Written (About) Locally - Schoharie in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark

By Bradley Towle

SCHOHARIE — Since its first publication in 1981, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark has terrified and fascinated generations of kids. Alvin Schwartz's collection of American folklore and Stephen Gammell's grotesque and unnerving drawings often provided just the right dose of spooky for young horror fans. The duo followed up with two subsequent versions: More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark in 1984 and Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones in 1991. Schartz mined folklore from all around the country to fill the pages of his books and looked to Schoharie County for a tale in More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

The final story of that collection, "Thumpity- Thump," opens with the following line: "When we moved to Schenectady from Schoharie, we rented a house awful cheap 'cause it was spooked, and nobody would live in it." In the story, a chair alerts the newly arrived family to an unsettling situation in the basement by making a loud thumpity-thump repeatedly in the night. "The haunted chair in this story is a poltergeist," explains Schwartz in the endnotes, which translates to "noise ghost." Schwartz sourced the story directly from Emelyn Elizabeth Gardner's 1937 book Folklore From The Schoharie Hills. The story, located on pages 96-97 of Gardner's collection, is attributed to one Maggie Zee of Middleburgh circa 1914. The first line in Gardner's book reads: "When we moved to Schenectady, we hired a house for awful cheap…"

A few lines later, the move from Schoharie to Schenectady is mentioned. Schwartz tightened that up for Scary Stories but otherwise retained the odd language from his source material, which gives the tale a unique quality and brings a little of Gardener's research into the popular culture.