Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

I can’t count how many nights I spent huddled around a campfire deep in the Piney Woods National Forest of east Texas, listening to the scary stories and urban legends that turned darker the lower the fire burned.

It always ended with my uncle telling us to “sleep tight…” which of course, I was never able to.

Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

Fall is an incredible time to be outdoors and the perfect time to tell ghost stories. The night grows dark, the flames lay low and begin to smolder, uneven light flickers and shadows slither across otherwise familiar faces… there is no better way to pass the time.

I’ve put together a short list of my favorite urban legends and scary stories to tell in the dark for you to share with your own family.

The trouble with urban legends is most of them are steeped in truth…

But where does the truth end… and where does the story begin?

Can you separate fact from fiction?

Can you “up” the scare factor and make them more believable…more terrifying?

Below are just a few samples of some of the best ghost stories I’ve come across:

Drip Drip Drip:

One night a young girl, Lily Foster, is left alone for the night, in her country house, while her parents drove out to town for a party. This was fine with Lily, especially since she had her faithful dog, Scout, protecting her throughout the night.

She made herself something to eat and sat down at the kitchen table. Turning on the radio to her favorite station, she was surprised to hear a news bulletin declaring that an avenged murderer was on the loose. It advised that people secure all windows and doors as a safety precaution. With her dog by her side, the young girl locked the front and back doors. She went from window to window and locked each of them one at a time.

Lily reassured herself that she would be fine with her trusty dog and that her parents would be home shortly, anyway.

So, Lily had a pleasant, peaceful evening, and finally decided around eleven o’clock that it was time for bed.

She climbed the stairs to her bedroom and slid under the big, warm blanket on her bed. Before closing her eyes she reached her hand down under the bed, and allowed her dog to lick it- she did this every night because it comforted her. A short while later she awoke to the sound of a scratching noise at her bedroom window. She eyed the window and reminded herself that the whole house was locked and she was safe.

She stuck her hand under her bed and felt her dog’s slobbery tongue cross over the palm of her hand.

Sighing, she went back to sleep. An hour or so later she sat up in bed…She had heard footsteps in the hallway and crept out of bed to see if it was possibly just her parents returning from their party. Seeing nothing, she returned to bed. As she was about to stick her hand under the bed, she heard a drip, drip, drip, followed by some footsteps. She walked downstairs into the kitchen and secured the taps. That surely wasn’t the source of the drip.

She crept upstairs and climbed into bed. “This is silly,” she told herself “I’m probably just imagining things.”

She stuck her hand under the bed and felt the dog lick her hand. An hour later she awoke again. A little mad at this point, she jumped out of bed. The dripping wasn’t coming from the kitchen so it must be from the bathroom.

She crept along the side of the hallway and walked into the bathroom. Groping along the side of the wall with her left hand, looking for the light switch, she flicked the light on and gasped.

There, hanging from the shower rod was Scout.

Skinned… and dangling lifeless, a pool of blood had formed on the bathroom tile with a continuous ‘drip, drip, drip’ as the blood from the dog slowly spattered on the floor.

Something on the wall caught her eye; written on the wall was a message in blood…

“Humans can lick too.”

blood dripping on floor | Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

Some Things Are Better Left Unseen…

She commandeered the room in the basement of her dorm as soon as she realized she would have to pull an all-nighter in order to prepare for tomorrow’s final exam. Her roommate, Jenna, liked to get to bed early, so she packed up everything she thought she would need and went downstairs to study . . . and study . . . and study some more.

It was two o’clock, when she realized that she’d left one of the textbooks upstairs on her bed. With a dramatic sigh, she rose and climbed the stairs slowly to her third-floor dorm room.

The lights were dim in the long hallway, and the old boards creaked under her weary tread.

She reached her room and turned the handle as softly as she could, pushing the door open just enough to slip inside, so that the hall lights wouldn’t wake her roommate.

The room was filled with a strange, metallic smell. She frowned a bit, her arms breaking out into chills. There was a strange feeling of malice in the room as if a malevolent gaze were fixed upon her. It was a mind trick; the all-nighter was catching up with her.

She could hear Jenna breathing on the far side of the room—a heavy sound, almost as if she had been running. Jenna must have picked up a cold during the last tense week before finals. She crept along the wall until she reached her bed, groping among the covers for the stray history textbook.

In the silence, she could hear a steady drip-drip-drip sound. She sighed silently.

Facilities would have to come to fix the sink in the bathroom…again. Her fingers closed on the textbook. She picked it up softly and withdrew from the room as silently as she could.

Relieved to be out of the room, she hurried back downstairs, collapsed into an overstuffed chair and studied until six o’clock. She finally decided that enough was enough. If she slipped upstairs now, she could get a couple hours’ sleep before her nine o’clock exam.

The first of the sun’s rays were beaming through the windows as she slowly slid the door open, hoping not to awaken Jenna. Her nose was met by that same earthy, metallic smell a second before her eyes registered the scene in her dorm room. Jenna was spread-eagled on top of her bed against the far wall, her throat slashed from ear to ear and her nightdress stained with blood.

Two drops of blood fell from the saturated blanket with a drip-drip noise that sounded like a leaky faucet.

Scream after scream poured from her mouth, but she couldn’t stop herself any more than she could cease wringing her hands. All along the hallway, doors slammed and footsteps came running down the hall.

Within seconds the other students had gathered in her doorway, and one of her friends gripped her arm with a shaking hand and pointed a trembling finger toward the wall. Her eyes widened in shock at what she saw. Then she fainted into her friend’s arms.
On the wall above her bed, written in her roommate’s blood, were the words: “Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light?”

Scary Writing In blood | Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

Ring Ring…

A married couple was going out for the evening and called in a teenage babysitter to take care of their three children. When she arrived they told her they probably wouldn’t be back until late, and that the kids were already asleep so she needn’t disturb them.

It should have been an easy night…

The babysitter starts doing her homework while awaiting a call from her boyfriend. After a while the phone rings.

She answers it, but hears no one on the other end — just a slow…heavy…breathing.

After several moments the line goes dead.

Ten minutes later, the phone rings again.

She answers, and this time, there’s a man on the line who says, in a chilling voice, “Have you checked on the children?”

At first, she thinks it might have been the father calling to check up and he got interrupted, so she decides to ignore it. She goes back to her homework, then the phone rings again.

Ring Ring

“Have you checked on the children?” says the creepy voice on the other end.

“Mr. Murphy?” she asks, but the caller hangs up again.

She decides to phone the restaurant where the parents said they’d be dining, but when she asks for Mr. Murphy she is told that he and his wife had left the restaurant 45 minutes earlier.

So she calls the police and reports that a stranger has been calling her and hanging up. “Has he threatened you?” the dispatcher asks. No, she says. “Well, there’s nothing we can really do about it. You could try reporting the prank caller to the phone company.”

A few minutes go by and she gets another call.

Ring. Ring

“Why haven’t you checked the children?” the voice says.
“Who is this?” she asks, but he hangs up again. She dials 911 again and says, “I’m scared. I know he’s out there, he’s watching me.”

“Have you seen him?” the dispatcher asks. She says no. “Well, there isn’t much we can do about it,” the dispatcher says. The babysitter goes into a panic and pleads with him to help her.

“Now, now, it’ll be okay,” he says. “Give me your number and street address, and if you can keep this guy on the phone for at least a minute we’ll try to trace the call. What was your name again?”


“Okay, Linda, if he calls back we’ll do our best to trace the call, but just keep calm. Can you do that for me?”

“Yes,” she says, and hangs up. She decides to turn the lights down so she can see if anyone’s outside, and that’s when she gets another call.

Ring Ring

“It’s me,” the familiar voice says. “Why did you turn the lights down?”

“Can you see me?” she asks, panicking.
“Yes… that’s such a pretty dress you’re wearing Linda” he says after a long pause.

“Look, you’ve scared me,” she says. “I’m shaking. Are you happy? Is that what you wanted?”

“Then what do you want?” she asks.

Another long pause. “To see what your insides look like, Linda.” He said with a low ominous chuckle…
She slams the phone down, terrified. Almost immediately it rings again.

Ring Ring

“Leave me alone!” she screams, but it’s the dispatcher calling back. His voice is urgent

“Linda, we’ve traced that call. It’s coming from inside the house. Get out of there! Now!!!”

She tears to the front door, attempting to unlock it and dash outside, only to find the chain at the top still latched. In the time it takes her to unhook it she sees a door open at the top of the stairs. Light streams from the children’s bedroom, revealing the profile of a man standing just inside.

She finally gets the door open and bursts outside, only to find an officer standing on the doorstep with his gun drawn. The officer rushes in and up the stairs… They capture the man and as they drag him down the stairs linda notices the blood… but it’s not his own.

As he’s being lead to the car, the man screams:


scary-killer-with-knife|Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

These are just a couple of my favorite scary stories… but there are so many more floating around and so many variations that there’s no way to even make a dent in them.

If you want a great place to start looking for new scary stories to make your next campfire a real fright fest… Click here now!

One thing to keep in mind…not every scary story needs a long set up…sometimes even just two sentences can be enough to raise the hair on the back of your neck:

Creepy 2 Sentence Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark…

Creepy Two Sentence Scary Stories | Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark 2 3 4 5 6 7 Image Credit:

Bonus: this one would be a little long to commit to memory and tell around a campfire but it is by far one of the most unsettling stories I’ve ever read. Caution: This one gave me nightmares….

The Russian sleep experiment:


This was before closed circuit cameras so they had only microphones and five-inch thick glass porthole sized windows into the chamber to monitor them. The chamber was stocked with books, cots to sleep on but no bedding, running water and toilet, and enough dried food to last all five for over a month.


Everything was fine for the first five days…





They continued whispering to the microphones until the second of the captives started to scream. The non-screaming captives took the books apart, smeared page after page with their own feces and pasted them calmly over the glass portholes. The screaming promptly stopped.

So did the whispering to the microphones.


In fact it was the amount of oxygen five people would consume at a very heavy level of strenuous exercise. On the morning of the 14th day, the researchers did something they said they would not do to get a reaction from the captives, they used the intercom inside the chamber, hoping to provoke any response from the captives they were afraid were either dead or vegetables.


To their surprise, they heard a single phrase in a calm voice response:

“We no longer want to be freed.”



The food rations past day five had not been so much as touched. There were chunks of meat from the dead test subject’s thighs and chest stuffed into the drain in the center of the chamber, blocking the drain and allowing four inches of water to accumulate on the floor.

Precisely how much of the water on the floor was actually blood was never determined…


The abdominal organs below the ribcage of all four test subjects had been removed…

While the heart, lungs, and diaphragm remained in place, the skin and most of the muscles attached to the ribs had been ripped off, exposing the lungs through the ribcage.



To everyone’s surprise…


In the struggle, one of the four living subjects had his spleen ruptured and he bled out almost immediately.



The surviving three test subjects…


The most injured of the three was taken to the only surgical operating room that the facility had. In the process of preparing him to have his organs placed back within his body it was found that he was effectively immune to the sedative they had given him. He fought furiously against his restraints when the anesthetic gas was brought out to put him under.

The subject managed to tear most of the way through a four inch wide leather strap on one wrist, even through the weight of a 200 pound soldier was holding that wrist as well. It took only a little more anesthetic than normal to put him under, and the instant his eyelids fluttered shut, his heart stopped.

In the autopsy of the test subject that died on the operating table…


The second survivor had been the first of the group of five to start screaming. His vocal cords destroyed, he was unable to beg or object to surgery, and he only reacted by shaking his head violently in disapproval when the anesthetic gas was brought near him.

He shook his head yes when someone suggested, reluctantly, they try the surgery without anesthetic and did not react for the entire six hour procedure of replacing his abdominal organs and attempting to cover them with what remained of his skin.


One terrified nurse assisting the surgery stated that she had seen the patient’s mouth curl into a smile several times, whenever his eyes met hers.


It was simple. “Keep cutting.”






To everyone’s surprise, all three of the subjects stopped struggling the moment it was known that they were going back in the gas chamber. It was obvious that at this point all three were putting up a great struggle to stay awake. One of the subjects that could speak was humming loudly and continuously; the mute subject was straining his legs against the leather bonds with all his might, first left, then right, then left again for something to focus on.



They were normal most of the time but then, sometimes they would flat line inexplicably. It looked as if he were repeatedly suffering brain death, before returning to normal. As they focused on paper scrolling out of the brainwave monitor only one nurse saw his eyes slip shut at the same moment his head hit the pillow. His brainwaves immediately changed to that of deep sleep, then flat lined for the last time as his heart simultaneously stopped.


His brainwaves showed the same flat lines as one who had just died from falling asleep. The commander gave the order to seal the chamber with both subjects inside, as well as three researchers. One of the named three immediately drew his gun and shot the commander point blank between the eyes, then turned the gun on the mute subject and blew his brains out as well.


The subject smiled.



So… nearly… free…”

Russian Sleep Experiment Scary Photo | Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

Need a little more inspiration? Check out these 30 urban legends that turned out to be true…

What’s your favorite scary story to tell around the campfire? Think you can give us a fright?

Share it in the comments below… I’d love to read.

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