Thumpity-Thump

Thumpity-Thump is a story from More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It tells the story of a ghostly chair who comes in contact with a family. The story is meant to be comedic.



The Story
When we moved to Schenectady from Schoharie, we rented a house awful cheap 'cause it was spooked, and nobody would live in it. But we didn't care, 'cause we didn't take no stock on spooks. We had just gone to bed the first night, dog tired from riding in a wagon all day. We hadn't had time to shut our eyes when we heard a thumpity-thump, thumpity-thump comin' down the attic stairs. I covered my head with the blankets, but I couldn't shut out the sound. Thumpity-thump, thumpity-thump, it went. I could hear it plain as day.

Past the bedroom door thumpity-thump, thumpity-thump and down the stairs thumpity-thump, thumpity-thump and through the kitchen thumpity-thump, thumpity-thump and down the cellar stairs thumpity-thump, thumpity-thump, makin' the most awful racket you ever heard. It was more than we could stand. So we all followed the sound to see what was goin' on. When we got down the cellar stairs, we saw that it was a chair that had made all of that racket. There it was, with one of its legs pointin' to a place on the dirt floor. We all just stood and gawped till my brother Ike said that he believed that the chair was trying to tell us something about the place it was pointing at.

So Ike went and got a shovel and started diggin'. He didn't have to dig far before his shovel struck somethin' hard. Pretty soon we could see the edge of a box stickin' out. We all hollered for him to hurry up and uncover the rest of it. And the chair--it got so excited, it jumped up and down like it had gone plumb crazy.

When Ike got the box uncovered, Pop and the boys pried off the lid. And there was the body of a man all smooched with blood. It was plain as the nose on your face that he had been murdered, and the chair wanted folks to know it. Right then and there we decided to leave. Bein' strangers, everybody would think that we had murdered him and come there to hide the body. It didn't take long to fill up that hole and get out of that house.

The chair was awful mad about our leavin', and it went up the cellar stairs thumpity-thump, thumpity-thump louder than when it had gone down. Then it thumpity-thumped up the next set of stairs and the next louder still. When it got back into the attic, it THUMPITY-THUMPED so loud we thought it would thump all the plasterin' down on our heads. Nobody asked us why we were movin' out so soon, 'cause nobody ever stayed more than one night in that place, and most not that long. But I can tell you we were thankful to get back to Schoharie where chairs stay where they're put and don't go rarin' and rampagin' 'roun, scarin' folks out of their wits, pointin' out murders and goodness knows what!