men

Boo Men is the prologue to Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill your Bones. It gives a brief summary of the stories in the book as well as society's reasoning to sharing scary stories.



The Story
The girl was late getting home for supper. So she took a shortcut through the cemetery. But, oh, it made her nervous. When she saw another girl ahead of her, she hurried to catch up. "Do you mind if I walk with you?" she asked. "Walking through the cemetery at night scares me." "I know what you mean," the other girl said. "I used to feel that way myself when I was alive."

There are all sorts of things that scare us. The dead scare us, for one day we will be dead like they are. The dark scares us, for we don't know what is waiting in the dark. At night the sound of leaves rustling, or branches groaning, or someone whispering, makes us uneasy. So do footsteps coming closer. So do strange figures we think we see in the shadows - a human maybe, or a big animal, or some horrible thing we can barely make out.

People call these creatures we think we see "boo men." We imagine them, they say. But now and then a boo man turns out to be real. Queer happenings scare us, too. We hear of a boy or a girl who was raised by an animal, a human being like us who yelps and howls and runs on all fours. The thought of it makes our flesh crawl. we hear of insects that make their nests in a person's body or of a nightmare that comes true, and we shudder. If such things really do happen, then they could happen to us.

It is from such fears that scary stories grow. This is the third book of such stories I have collected. I learned some of them from people I met. I found others, tales that had been written down, in folklore archives and in libraries. As we always do with tales we learn, I have told them in my own way. Some stories in this book have been told only in recent times. But others have been part of our folklore for as long as we know. As one person told another, the details may have changes. But the story itself has not, for what once frightened people still frightens them. I thought at first that one of the stories I found was a modern story. It is the one I call "The Bus Stop." I then discovered that a similar story had been told two thousand years earlier in ancient Rome. but the young woman involved was named Philinnion, not Joanna, as she is in our story.

Are the stories in this book true? The one I call "The Trouble" is true. I can't be sure about the others. Most may have at least a little truth, for strange things sometimes happen, and people love to tell about them and turn them into even better stories.

Nowadays most people say that they don't believe in ghosts and queer happenings and such. Yet they still fear the dead and the dark. And they still see boo men waiting in the shadows. And they still tell scary stories, just as people always have. - Alvin Schwartz.