6 Bedtime Stories In History Creepier Than Our Horror Films

What about the Agropelter, which'll cave in your skull and rip your arms off? They were said to specifically hate loggers, rather than human beings in general. Think of them as hyper-aggressive Loraxes; they don't just speak for the trees, they break off pieces of those trees and bash unsuspecting lumberjacks in the dome with them.

Margaret R. Tryon
And break pieces off you too, of course.

The Rumtifusel, meanwhile, pretends to be a fine mink coat, then wraps itself around the person who touches it and sucks him or her down to the bone with hundreds of tiny pore-like mouths. It was probably invented to explain owl pellets (they're meant to be the fluttery remains of the clothing left behind by the victims), and it's just ... horrifying.

Margaret R. Tryon
Pictured: Something easier than explaining owl shit apparently.

The whole book is available online in full, along with a few other lumberjack-y goodies, such as Yarns Of The Big Woods and The Hodag And Other Tales Of The Logging Camps.

With his nasty hair and hands.

See! his nails are never cut;

They are grimed as black as soot;

And the sloven, I declare,

Never once has combed his hair;

Anything to me is sweeter

Than to see Shock-headed Peter."

Lesson: Groom yourself or you'll turn into a freakish pariah even if you are only 3-6 years old.

Side effect: Learn to be cruel to children whose parents don't take care of them. They're inhuman little monsters.

There are also several stories that would be right at home in the Potterverse -- namely, the ones concerning homicidal grownups. The villain of The Story Of Little Suck-A-Thumb features a scissor-man who cuts off the figures of kids who won't keep their thumbs out of their mouths. Actually, we're not even sure if he's the villain of the story -- it sounds like the narrator really has it out for Little Suck-a-Thumb.

Heinrich Hoffmann
The door flew open, in he ran,

The great, long, red-legged scissor-man.

Oh! children, see! the tailor's come

And caught out little Suck-a-Thumb.

Snip! Snap! Snip! the scissors go;

And Conrad cries out "Oh! Oh! Oh!"

Snip! Snap! Snip! They go so fast,

That both his thumbs are off at last.

Mamma comes home: there Conrad stands,

And looks quite sad, and shows his hands;

"Ah!" said Mamma, "I knew he'd come

To naughty little Suck-a-Thumb."

Lesson: Keep your thumbs out of your mouth because I said so, not because everything you touch is covered in E. coli and MRSA.

Side effect: For every Santa Claus, there is a crazed, omniscient tailor who breaks into houses with large pairs of scissors. It's better if you prioritize not sucking your thumb over being nice.

Dr. Hoffmann's series was a hit with parents everywhere. In 1911, his stories hit American shelves in the Slovenly Betsy series, which we assure you is just bursting with the same dark, child-mauling humor that made Struwwelpeter so popular with Hoffman's Teutonic tyke-wranglers. But this instalment is less a series of side-effect-ridden lessons and more a litany of misdiagnoses of small children. Augustus, Who Would Not Have Any Soup, for example, is a fun story of a little boy who develops an eating disorder and dies.

Heinrich Hoffmann

Observe Phoebe Ann, "a very proud girl/Her nose had always an upward curl." Her problem seems to have more to do with the size of her head than the angle of her nose.

Walter Hayn
And those are the only physical problems we see here.

At first glance, "Pauline" appears to be your average prepubescent pyromaniac.

Walter Hayn
But Pauline said, "Oh, what a pity!

For when they burn it is so pretty;

They crackle so, and spit, and flame;

And Mamma often burns the same.

I'll only light a match or two

As I have often seen my mother do."

Not so! If you look closely, you'll see that loving fire is not Pauline's real problem. As she lights her matches, she has a moral debate with her two cats. They're very vocal and gesticulate freely -- to Pauline's eyes and ears, anyway. Once she lights her second match, we see clear proof that Pauline has indeed never given into her desire to light matches, before, because she Immediately immolates herself while the cats look on in horror.

Heinrich Hoffmann

Mary AKA "The Little Glutton" was actually doing fine until she made the all-too-easy mistake of trying to drink honey straight from a beehive.

Walter Hayn
Children who liked food were a major problem in the 19th century.

See, it could have stopped here, like this. "Lesson: Don't make your mom sad by eating more than your family can afford. There are serious socioeconomic implications you don't quite understand, yet."

But it didn't.

Walter Hayn
Lesson: Beehives are full of BEES.

And what about Polly, the tomboy who wanted to run and play like every child ever? After running too hard, she fell and broke her leg. Her story really says more about doctors and paramedics than children.

Walter Hayn
Lesson: When carrying a patient to the hospital, make sure to bring all of her limbs.

Not only did the doctors botch the patch up, forcing Polly to use crutches for the rest of her life, the last panel suggests that as an old woman, Polly prepared her own gravesite, complete with the commemorative crutches.

Walter Hayn
(In case you were wondering, Polly did not survive. How else will you learn?)

It is probably fitting to close Dr. Hoffmann's series of bewildering conduct-related childhood maladies with this image of a very large rabbit wearing glasses, shooting a man who is falling down a well.

Walter Hayn
The poor man's wife was drinking up

Her coffee in her coffee-cup;

The gun shot cup and saucer through;

"Oh dear!" cried she; "what shall I do?"

There lived close by the cottage there

The hare's own child, the little hare;

And while she stood upon her toes,

The coffee fell and burned her nose.

'Oh dear!' she cried, with spoon in hand,

"Such fun I do not understand."

Lesson: Just don't leave the house. Ever.

Except... all of the shadow-pictures are unsettling as hell. They look like phantasmagoric monsters in an inkblot test for serial killers (Rorschach wouldn't start interpreting these inkblots as windows into the diseased mind until 1921 and he was a nut for inkblot parlor games). They're the kinds of things you see when you have sleep paralysis.

Ruth McEnery Stuart
The Friendly Chickens look like conjoined chicken fetuses.

Ruth McEnery Stuart
"Blowing crooked bubbles." Yeah, that checks out.

Ruth McEnery Stuart
Dipsey Doodle and his brother "have ears like one another." (Do they? Where?)

Ruth McEnery Stuart
A baffling story about crying and "feeling badly."

Ruth McEnery Stuart
Hey kids! Don't be like the Bad Boy -- you'll be put in the stocks, too!

Ruth McEnery Stuart
And this is just clearly a penis.

We'll get right to it: This book is bleak. There's nothing funny about dying children, and these are, allegedly, based on actual events. That being said, the idea of other, healthy children actually reading this stuff is absolutely daffy. If you're in the mood for self-torment, go ahead and read the full stories. If not, we'll just highlight a few passages believed to encourage piety (instead, somehow, of terror) in young children.

We'll start as gently as we can with the 14-year-old girl whose life was turned upside down by her conversion and subsequent terminal illness. When she wasn't sleeping -- and sometimes when she was -- she was literally begging for death. She refused to see a doctor and spent most of her time saying things like, "How long sweet Jesus? Finish thy work sweet Jesus, come away sweet dear Lord Jesus, come quickly; sweet Lord help, come away, now, now, dear Jesus come quickly; Good Lord give patience to me to wait thy appointed time; Lord Jesus help me, help me, help me." God eventually did her a solid and let her die.

State Library of Victoria
Anything to shut her up.

Kicking it up a notch was the seven-year-old boy who didn't even want to see a doctor -- he just wanted to die. This is perfectly reasonable when you consider the fact that his very pious sister was also terminally ill and would follow him to the grave three or four weeks later.

Finally (because we just can't anymore, seriously...) we're given the tale of the five-year-old boy who "in prayer ... he would beg, and expostulate, and weep so, that sometimes it could not be kept from the ears of neighbours." In the presence of swearing, he would immediately start trembling with horror. According to the book, "He was wont oftentimes to complain of the naughtiness of his heart, and seemed to be more grieved for the corruption of his nature, than for actual sin." Because of course he was. He was five. This poor boy would apparently sit in corners and berate himself for being a human being, usually while crying. Even on his deathbed, he clung to his guilt, saying, "Lord be merciful to me, a poor sinner." The author decided to end his story with the words, "He died August 8, 1664. Hallelujah."

Even five-year-olds can live in fear and die with dignity! ...Hallelujah?

It-narratives tended to focus on the wild adventures of everyday bullshit like coins and pincushions, an experience you can replicate for free by visiting your nearest garage sale and dropping a shitload of mescaline.

One of the first it-narratives was The Golden Spy, a novel starring an ensemble cast of coins who team up to talk shit about their owners and the terrible state of society because fantasy is all about escapism and having fun. The books even came prefaced with a warning from the author purporting the coins' confessions had been edited down, lest they "destroy all confidence between man and man ... and put an end to human society." It was a ballsy claim on par with prefacing The Little Engine That Could with a note telling parents that letting their children read unsupervised could result in them rising up and bringing down the system.

Publications Internationa
You don't even want to know what Spot the Dog's deal is

Despite appearing on bookshelves in the days when both women were still considered conduits of the supernatural and bookshelves hadn't yet been invented, the it-narrative became the best-selling literary trend of the 17th century -- presumably, ranking alongside classics such as Eat, Pray, Die at 17 and Slaughterhouse-Tithe. The range of it-narratives then grew to encompass all manner of objects from coaches and animals to walking canes and dolls to tea cups and clothing. It's been argued that Memoirs Of A Woman Of Pleasure -- a book you might know better as Fanny Hill -- is an it-narrative of an "enthusiastic" vagina.

Amazon Digital Services
It was no Chuck Tingle, but it worked for its time.

Instead of farting on people a la Terrance and Phillip of South Park, Gargantua and Pantagruel invariably shower hapless peasants and hardened soldiers alike in torrents of urine during the course of their adventures together. It's basically their father-son bonding time, like throwing a football around in the back yard. They encounter a colorful cast of cheekily named dunderheads, such as Lord Kissbreech and Lord Suckfist, and no topic is considered out of bounds; he even writes about papal approval of one's basic human right to fart freely, at one's own discretion, without being shamed by the people nearest to Ground Zero, where it is virtually impossible to hide your guilt (unless you are fortunate enough to own a dog). As a bonus, there are a number of chapters containing long lists of rude and ribald insults ready made for use in whatever way you, gentle reader, deem fit.

Gustave Dore
"He did cry like a cow!" (It loses something in translation.)

One of the fascinatingly subtle details of the series is that Gargantua and Pantagruel aren't introduced to us as giants. That is a revelation meant to dawn on us after reading about the umpteenth time they drowned their enemies in piss. Or by looking at the pictures. In fact, there are many subtleties hidden here and there throughout the series, and its satirical nature allows the author, Francois Rabelais (who published his first book under the anagrammatic pen name Alcofribas Nasier) to comment on the overly superstitious and eminently dysfunctional society in which he lived. He also has fun as a narrator, missing an entire battle because he was exploring the inside of Pantagruel's mouth the whole time.

via annatambour.net
Wait, are we sure this isn't a Chuck Tingle book too?

Intertwined with his satirical observations about the corruption of the clergy and the general slack-jawed stupidity human beings are given to when someone hands them a sword are a number of clever little anecdotes about the side characters. In one of these, one of Pantagruel's friends, Epistemon, gets his head lopped off and then sewed back on. He farts himself awake and eagerly tells his companions all about his trip to hell, which is apparently not unlike Detroit. Rather than screaming in agony as they bathe in a lake of fire, the souls in hell just work shitty jobs for shitty pay. Forever.

Marina LOVES Harry Potter and really enjoyed poking fun with this article. At Pottermore, she is a Ravenclaw (Hogwarts), a Pukwudgie (Ilvermorny), and has a lovely, supple and flexible 14-inch pine-wood wand with a dragon heartstring core. Her Patronus is a swallow. Adam, meanwhile, is a Hufflepuff (Hogwarts), a Pukwudgie (Ilvermorny), and is packing a slightly springy 12 1/2" laurel wood wand with a dragon heartstring core. His Patronus is a black mamba because he's rad.

It's Spring Break! You know what that means: hot coeds getting loose on the beaches of Cancun and becoming imperiled in all classic beach slasher ways: man-eating shark, school of piranhas, James Franco with dreadlocks. There are so many films about vacations gone wrong, it's a chore to wonder if there's even such a thing as a movie vacation gone right. Amity Island and Camp Crystal Lake are out. So what does that leave? The ship from Wall-E? Hawaii with the Brady Bunch? A road trip with famous curmudgeon Chevy Chase? On this month's live podcast Jack O'Brien and the Cracked staff are joined by some special guest comedians to figure out what would be the best vacation to take in a fictional universe. Tickets are $7 and can be purchased here!

Also check out 6 Terrifying Children's Cartoons From Around The World and The 5 Most Excessively Creepy Children's Educational Videos.

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