Hello Children! Today we’re featuring a pair of new tales that are certain to make you appreciate your youth while you’ve still got it.

The Crying Woman

One night when we were young, my brother and I snuck out of the house to see what went on after bedtime. We got as far as the edge of town, where there was a seedy bar called Donna’s. A woman was standing outside against the wall, in a spot just past the glow of a streetlight where we could barely see her. We froze to avoid getting caught; then, we heard her sobbing. For awhile my brother and I stayed where we were. We weren’t sure what to do, but listening to her cry in the dark was making us nervous. We tried to call to her, but our voices wouldn’t come out. We started to walk towards her, and as we did she slumped down and fell over into the light on the sidewalk. Her eyes were staring forward; she was dead. The sobbing, however, continued. When the police found her the next morning, they didn’t notice any unusual sounds. That tape recorder was too high-quality for us to just leave with her.

Instruments of Doom

One time my friends and I went out into the woods to hunt for treasures. Billy, who knew the area best, went on ahead before any of us could see where he was going. As we tried to find him, Kevin spotted an old drum lying on the ground. He picked it up and we admired it. It looked old enough that it could have belonged to a pirate, or a civil war soldier, or Native Americans. We didn’t have a very clear grasp of history. Kevin tested it to see how it sounded, and it made a rich thump. He started playing more, getting into a rhythm, and the more he played the drum, the more the trees echoed with a pitter-pat sound that was just like horse hooves. That was when I realized that the sound was horse hooves, drawing in from the distance, along with men whooping and yelling. I told Kevin to stop playing, and he turned to me and cried that he couldn’t. I tried to run over and knock the drum away, but at that point we could hear the horses passing by us. I felt something brush my shoulder, but nothing was there. There was a loud bang, and Kevin fell down and stopped playing. He was dead.

In the silence that followed, I saw Billy coming back through the trees. Before I could say anything, he put something up to his lips. The slurred noise of a kazoo filled the air. As it droned on, I got the feeling that Billy also couldn’t stop playing. The more he played the kazoo, the more the air started to smell like Mad Dog 20/20, and we could hear a man’s voice slurring something unintelligible in tune with the kazoo. I tried to stop Billy, but he stumbled off toward the railroad tracks and I wasn’t able to keep up. They say that at night on those tracks, when the moon is full, you can still hear the kursed kazoo and smell the low-end fortified wine.