The Thing

The Thing is the seventh story in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It is about two teenage boys who see something horrible in a cornfield at night. This story is based off of one from the book Bluenose Ghosts.

The Story
Ted Martin and Sam Miller were good friends. They spent a lot of time together. On this particular night, they were sitting on a fence near the post office talking about one thing and another.

There was a field of turnips across the road. Surprisingly, they saw something crawl out of the field and stand up. It looked like a man, but in the dark, it was hard to tell for sure. As quickly as it had appeared, it was gone.

But soon it appeared again. It walked halfway across the road, then turned around and returned to the field.

Then it came for a third time and started toward them. By now, Ted and Sam were scared and they started running. But when they finally stopped, they decided they were being silly and childish. They weren’t so sure what had scared them. So they decided to go back and get a better look.

Pretty soon, they saw it, for it was coming to meet them. It was wearing black pants, a white shirt, and black suspenders.

Sam said, “I’m going to try to touch it. Then we’ll know if it’s real.”

He courageously walked up to it and peered into its face. It had bright, penetrating eyes that sunk deep into its head. It looked almost like a skeleton.

Ted took one look and screamed, and again he and Sam ran, but the corpse-like figure followed them. When they got to Ted’s house, they stood in the doorway and watched it, appalled. It stayed out in the road for a while, seeming to watch them in return, but once more, it vanished.

No more than a year later, Ted grew horribly ill and the sickness killed him. Toward the end, Sam sat up with him every night. The night Ted died, he looked just like the frightening thing that they had encountered a year before.