Give Me Back My Tailypo

Photo credit: Sayo24

I can’t say I’m particularly fond of being scared. I enjoy scary movies, but you will not get me into a haunted house. Do you know how long it took me to ride the Haunted Mansion at Disney? Scratch that. Do you know how long it took me get over riding the now-defunct Snow White’s Scary Adventures when I was six?

Books that fall into the horror genre aren’t really my thing. Never have been. The illustrations on Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark were enough to put me off for life. But there was a time when I decided to give them a try. Maybe if I read one, I’d find that “Hey! These aren’t so bad!”

I was in elementary school when I read this:

 

Do you see the cover of this book? Do you see how misleading this is?

The story: A hunter and his three dogs are in the woods...hunting, when he sees this weird cat-like creature with big glowing eyes and a long tail, and does the only logical thing: shoots it. Screaming, the animal runs away, leaving behind its blown-off tail that the hunter picks up, cooks, and eats for dinner.

That night, there's a rustling in his cabin in the middle of the woods, and the creature shows up at the foot of his bed, asking for its “Tailypo.” To get the thing to go away, the hunter has his dogs chase it away. Every time he does this, one dog doesn’t return. Still, he thinks it’s a good idea to send the dogs until they’re all gone. Dude.

Then it’s just the man and his gun. With only a few hours until sunrise (the Tailypo only shows up at night when it’s hard to see), he plans to make a run for it, but we all know the creepy dog-sized feline-beast is going to return. We know this! And it does, asking for its tailypo again. "Taily-po, Taily-po...all I want is my Taily-po..." At this point, the hunter knows he’s screwed. You know he’s screwed. And I’m rocking myself back and forth in a corner, crying.

In the end, the creature attacks the man. According to Wikipedia, most stories say he was flayed beyond recognition, but “less violent” tellings say all that remained of the cabin the next morning is the chimney. As someone with an extremely vivid imagination, both of those endings are equally jarring.

I thought I was in for some “scary” story that would make a spin at the end into a happy compromise for both parties. I was going to work my way into the more frightening stuff. Oh, how wrong I was...

Classic case of judging a book by its cover.

What are some of your favorite (or not-so-favorite) scary stories?