The Art of Retelling a Goulish Tale

Author: Sadie Hoagland

Halloween has evolved since we were children. The holiday used to mean dressing up, making ghosts out of Kleenex and cotton balls, parading the streets and eating an obscene amount of candy out of pillowcases or plastic pumpkins.

The night was delightfully frightening - you never knew what was going to jump out at you next or who was behind the ghoulish masks. Though we are beyond trick-or-treating and many of us don't scare as easily as we once did, Halloween can still bring out our creative sides, whether it's through an elaborate costume, a cubist jack-o-lantern or a chilling ghost-story that makes you look over your shoulder as you cut across Battell Beach late at night.

Ghost stories haunt our culture and compose a prominent oral tradition. We've all heard the campfire classics and urban legends such as the one about the girl who, as she is driving home, notices a man following her, flashing his high beams. She becomes very frightened and races home, running from the car to her house. He gets out too and runs to her car. It turns out the man was following her because he had seen a man with a knife get in the back of her car and crouch behind the driver's seat.

There are many others, and with Halloween upon us, the Vermont autumn nights beg for a quiet voice to speculate the possibilities that lie waiting in the darkness, or the basement of Starr Library.

Ghost story-telling is an art in and of itself. We all know a good ghost story when we hear one and know that it takes an extra something to repeat it effectively. So how do you tell a good ghost story? There is often more potential fright in the telling than the actual tale, and in a well-told ghost story the audience's imagination will do far more to scare them than the story ever will.

The idea of the ghostly subject can be far scarier than any details - something to keep in mind. My father, an expert ghost-story teller, mastered this in a story that used to give me nightmares, though now I realize he never actually told a coherent tale. The story, so to speak, was of the "one-legged deer" that haunted the Idaho woods outside our cabin (the concept of the one-legged deer didn't actually become humorous until I was much older). As we sat on the floor listening to him by the firelight, he would tell a warm-up story.

He would then refer to the "one-legged deer story," pause, and shake his head solemnly, saying, "No, that's too scary for you kids."

Sometimes my mother was in on this and would sigh and tell my father that we were too young, or that he'd better not dare. Sometimes he would go so far as to start the story - a fisherman gets up before dawn and ventures into the cold and the fog and suddenly hears something in the bushes. But he never had to go farther because he would just jump a little and we'd scramble screaming into his lap. It was a perfect build-up. The idea of the story was more frightening than anything he might have actually told (especially involving a one-legged animal).

There certainly is an undeniable craft in ghost story-telling. Mark Twain, in his essay "How to Tell a Story," asserts that the "pause in front of the snapper on the end" is the crucial element to a good ghost story. To use Twain's example, the art is in knowing where to pause between the "Who's got my golden arm?" and the "YOU'VE GOT IT!"

The proximity to your audience becomes especially important if you've got an ending that involves jumping and yelling something to scare them, in which case you'll want to lean in real close and speak in almost a whisper before the grand finale.

When telling an urban legend, it is best to tell it as if you know for certain that it is true, and that it in fact happened to someone you know, your cousin perhaps or your best friend from sixth grade. This makes the listener inherently more interested.

Make sure to use details familiar to the auditors. It's best if the story takes place wherever you are, or nearby, and if the main character of the story is doing something your listener can relate to (i.e. babysitting or making out on the football field) rather than something less realistic (i.e. walking past the haunted mansion or plowing corn at night). Your listener should be eager to hear the end and left with a shiver.

As an example of this art form, here's a story I heard and I'd like to pass on...

So a neighbor of mine went to Middlebury, she graduated in 1998, and told me a pretty scary story over Fall Break. She was an Art major here, and she was doing a senior project on nature photography. She procrastinated until the end of the semester and so one weekend decided to go hike the Long Trail, camp for a few day and get it all done at once. Well, there had been some murders in Addison County over the past year, mostly young girls, which they later all connected to one serial killer. The suspect had escaped custody and had been seen up in the Green Mountains. People were warned not to go up in the mountains until he had been found. Well my neighbor heard this and didn't really think much of it. She thought the killer had probably hiked his way up to Canada. She also really wanted to get the project done, so even when her friends told her not to go, she was still determined. So she headed out on her trip and took some beautiful photos. Though she was a little more wary than usual, she didn't see anyone else on the trail and finished her project. The trip seemed to go smoothly until she got back to campus and began developing her photographs. (Pause) It was then she saw the pictures of herself sleeping.

This is, of course, a true story, and so be sure to remind your listeners that, and also when you tell it was your neighbor. Happy Halloween!