Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

The Hangman's Origin

The year is 1887 and you are Will Jameson, a photographer for a fairly well-known New York paper. It is a well-paying and fairly secure position. Your current task is to venture into that dying side of America called the Old West, currently on the verge of collapse under the crushing weight of modernization. The rail systems appear to make the country seem smaller every time they are expanded. Fittingly enough, because that's how you are travelling to the ghost town you are supposed to take pictures of anyhow, via said railway.

Your economy cab is empty, save for one other male passenger and yourself of course. The interior is dimly lit, and the roaring din of the thunderstorm outside doesn't do much to help visibility. It just makes you all the more thankful for the oil lantern suspended from the ceiling, without which you would trip over your own feet if you got up. Not like the cramped, sparsely appointed cab would give you enough room to stand erect anyway. The overall feeling is claustrophobic and slightly unsettling.

The first few hours pass by swiftly, during which you and the other passenger are each immersed in reading novels brought for the purpose of entertaining you on the trip. After a while though, you figure you should start up a conversation just for the sake of being polite.

"Hey, I'm Will Jameson, from New York. Where are you from?" you ask. It seems like a safe enough opener.

"Daniel Cullen. Hendrick's Post" the man answers.

You blink twice in bemused interest at the coincidence. Hendrick's Post is the name of the ghost town you are being sent to photograph.

"No kidding? That's where I'm headed" you say back.

"Sorry to hear that."

A bolt of lightning snakes down to the ground mere kilometers away, making the man's features appear much more distinct for that brief flash of a second. He is handsome for a man in his late twenties. His hat covers his matted black hair, and his ragged workmen's clothes have certainly seen better days. Most noticeably, a scarf that looks scavenged from the trash is wrapped around his neck, unusual for this time of year.

"What do you mean?" you frown.

"Well", he sighs as he leans back in his seat and tilts his hat over his eyes, "for starters, I'm not just from Hendrick's Post, I'm running from it. You don't know what I'm talking about though. You don't know about The Hangman"

"'The Hangman?'"

"The Hangman. Sorry, this is gonna take a bit of backstory. Are you ready for a fairly tall tale?" he asks.

"Sure, I'm not going anywhere until our train arrives anyway" you smile.

"Okay, where do I start? Hendrick's Post wasn't always a ghost town. Of course, you probably figured that. No one just builds the infrastructure for a town, settles it and then abandons it, not immediately anyway. But Hendrick's Post was in fact abandoned in record time. At least by those who had the good sense to leave. As for those poor bastards that stayed..." he says with a resigned shrug.

"What happened?" you ask, now apprehensive. What could he be getting at?

"The Hangman got them. Strung them all up, then left them to rot where they fell. Quite a sorry sight."

"Who's this Hangman?"

"Ah," he says through a wisp of a smirk, "now the story begins in earnest."






"For the last goddamn time, I'm innocent!" the workman protested.

Not like the acting sheriff was still listening at this point. The workman kicked the bars of his cell, immediately regretting the action and letting out a roar of pain as he cracked a toe against the iron pole.

"For Jesus's sakes, someone shut him up" a drunk who was being detained for disorderly conduct whined from the next cell over.

"Hey, you!" the workman shrilled as he threw his water canteen at the acting sheriff's head.

He missed on purpose, but he had only wanted the man's attention. Indeed, the outburst and the clatter of the metal object bouncing off the exposed brickwork had brought the eyes of everyone in the room on him. The inhaled nervously before screaming a jumbled mess of protests and curses.

"WHAT? FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK, WHAT?!" the acting sheriff howled. This workman had been making a royal disturbance ever since he'd be brought in here.

"I didn't do it! I DIDN'T!" the imprisoned workman cried with gritted teeth as he brought his face up to the bars.

The acting sheriff immediately bolted over to the workman's cell, and before the other man could react he had grabbed the collar of the workman's shirt and spat full in his face.

"I-don't-care. I don't care at this point whether you're even guilty, you've been making such a racket that I have half a mind to put a bullet in you right now! And on the topic of your 'innocence', we've got a reliable witness of sound mind and body who SAW you do it! He saw you kill my predecessor in cold blood! What do you have to say to that?" the acting sheriff seethed, practically hissing the last line.

"I...he's the one."

"What?" the acting sheriff asked.

"HE'S THE ONE WHO KILLED THE SHERIFF! NOT M-" the workman began to scream before the acting sheriff threw him back onto the cold stone floor.

"I'm assembling the town" the acting sheriff sneered. "We're doing this thing now."

The remainder of the town gathered in impressive time considering it was approximately 4:00 in the morning when the call went out that the execution had been moved up. The man was led to the gallows, only stopping briefly as he went to stare at one member of the crowd who seemed particularly smug. He obediently stood motionless as the noose was tightened around his neck and rechecked for tautness. It seemed to be a model execution. The trap door was released...

And then it happened.

Forty-five minutes. For forty-five minutes, more than should have been humanly possible, he kicked, gasped, and writhed like a demented snake coiled around itself. It was such a spectacle for the bored townspeople. No one moved to help him, no one put a slug from a revolver into his lolling head, and no one gasped in anything but macabre fascination. The dance of a man going through such an excruciating end was nothing but the height of entertainment to these sick people.

At last, after forty-five minutes he stopped moving. A few people let out cries of disappointment. The workman was cut down from the gallows and buried in a pauper's grave. The noose was left around his neck, seeing as it had worked its way into the skin and no one wanted to be the one to extricate it. Life would go back to normal in Hendrick's Post. The murderer, after all, was dead.

Of course, that's not what happened.

It started gradually at first. The sheriff and the executioner both reported unsettling visions, half-heard whisperings and quasi-real sights in their bedrooms at night. Most attributed it to guilt or stress. Of course, it was hard to stick to that argument when they both turned up dead in their homes. The mortician reported they had both been strangled with a length of rope, although the murder weapon was never recovered.

At their funerals a distant laughter accompanied the lowering of the caskets into the earth. The workman's, hoarse but mirthful. Soon after people began to avoid certain sections of the cemetery and then that side of the town altogether, after numerous sightings of the workman. The mayor attributed it to the testimony of drunks and ordered the casket of the workman exhumed, and the body re-examined to show that the man was unequivocally dead.

Except, the casket was empty. It was then that people began leaving the town. The mayor was among the first.






You sit there for an agonizingly long moment, pondering what Daniel has just told you. It is then that your eyes are drawn to the scarf hiding his neck and your face goes white at the implication.

"No, hell no, I'm not the ghost!" he laughs after noticing where your eyes are. "I'm really the guy who murdered the sheriff! I'm on the run, you see! Sooner or later I'll probably be caught, by either our spectral friend or the law. So what's the harm in telling one more person?

He stops his tittering just long enough to look aimlessly at the wall of the cab over your head, before continuing in an emotionless tone.

"I wonder what punishment the courts would give me for indirectly killing someone who came back from the dead?"