Prepare For A Scare: Why Kids’ Horror Is Important
By: Priya Sridhar
Tags: Cats, Literature, Childrens Books, Book Review, Zombies

It was Halloween time. The teachers would create a punch with dry ice so that it would smoke, taste ravioli for my vegetarian self to see if it had cheese or chicken, and deck out in costumes. (Spoiler alert: it was chicken.)Ms. R sat us down one time and opened a picture book. It didn’t seem so bad, about a girl with a ribbon around her neck.

Then Mrs. R got to the end, showing us the pictures. We were all gasping and screaming. I haven’t read the rest of the book or the stories, but the images are online. They reflected my horror. Even though it’s been more than two decades, the story still gives me the chills. I felt better when I read the story aloud to an Israeli friend, and he started cursing on realizing that was the ending.

Now it’s a little past Halloween, when I intended to post this. I like writing horror and reading stories, either for my own time or to help out my friends. Even so, as a kid, it took me a while to realize why. I say this as I’m wrapping up Ghostology by Lucinda Curtle and Dugald A. Steer, a children’s book that dives into the world of haunting and spirits. It treats ghosts as real. That’s what adds to the joy, while there are hints that this is all for fun. Yet we know where to draw the line between facts and fiction.

Studying Ghosts To Understand Them

Ghostology is purportedly written by a ghostologist, an expert who studies ghosts and their folklore. The author has ostensibly died but has sent the manuscript over to be published, welcoming the reader to learn more about these strange happenings all over the world. We dive into history and geography, as well as for deciding what to pack when ghost-hunting. I didn’t know that Anne Boleyn sometimes appeared since her stepdaughter Mary Tudor is seen more in ghost stories.

The book is nicely designed, with a yellow tint for the pages to simulate old age, and a few foldouts to educate more thoroughly on the nature of ghosts. There are hints that the author may not be as absent as it first seems, though I haven’t found any solid conclusions yet.

Does learning about ghosts scare me? No. Thanks to the book’s factual tones, I can determine what is normal and what isn’t. If there were tales of terror in the night, like what Mrs. R. told us, that would be a different story. I would be making sure that the lights are on and my incense is ready to do a cleaning.

In this case, however, I like to be reassured. After all, when you are warned to not read something before bed, you wonder about the nightmares that will ensue. There are hints that the ostensible “single” author made the mistake of studying ghosts while alive. Fortunately, they are just little bits and pieces scattered through the book, including an entire page that seems to be missing and neatly sheared. When I feel ready to explore the whole, I will later after opening a secret entry. It seems that the mystery will keep ongoing, and lending to the joy.

Would this book scare a child? It seems possible. After all, the unknown scares us more than a story’s whole. As the whole is possible, it means the fear won’t last forever.

Why Kids Need To Be Scared

Horror and fantasy got me into reading. I was averse to both because I thought stories were scary. To an extent, some are. I remember staying awake at night after reading the Goosebumps novel Ghost Beach, which makes you squint at the water rippling against rocks because of the caves that may be next to them.

A horror story is basically a roller-coaster ride. You get on it, pull down the bar, and brace yourself. That’s what makes it super fun.

Fun fact: I hated roller coasters as a kid. They seemed too scary even when I determined I would go on them and tried to be obnoxious towards my siblings about the fear. My parents would usually let me sit them out if I wished. Sometimes, however, I went. At first, they were too fast for my liking.

It took until I was a teenager to appreciate that rollercoasters are just rides. They’re not actually going to hurt you. Instead, you get a thrill that you are hurling along at massive speeds, and the drops just make your stomach hurt a little. You can relax a little afterward, knowing that you are okay. The trick is to make sure to leave your glasses in a locker, so they don’t fly off.

Why You Need To Identify Fictional Scares

For better or for worse, sometimes people can’t identify what is a monster and what isn’t. Do we know why? Sadly, no. It’s a primal fear that we become terrified of the dark, especially when dealing with horror. We see other things as scary: heights, snakes in my case (in the wild only; I’m fine with tame and pet snakes), and sometimes even raisins. Other people use racism and homophobia as an excuse to get scared and lash out in fear.

We do want to believe there are things in the night we don’t understand. That can make us susceptible to fraud or to committing terrible acts. Adam Ruins Everything covered this in their Halloween episode, how people want to believe that the monsters in the night can scare a person. He said the real terror is that other people will take advantage of your primal fear and watch gleefully while counting the dollars from your purse. That can include newspapers blowing up a hoax on the radio, as a means to discredit the form of communication and sell more papers. In other cases, the fears are people conducting insurance scams and getting caught rather quickly. Realism is more depressing, because we have to confront that everyone is capable of murdering or taking advantage of you, and there are no rules that you can follow.

In short, never pay someone to tell you that a monster is there. They may be fleecing you. Then they get away and count the cash, all quite easily.

The Victorians were guilty of this with the Spiritualist movement. Not every person believed in it or in the ghosts. Still, enough did that spiritualism became lucrative for the mediums who worked with it. There were exceptions, such as those with exploitative managers or who could not put on a convincing show.

Are ghosts monsters? They can be, especially when you think they are a dead father, brother, or family member. Don’t fear the deceased in this case, however; aim a stink-eye at the living.

Spiritualism was a movement where people claimed to see ghosts. They would host seances, demonstrate proof that spirits had visited them, and ask for payment from grieving families. The Victorians had a habit of photographing children after they died, as a means to commemorate them. There was a question of why death had to happen, and why we couldn’t contact our loved ones.

How did mediums do it? There was a simple solution: they bribed servants for personal information on the deceased. Or they did their homework on the subject in question, to provide proof that they came back. Ectoplasm, or the essence of a ghost, was sadly not real. It was often a trick of the light in photographs, which could capture sudden flashes and images. Or the substance bottled in jars was just another trick, with glue or cheesecloth. Mediums would take advantage of the seance requirement for dim lights to perform little parlor tricks.

One man set out to expose all of these people as frauds. For the most part, he succeeded in the long run, shinning a light on the ghosts, sometimes literally. This also made him the most hated man in the Spiritualist community. That was Harry Houdini, famed escape artist and stage magician.

Houdini knew that Spiritualists were frauds. That was because he trained to be one until a crisis of conscience overtook him, in his early days as an entertainer. (You can read this in the Fleischman biography of the magician, aimed at children.) Houdini asked himself if his deceased mother would be happy with him for tricking people in their grief. Afterward, he moved onto do escape tricks and stage magic, because in that case people were paying for a show and picking locks required actual talent. He got annoyed, however, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, would insist that he actually claim that Houdini was doing real magic. Houdini also tried to no avail to convince Doyle that his mediums were all lying to him and manipulating him, so as to get more money and credibility out of him. At seances, he would have ways of debunking the ghosts talking or the hands clapping. In one case he smeared ink over a megaphone that a ghost would use to communicate. When the lights came on, the medium’s mouth was black. She was very unhappy, as a result.

Ghostology has an entry on Houdini. It illustrates one of his devices: a box that shackled the medium and immobilized them. Houdini said if a Spiritualist could summon a ghost while unable to move, then he would be convinced. No one managed to do it.

Mind that Houdini wanted to believe. Doyle was a good friend of his and considered a genius writer by the standards of the time. He wanted to see that someone could actually talk to the dead. It would potentially ease the grieving process, especially in the time before antibiotics and people washing their hands. Everyone disappointed him, however, and as a trained magician, he knew where to look in the room. All he had to do was attend a seance in disguise with a witness who could prove that Houdini was telling the truth, such as a cop.

The fact is that Houdini tried his best to warn people about the fraud. Even so, he couldn’t stop the tide. Only time did, as more people decided to test mediums and expose their various parlor tricks. His book A Magician Among the Spirits exposed all the tricks that mediums did, to convince their clients. While he did keep Scientific American from legitimizing mediums due to their tricks, Doyle did more than disbelieve him. He also ended their friendship. To the end of his life, Doyle maintained that ghosts were real and two girls really did photograph fairies. (The girls later admitted that they didn’t want to admit they tricked him after it grew so much, since it would mean making him look like a bigger fool.)

In addition, what upset Houdini was the emotional manipulation that Spiritualists involved. Goodness knows that ghost tours in New Orleans are fun, as you walk in a brisk wintry air and hear stories about bodies in the floorboards and ladies hanging off spires while naked. I did that before the pandemic and was shivering not just from the cold. Some of the stories were eerie and I had to remind myself they were just tales.

With a tour or a ghost story, however, you are paying to be entertained. Spiritualists claimed they really could talk with the dead, and provide a measure of comfort to the living who were left behind. Some of them weren’t even good at it; Houdini caught one that lied about seeing his mother with a cross when she was Jewish, something that Drunk History covered. Also, she couldn’t speak any English and would have addressed him by his birth name, Eric Weiss, rather than as “Harry”. He got furious about how they would lie so baldly.

Sadly, our genius magician could also be an idiot where it counted. A college student punched him in the stomach, for reasons, and he refused to see a doctor when the pain got worse; it turned out he had appendicitis and he died on Halloween night. His wife confirmed, after hosting seances for ten years, that he hadn’t become a ghost or returned to her. If Houdini hadn’t been killed, he would have finished a project with H.P. Lovecraft and S.M. Eddy, Jr called The Cancer of Superstition. He commissioned both of them to work on the book. Sadly, his wife didn’t want to continue the project after his death, so it remains unfinished. Lovecraft wrote a few chapters, and that was it. Those are still online if a person wishes to look them up. It’s quite fascinating, actually, that this work-in-progress had potential.

Many of us know that Lovecraft was an unapologetic racist, even for the standards of his time. At the same time, he pretty much turned cosmic horror into a speculative fiction mainstay, for better or for worse. If he had finished the book, he could have the same impact on Spiritualism and saving more people from their wishful thinking. The Spiritualist Church, founded from the remnants of the movie, may have not transpired.

When To Open The Book, And When To Close It

We need to know that monsters aren’t real. That is where fiction comes in; we can close the book or switch to another audio track, knowing that it’s just a story. Otherwise, we can find ourselves deceived and fooled.

There have been real cases of people taking fiction too far when they are scared or want to meet monsters. I don’t need to go further than mention Slenderman, and how some viewers want to summon him. Web series videos that delve into horror can inspire this sensation, with the blurring between reality and fiction. People that play Alternate Reality Games sometimes run the risk of trespassing and breaking the law to find answers. These are meant to be fun. Reading as a bystander can make me worry for those playing. This even happened with Gravity Falls.

I prefer fiction that reminds you that horrors aren’t real. We don’t have to think about what’s crossing the street every day, or what mundane scams can ring up our phone. Instead, we can sit back and enjoy the ride.

Scares Teach You How To Handle Real Dangers

G.K. Chesterton wrote that “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” Neil Gaiman used a paraphrased version of this to preface his novel, Coraline. He wrote it based on a story that his kids told him, about wanting a parent who looked like him and gave them everything they wanted. Neil channeled the fear that would ensue. This novel is a prime example of kids’ horror.

Coraline is about a girl who ends up in another world that reflects her own. Her Other Mother cooks food that she likes and sends her to the neighbors that can entertain her. Coraline accepts it all mildly but refuses to let the lady sew buttons into her eyes. Disaster ensues from there. It takes Coraline directly rejecting the false world and destroying the means to enter the secret door to defeat her Other Mother.

There’s a primal fear about strangers with alluring gifts, who look like people that children know, stealing them away and taking their ability to flee. In fact, more often children are hurt by people they know than by strangers if one believes the statistics. It’s harder to teach a lesson about that.

This world doesn’t have monsters, at least not the ones in our books, and illustrated in fairy tales. Alligators will leave you alone as long as you respect their territory during all times of the year, but especially in the spring. Good cleaning practices can prevent bedbugs, fleas, and mites from infesting your houses. Komodo dragons mind their own business and eat animals that cannot escape their jaws. Robots need maintenance, so they won’t come to swoop at you in the night.

Instead, real monsters wear suits and have pretty faces while destroying your lives. They will lie to you to get your money, and in some cases your livelihood. That’s when you need to stay vigilant, knowing what is real and isn’t.