Kids say the SCARIEST things

A compilation of creepy tales from the mouths of children

My 4-year-old daughter and I were getting ready to go to church, and as I’m picking out her clothing, I see her staring at her closet ceiling. I don’t think much of it and leave the room to find her missing shoe. I come back in and she’s still staring up at the same spot. I bend down next to her and stare up, too.

“What are you looking at?” I ask her. She tells me, “That man” with a tone that suggest it’s silly of me to even ask. I look more carefully, in case there’s a series of paint cracks that looks like a man — the house is really old, after all. I still can’t make anything out.

“Right there!” she says, her finger making a slow sway back and forth. “He has a long, snake neck.” The imagery gives me a chill. Where would she come up with something like that? A long, snake neck?

Then it dawned on me that years ago, I’d been told about a young man who hanged himself in the house a generation before we bought it, but I willingly never gave it much thought. I picked her up and dressed her in the living room.

It didn’t take long for me to find police records on where exactly the young man had killed himself.

That room is now for storage only.

—

My youngest daughter, then 6, had a fascination with knives. We’d find one hidden in her nightstand on the occasion we’d remember to look. To our knowledge, she never played with them; just kept one in her nightstand. Yet again one evening, I found a steak knife hidden under her big box of markers. Instead of scolding her for the hundredth time, my husband and I sat next to her on the bed and asked, in the most gentle way, why she feels she needs a knife so close. It took awhile to get her to speak, which was expected — she was always a very quiet one. She kept saying she didn’t want to tell us, but we assured her repeatedly that whatever she had to say would be ok with me and Daddy. When she finally began to speak, her voice was shaking.

“I don’t want them to kill me again,” she said hoarsely. “If I had a knife, I could have stopped those men who kicked in the door, and I could have my old life with my old family back.”

—

My 5-year-old son always attributed the sounds of our house settling at night to “white wolves” creeping about. One evening, just as I’d finished reading to him and closed the book, he turned his little back to me, rolling over to sleep. I tucked him in and he said, “The white wolves are our friends, Mommy.”

Thankful for his positive imagination, I agreed in a whisper, “Yes. The wolves are our friends.”

He half-turned his body for a sleepy goodnight kiss and said, “They protect me from the man who crawls on the floor and stands by my bed.”

—

I’m an elderly chap who enjoys the company of my two young grandchildren — they’re not siblings, they’re cousins — who visit every so often, but rarely together. One Thanksgiving evening, after everyone else had shuffled off to bed, the grandson and I stayed up to play a board game in my furnished basement. There’s a bedroom down there, and the door was open. He’d look up from a dice-roll here and there, and when I finally asked what he was looking at, he whispered,

“A lady. She’s pretty. Why is she hiding?”

I didn’t want to give away that it was giving me the willies, but we wrapped up the game and soon went to bed. I told him I didn’t know who she was as I tried to get him to fall asleep in bed with me.

Months later, my younger granddaughter visited and wanted to watch cartoons on the “big TV” downstairs. We were waiting on the roast, so I thought it’d be a great way to pass some time. We get to the bottom of the stairs, and she stops and looks into the dark, open room. “What’s wrong?” I ask. She grabs my hand and asks who “that lady” is. Could this be happening? I walked toward the room, flicked the lights on, and politely asked where the lady was. She said, “She wants to hide. Come on, Grandpa” and headed back upstairs.

The next Christmas, they were both here and a big, family party was underway. I admit to having a few rounds of good scotch (a lovely gift!), and danced my way to the Christmas tree where the young duo were gathered. I leaned over them to see what they were staring at, and they looked up at me.

“That’s the lady who hides downstairs, Grandpa,” my granddaughter said, pointing to an ornament with my late-wife’s young face. They were both looking at me for explanation, but I was now short of breath and trying to steady my glass.

My beloved Nancy had a fatal, epileptic seizure in our basement bedroom nearly 15 years prior. Needless to say, I wasn’t much company for the rest of the party.

After the family had gone, I moved my things back downstairs into that room and have been waiting for her to come out of “hiding” ever since.