The Thing at the Foot of the Bed and Other Scary Tales

A mysterious hitchhiker, a lovelorn pig, and a backseat gangster are among the colorful characters that populate these spooky stories. Noted folklorist Maria Leach spins a tapestry of yarns that originated in the British Isles, New England, and the American South. Moody black-and-white drawings complement the stories, which range from humorous and playful to downright eerie.
There’s the one about the fellow who saw two eyes staring at him from the foot of the bed, and the one about the family that ran away from their malevolent household spirit only to find that it had come with them. The tale of the golden arm, a favorite of Mark Twain’s, is a standard of campfire gatherings. Other chilling stories recount scenes from haunted houses, ghostly visitations, and midnight trips to the graveyard. An amusing selection of Do’s and Don’t’s About Ghosts offers advice to those who go looking for scares as well as those who find them accidentally, and the stories’ sources and backgrounds are explained in helpful notes and a bibliography. An enjoyably creepy collection of tales. -- Through Raspberry Colored Glasses.

Dialects, folk speech, and slang were the particular interests of Maria Leach (1892-1977), a noted American scholar of folklore who wrote and edited books for adults as well as children. She spent a dozen years compling her distinguished two-volume study, the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend.