Campfire Classics
You have probably heard versions of these before. Around a fire, maybe. Or at a sleepover where nobody slept afterward.
9 stories
Campfire Classics
The Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow
A schoolteacher with a neck like a periscope and zero danger instincts rides home alone through the creepiest valley in New York after a party where everyone was telling ghost stories. A headless man on a horse shows up. It goes badly. In the morning, there is a smashed pumpkin. Nobody has ever fully explained the pumpkin.
Campfire Classics
The Vanishing Hitchhiker
A guy picks up a girl on a dark road. She gives him an address, sits in the back, and watches the trees like she has seen them before. When he pulls into the driveway, the seat is empty. The door never opened. The woman who answers the door is not surprised. Her daughter died on that road. Years ago. She does this every year.
Campfire Classics
Bloody Mary
Three times in the dark, and something looks back: a complete history of a game that children invented and then immediately regretted.
Campfire Classics
Resurrection Mary
A young woman in white has been hitchhiking the same stretch of Archer Avenue since the 1930s, which is either a ghost story or an extremely consistent commute.
Campfire Classics
The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs
The phone has been ringing all evening and the police keep saying the same thing, which is that you should leave the house right now, which seems like an odd thing to say.
Campfire Classics
Cropsey
Staten Island kids told each other about the monster in the tunnels, which was supposed to be a story to scare each other with, and then children started disappearing.
Campfire Classics
The Hook Man
Two teenagers park at a lovers' lane, hear something scrape the car, and drive away fast, which turns out to have been the correct decision.
Campfire Classics
The Ghost Ship Palatine
A ship full of German immigrants wrecked off Block Island in 1738, possibly with help from the islanders, and has been seen burning offshore every December since, which is either a haunting or a very consistent weather phenomenon that locals have chosen not to investigate.
Campfire Classics
The Licked Hand
A story about a dog, a dripping sound, and the specific cruelty of discovering that the thing keeping you safe was never what you thought it was.