Southern Fried Rat and Other Gruesome Tales Read online

  Southern Fried Rat

  & Other Gruesome Tales

  DANIEL COHEN

  illustrated by Peggy Brier

  For the kids at B&B camp, Shohola, Pennsylvania

  Introduction—Grossed Out

  Oh, gross!

  That may be your reaction to many of the tales that you read in this book. These are tales of dead mice in soft-drink bottles, and of girls who try to dry their hair in microwave ovens, with disastrous results. There are severed heads and severed hands. There are stories that are funny in a disgusting sort of way, and stories that are just plain gruesome, as well as some that are just plain silly.

  But there is no way around it, most of the tales are pretty gross. Don't blame me. They are not my stories, they are yours. These are stories that people like you tell at slumber parties, or around campfires, or just during the course of an ordinary day.

  Well, I guess that I have been known to tell them too. But they didn't begin with me. They didn't begin with you, either. In fact, no one knows where most of these stories started. The tales in this book are taken from folklore, most of them from a branch of folklore called urban legends, or urban belief tales. They are stories told by people who live in cities or suburbs today, and most of the tales are told to be believed. Indeed, many of those who tell the stories actually do believe them. Some of these tales have appeared in one form or another in newspapers, or have been broadcast on television or radio news programs.

  Are they true? Probably not. There is not a credible shred of evidence that any of the tales in this book are really true, or have any substantial basis in truth. This does not keep them from being widely believed anyway.

  Why do we persist in believing such revolting and sometimes silly tales? Why do we seem to want to believe them? Why do we even want to listen to such tales in the first place? I don't know, but we do.

  You have been warned. There are some stomach-turning accounts ahead. A couple of the puns may make you groan in pain. I trust you will ignore the warning and go right ahead and read them anyway. And when you are finished reading the tales, you will repeat your favorites, with your own horrible additions and revolting variations, to your friends. When your friend is about to bite into his or her fast-food delight, you will recount what you have learned in this book.

  That, gentle reader, is the way that folklore spreads.

  Southern Fried Rat

  Jim and Karen had gone to the movies on Friday night. After the film was over, they both felt pretty hungry, so they decided to stop somewhere for a bite to eat. But where?

  They discussed the decision for a while. Hamburgers? No—they always went for hamburgers after a movie.

  How about pizza? Well, that would be nice, except the only decent pizza joint around was in a pretty rough neighborhood. Neither Jim nor Karen relished going into that neighborhood, particularly at night. You never could tell what might happen.

  How about fried chicken? A brand-new outlet for a popular fried chicken chain had opened up iust a few blocks away. Why not, they decided, it would make a nice change from hamburgers.

  They drove over to the new fried chicken place. It was jammed. It seemed as if everybody in town had the same idea.

  "Let's go someplace else," said Jim. "It's so crowded that we'll never get a table."

  Karen wanted to stay. "It smells so good, I really want chicken now. We can get a take-out order and eat it in the car."

  Jim didn't much like the idea of eating in the car. That got the upholstery dirty. But Karen's desire for fried chicken was too powerful to resist. Reluctantly, he agreed that they would get a take-out order and eat in the car.

  When they got to the counter, Jim ordered regular chicken and Karen ordered "extra crispy." Jim shuddered as he imagined the extra-crispy coating raining down on his clean upholstery.

  Behind the counter uniformed attendants were working with amazing speed, packaging up the orders and passing them out to the throng of eager customers. Jim and Karen's order arrived in a matter of minutes, and they carried the box out to the car.

  The place had been so crowded that Jim had been forced to park in the back of the lot, beyond the reach of the parking lot lights. It was pretty dark inside the car, but you didn't need lights to eat fried chicken.

  Jim, worrying about the upholstery, ate in silence. Karen, who really was hungry, tore into her order and was loudly crunching away at the extra crispy.

  "Hey, be careful about those crumbs," complained Jim.

  "I am being careful," said Karen, talking with her mouth full.

  After a few moments the crunching stopped, and Karen said,

  "You know, there's something funny about this flied chicken. It doesn't taste right." But she kept on eating for a moment. And then she said, "It doesn't feel right either. Jim, you better switch on the light."

  He did. Karen was correct; there was something funny about the fried chicken. Sticking out of the extra-crispy coating of the piece Karen had been eating was a three-inch tail. Somehow a rat had gotten in with the chicken pieces. It had been floured, fried up, and served to Karen. She had eaten half of it before she found out what it was.

  As soon as she realized what she had been eating, Karen went into shock. Jim felt pretty sick too, but he managed to drive to the hospital, where Karen had her stomach pumped.

  Karen's family threatened to sue. The fried chicken chain paid them a huge amount of money to keep quiet about what had happened, so the case never got to court, and it was never written up in the papers. Of course, the chicken people deny that it ever happened.

  Karen's financial future is assured, but they say that now she won't eat anything that she doesn't cook herself.

  —————

  The day was hot and Billy had a long walk from school, carrying a heavy load of books. He was getting horribly thirsty, so when he passed the local convenience store he stopped in to get a soft drink.

  He paid for bottle of cola and began to gulp it down. it tasted kind of funny, but since he was so very

  thirsty, he kept right on drinking. His eyes were closed as he tipped the bottle up to drain the last few drops. Then he felt something kind of slimy slip down the neck of the bottle and bump up against his lips.

  He held the bottle out where he could see it. There was something inside. It took Billy a moment before he could recognize what was in the bottle. It was the tail and rear legs of a partially decomposed mouse.

  Billy dropped the bottle on the ground and began vomiting immediately. He was in the hospital for weeks. The doctors said he was suffemg from some kind of food poisoning.

  Naturally, the cola bottling company said that there was no possible way the rodent piece could have gotten into the bottle, but they paid a big out-of-court settlement anyway, just to keep the incident out of the papers.

  Not only doesn't Billy drink cola anymore, he has become a vegetarian.

  —————

  Have you ever wondered why the hamburgers you make at home never taste quite like the ones that you get at the fast-food place? It's not the special sauce or the onions or pickles or anything like that. It's the meat. The fast-food place supplements its hamburger meat with ground-up worms.

  It figures, doesn't it? With all of those hamburger joints opening up all over the country, there just isn't enough beef to go around. So they have added the ground-up worm meat as a filler. Besides, it gives the hamburgers that special flavor. Naturally, they aren't going to tell the public about it.

  The government knows all about the worms, but they won't say anything. The hamburger chain contributes a lot of money to politicians.

  �
�————

  One of the major fast-food hamburger chains advertises that the meat used in their hamburgers is freshly ground. That sounds great, but there can be problems. One night the local outlet of this chain was unusually busy and nearly ran out of fresh hamburger. In the back they were frantically grinding more. Things became so rushed that one of the fellows who was grinding the meat got his finger cut off and ground up in the machine. The management didn't want to lose any customers. They went ahead and served up that batch of hamburgers anyway.

  —————

  A few years ago there was a popular new candy that fizzed in your mouth. It was mostly colored sugar with carbon dioxide bubbles inside. When you put it in your mouth, the sugar melted and released the bubbles. The candy didn't taste very good, but it did feel funny and was very popular. You don't see it around anymore. Want to know why?

  Sometimes little kids wouldn't wait to let the candy dissolve in their mouths. They would just swallow a whole bunch of it. It would begin fizzing violently in their stomachs, and a couple of kids actually died became their stomachs had been all ripped up inside.

  The manufacturers of the candy were a big, powerful company, so they managed to keep the stories out of the news. But they quietly took the candy off the market, and paid out a lot of money to parents.

  These are just a few recent examples of the "horrible discovery" tales that regularly sweep the nation. Sometimes these tales are fed by actual stories of food contamination that appear in the news. Most often they are simply rumors based on fear and distrust, and on the apparently irresistible human urge to tell a really disgusting story.

  The stories about the worm meat (which, incidentally, is more expensive than hamburger, in case you're interested) and the fizzing candy are totally false. That did not keep them from being widely believed anyway.

  The tradition of telling such tales is an old one that long predates the existence of fast-food chains. For hundreds of years throughout America and Europe, people have heard about the diner in a restaurant who finds a gravy-covered mouse on his plate or slivers of glass in his mashed potatoes.

  While there may be a grain of truth behind some of these tales, if they were all true we would either all have been poisoned long ago or the rodent population would be much smaller than it is today.

  I Wanna Hold Your Hand

  The old Boggs place was big, deserted, and very, very spooky. Like all big, deserted, and spooky-looking homes, this one had the reputation of being haunted. Or if not haunted, at least it had the reputation of being somehow or other evil and dangerous. People went out of their way to avoid it, and certainly no one would ever think of living there.

  The house had been deserted for years. In fact, no one in town could remember when anyone had actually lived in the Boggs place. No one even knew why it was called the Boggs place. Perhaps people named Boggs had once lived there, but no one seemed to know for sure. If the Boggses once had lived there, they had cleared out a long time ago and had left no relatives behind. No one in town had ever met anyone named Boggs. Nor could anyone recall anything specifically horrible that was ever supposed to have happened at the home.

  Inevitably, there were plenty of rumors. Some said there had been a murder there once, and that the house was haunted by the ghost of the murdered woman, or by the ghost of her murderer, depending on who you asked. Others said that a weird old man had once lived in the

  house all alone. People didn't see him very often, and one day when no one had seen him for a very long time, a group of men went up to the house and found the old man hanging from a beam in an upstairs bedroom. The body had been hanging there so long that the flesh had practically rotted away. According to this version, it's the old man's ghost that haunts the house.

  Others say that it was an old woman who lived up in the house all alone, and that she used to practice some sort of black magic. One night, goes this version of the story, there were terrible screams heard coming from the house. People saw a blinding flash of light, and then everything was silent. The next morning when the sheriff went up to investigate, the house was empty. The only clue to what might have happened to the old woman was a suspicious-looking pile of ashes. In this version of the story, the old woman had been involved in some sort of magical ceremony that went wrong, and she was burned by flames from the underworld. The house, they say, is still troubled by the demons she let loose that night.

  The final version of the tale says that the troubles of the Boggs place began more recently—long after the house was abandoned, by Boggs or any other legitimate owners. This version holds that a homicidal maniac who escaped from a nearby mental institution took up residence in the house, and that he lives there still, making horrible noises and doing strange things in order to frighten away those who might want to disturb his hiding place.

  No one has ever actually seen anything, be it ghost, demon, or maniac, at the house. They have just heard about others who have seen strange figures. Occasionally people would report seeing a light in the house. Just reflected sunlight, say the skeptics. Others report hearing strange noises coming from the empty house, or just getting a weird feeling whenever they get near it. Skeptics scoff at such stories, but they don't go near the house, either.

  So the Boggs place, which stands starkly alone at the top of a hill in the midst of what was once a large lawn, but is now overgrown with waist-high weeds, is rarely troubled by visitors. Still, there are always a few brave or foolhardy souls for whom something like the Boggs place holds an irresistible, even a fatal, attraction.

  Such a pair were Chris and Lisa. They weren't local—the locals were scared off long ago. They were counselors at a summer camp nearby. They had come up from the city, and they viewed the town with the same sort of amused contempt that most city people showed for it. When they heard about the tales surrounding the Boggs place, they decided that they were going to go up and explore it. No haunted house was going to scare them—they faced the subway every day.

  So one evening late in August, Chris and Lisa could be found making their way through the high weeds up to the front porch of the Boggs place. It had to be evening, for there was no challenge in visiting a haunted house in the middle of the day. And of course the weather had to be threatening. A summer thunderstorm was about to break at any moment. What is a haunted house without thunder and lightning and the wind howling outside?

  Chris and Lisa got to the front door just as the first few drops of rain began to fall. The door was open. The lock had long since rusted.

  Chris switched on his flashlight, and they began looking around. The house was not completely empty of furniture as they thought it might be. One room contained an easy chair and several old wicker rocking chairs.

  Everything in the place was covered by a thick layer of dust. When Chris flashed the light around the rooms, Lisa pointed out that in some places the dust seemed to be disturbed, as if by footprints.

  "Mice," said Chris, confidently. "Or squirrels."

  As they worked their way from room to room, a creaking sound was heard coming from one of the upper stories.

  "That sounds like footsteps," said Lisa, in a hushed and frightened voice.

  "Mice," said Chris, "or squirrels." But he was no longer so confident, because the noises really did sound like footsteps.

  "Let's get out of here," said Lisa. "I think we've explored enough."

  Chris eagerly agreed, and they made their way back through the room with the chairs and toward the front door. The storm had begun in earnest now, and there was a flash of lightning followed by a tremendous clap of thunder. In the flash, both Chris and Lisa saw, or

  thought they saw, a form standing in the waist-high weeds in the front of the house. There was another flash. The form was still there but it had moved.

  "Someone's out there," said Lisa, "or something."

  "If we get out in those weeds," said Chris, "whatever it is can sneak right up on us. We'd never know until it was t
oo late. I think we'll be safer here in the house until it's light."

  Spending the night in that house was not a pleasant prospect, but Lisa saw the wisdom of the suggestion. So they went back to the room with the chairs. Lisa sat down in the armchair, and Chris pulled one of the wicker rockers over next to it.

  The flashlight, which had been growing weaker by the minute, finally gave out entirely, and Chris and Lisa sat there in total darkness.

  "I'm scared," said Lisa.

  "So am I," said Chris.

  "Hold my hand, maybe we'll feel better."

  Chris reached over and grasped Lisa's hand and gave it a squeeze. It made them both feel better, momentarily. There was nothing that either one of them could do or say. They just sat there holding hands in the darkness, waiting for morning to come. Lisa could hear Chris rocking back and forth, and every once in a while he gave her hand a little squeeze.

  Lisa dozed off for a moment, but when she awoke she was still holding Chris's hand, and she could still hear his rocking chair squeaking. But slowly she became conscious of the fact that something was different, something had changed. It took a while to realize what had happened or not happened—Chris had not squeezed her hand for some time. Perhaps he was asleep. But no, she could still hear the rhythmic squeaking of the rocking chair. She wanted to call out to Chris, but terror had robbed her of her voice.

  Finally a smear of grayish light could be seen through the window. It was dawn. And as the room in which Lisa sat was illuminated, she saw what had happened.

  She was still holding Chris's hand—just his hand. The rest of him was hanging from a beam in the ceiling. And rocking rhythmically in a chair across the room was a huge, wild-looking man, dressed in rags and clutching an enormous, bloody knife.

  The Secondhand