Southern Fried Rat and Other Gruesome Tales (8 page)

The turn may have been part of Jocelyn's frantic attempts to get out of the coffin before he suffocated.

—————

Some years ago a small town in Louisiana was struck by an epidemic of typhoid fever. Many of those who came down with the disease died quickly. One of those stricken was a young woman who had such a serious case that everyone felt sure she was going to die.

This woman was very close to her oldest brother, but he happened to be away when she got sick. As her condition worsened, he was sent for, and he rushed home as fast as he could. But the trip back wasn't an easy one. There were a number of unexpected delays, and by the time he arrived, his sister was already dead. In fact, he had even missed the funeral, which had taken place just a few hours before he arrived back in town.

The grief-stricken brother went to the cemetery, where he found the gravediggers just finishing their work on his sister's grave, tossing the last few shovelfuls of dirt back into the hole. He begged the gravediggers to open the grave so that he could see his sister just one more time. They refused his request. But the brother would not go away. He stood there begging and pleading so loudly that he began to collect a crowd.

He shouted to the people who had gathered that all he wanted to do was look at his sister one more time. Most of the people knew him, and knew how close he had been to his sister. He was such a pitiful sight, and so persistent, that several of the local people said that they would open the grave themselves just to satisfy his request, and to keep him from making a further spectacle of himself.

The earth was soft, and so the digging went very quickly. The coffin was uncovered and opened. The grieving man then looked down on his sister for what he was sure would be the last time. He was standing there weeping when one of the people in the crowd thought he saw the "corpse" move slightly. At first he dismissed what he had seen as a hallucination. Then others in the crowd saw movement, and they began whispering to each other. The "corpse" actually began to shake itself, and people in the crowd started to shout. The grief-stricken brother nearly fainted in astonishment. Then the "corpse" actually sat up, and finally stepped right out of the coffin. The young woman had not been dead at all. Because of the disease, she had fallen into a coma and looked as if she were dead. If her brother had not arrived late for her funeral, she would have remained buried alive and surely would have suffocated underground.

People say that after "coming back to life" the woman lived for many years and raised a large family.

—————

Diane's family was wealthy and socially prominent, so when she fell in love with Ben, the son of a local laborer, her parents were not too pleased.

At first the family tried to ignore the relationship, hoping that it would fade away as most young loves do. But it didn't. Indeed, matters became more and more serious and intense.

Diane's parents forbade her to see Ben. That didn't work either, because they couldn't keep her locked in her room all the time. They tried to put pressure on Ben's parents to keep their son away. Ben's parents didn't want trouble with the richest people in town and would have been happy to keep their son away from Diane. But they didn't have any real controi over Ben's actions. Finally Diane's parents hit upon an old-fashioned solution—they decided to send Diane away.

She was sent to a strict boarding school, really more like a prison. No telephone calls were allowed, and the mail was carefully watched. Diane was miserable. But it was far worse for Ben. Cut off from his love, he seemed to lose interest in living. He got sick, and very quickly he just died. The doctors weren't even sure what he died of. His body had just given up.

Diane's parents were not evil, and they were overcome with remorse. They now knew they had done something quite terrible, but they couldn't bring themselves to tell Diane about Ben's death.

A short time later, Diane was returning to her dormitory at school when she saw one of her family's cars drive up. Most astonishingly, the driver was Ben.

He looked terribly pale and anguished. "My God Ben. What's wrong? What's happened?"

"Your family asked me to come and get you," he said. "I don't know why."

Without bothering to get permission or even to tell anyone that she was leaving the school, Diane jumped into the car.

During the long drive back, Ben said practically nothing. He usually didn't talk much, but Diane felt that his extreme silence indicated something was wrong. She was very worried about him. She reached over to touch his forehead—it was cold and clammy.

"Ben, are you sick?" she said.

"I'm all right."

"You must be cold. Here, take my scarf." She carefully wound her long woolen muffler around his neck.

When the car pulled up in front of the house, Diane jumped out and rushed inside. Her parems were surprised—no, shocked—to see her. They were even more shocked when she told them why she had come and who brought her.

Her father then explained to her that Ben was dead. But she refused to believe it. If he was dead, who had been in the car with her? When they went outside, the car was there, the engine was still warm, but there was no sign of Ben.

Diane and her parents went to the home of Ben's parents, who sadly confirmed that their son was really dead. But when they heard Diane's story, they too were shocked and more than a little frightened. The only thing to do was to open the grave, which they did the very next morning. Ben's body was in the coffin, just as it should have been. But wrapped around the corpse's neck was Diane's long woolen muffler.

Fears of being buried alive were common during the last century, and for some people the fear was almost an obsession. This fear gave rise to a large number of legends and stories. Some of Edgar Allan Poe's best tales, for example, are about being buried alive. Fear also inspired inventors to patent many devices to protect people from this horrible fate. Coffins equipped with bells, flags, periscopes, air holes, and other devices designed to save the unlucky from the ghastly prospect of premature burial were manufactured and sold. There is, to my knowledge, not a single case in which any of these devices ever saved anyone's life. While it was certainly possible to be buried alive, particulary during an epidemic when doctors were overworked and there was a great rush to get the dead buried as quickly as possible, it was something that probably didn't happen very often.

Today the possibility of being buried alive is virtually zero, but the legends continue, though they do not form as large a segment of our frightening folklore as they did a century or so ago.

Many colleges still use special blue-covered exam booklets. They are called, appropriately enough, blue books, and are filled with lined paper. These books are handed out at the beginning of an exam, and the students must write their answers to essay questions in these special books. The books are supposed to ensure that the students don't come in with pre-prepared answers.

Steve was a student at Upstate University. He was very bright and could have had straight As, except for one small problem that he had. Steve hated to work. He loved to party, and he figured he was smart enough to bluff his way through exams. Sometimes he was right, sometimes he wasn't. He was right often enough to be able to stay in school—but wrong often enough that he was just barely hanging in there.

As final exams approached, Steve found that this semester he was losing more often than he was winning. He faced the very real possibility that his semester average would be so low that he would actually flunk out of school. Which would mean that he would have to go home and might actually have to get a
Job
. The thought sickened him.

Steve had only one final left, American Lit. He didn't know a great deal about American literature, but almost by accident he had read a couple of the books that had been assigned. So he was confident that he would be able to bluff his way through the final, and that this grade would be high enough to give him a passing average.

Steve was calm and assured as he entered the classroom to take the exam. He remained calm and assured as the professor handed each student two blue books. His calm began to shatter as the professor wrote two questions on the board. They were the only two questions on the exam.

The second question was about something that Steve had read, and instantly a brilliant series of connections were made in his mind. His answer to question two would give him an A on that part of the exam.

Question one was another matter. It was about something that he had never read, never even heard of. He drew a complete blank. There was nothing he could say about question one.

The result would be an exam score of fifty, not good enough for a passing grade in the course and certainly not good enough to carry the rest of his marginal marks. The horrible specter of a job rose before him. But he took a few breaths and did not panic. Steve had a plan.

He started filling the first book with anything that came into his head. Advertising slogans, nursery rhymes, anything. All he had to do was look as if he were working hard.

When he had filled the first book with all that nonsense, he took the second book and wrote a big number "2" on the cover. Then he wrote what appeared to be the last sentence of an answer to the first question. Right under that, he began his answer for question number two. It was a beautifully worked-out answer, a sure A. When the exam was over, Steve got in a crowd of other students turning in their exam books. But he turned in only the second book. The first one was carefully hidden under his shirt.

A few anxious days later Steve got a postcard from his American Lit professor. Steve was told that he got an A in the course. The professor also apologized for having lost the first part of his exam.

Steve's partner in indolence, his friend Jack, had an even worse problem. He didn't know the answer to either of the questions. But he was even cooler and more resourceful than Steve. Jack took one of the blue books and used it to write a letter to his mother in Boston. He said that he was writing to her because he had already finished his final exam and was waiting for a friend to finish. He apologized for not writing sooner but said that he had been studying very hard for this particular test and had had no time. He also said that he thought he did pretty well on the test, but that the professor, though a good guy, had very high standards.

When time was up, Jack handed in only the blue book with the letter to his mother in it. He had the blank blue book hidden in his notebook. He rushed back to his room, looked up the answers to the questions, and wrote them in the blue book. Then he put the blue book in an envelope and mailed it to his mother.

A few hours later Jack got a call from the professor, who was very puzzled. He wanted to know why Jack had given him a letter to his mother in Boston and not the answers to the final exam. Jack gasped. He said that there must have been a horrible mix-up and that he had by mistake handed in the letter to his mother and mailed his exam to Boston. He offered to call his mother in Boston, explain the situation, and have her mail back the letter, unopened, to prove that no one had tampered with it. The professor agreed to this plan, so Jack called his mother. She mailed back the unopened envelope with the blue book containing the answers Jack had looked up after the exam. Jack gave it to his professor. Jack got a B on his final.

Sometimes schools don't use blue books. What do you do then? Well, Lance, who went to high school in Los Angeles, came up with an ingenious solution when he was given a difficult two-page quiz. He knew that there was no way in the world he would be able to finish the entire test. So he spent all his time working on the second page. At the end of the period he handed in only the second page, concealing the first page in his notebook.

He used the next period to quickly look up the answers to the questions on the first page and write them in. Then he took the test paper, threw it on the ground, and trampled all over it. He gave the paper to a friend who had a later class in the same room.

When the friend handed the dirty, stepped-on paper to the teacher, he said that he had found it on the floor "in the back" and thought it might be important. The teacher checked through all of the test papers, and sure enough, Lance's paper was missing the first page. When the two pages were marked together, Lance got an A on the test.

In folklore throughout the world there is a familiar figure called the trickster. He or she may be a person or an animal, usually one who is weak or in an inferior position. Somehow the trickster manages to outwit those above him. In the stories it may be the rabbit outwitting the fox, the slave outwitting his master, the poor man outwitting the rich man, the simple farmer putting one over on the city slicker. In modern stories it is often the student outwitting the teacher, as these extremely popular tales of exam trickery demonstrate. With one variation or another they have been repeated all over the country.