The Dead Man's Hand

The Dead Man's Hand is a story about a group of students putting a scary prank on one of their own. It appears in More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.



The Story
The students at the school for nurses got along quite well with one another, except for Alice. The trouble with Alice was that she was perfect. At least that is how it seemed to the other students. She was always friendly and always cheerful. Nothing ever upset her. Her school assignments were always on time, and always perfect. She didn’t even bite her fingernails. Many of the student nurses resented Alice. They would have liked to see her fail at something–become frightened, or cry, or do something that showed she had weaknesses like they did.

One night several students tried to frighten Alice with a practical joke. They borrowed the hand of a corpse they had been studying in anatomy and tied it to the light cord in her closet. When she tried to turn on the light, she would find herself holding a dead man’s hand. “That would scare anybody,” one of them said. “If it doesn’t scare her, nothing will.” After tying the hand in place, they went to the movies. When they got back, Alice was asleep. But when they didn’t see her the next morning, they decided to find out what had happened.

There was no sign of Alice in her room. But they soon found her. She was sitting on the floor in her closet staring at the dead man’s hand and mumbling to herself. Alice didn’t even look up. The “joke” had worked, but nobody was laughing.