Short Stuff: Our Shortie Halloween Spooktacular

short stuff. I want to give them something to work with. Maybe, so so to prepare everyone for our Halloween Spooktacular, which will be out tomorrow. We wanted to do this, right, Chuck, you want to start? Uh? Yeah, what's um? Let's start with the story One Summer Night. This is a good one. This is a good one. Here we go, One Summer Night by Ambrose Beers. The fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not seem to him to prove that he was dead. He had always been a hard man to

convince that he really was buried. The testimony of his senses compelled him to admit his posture flat upon his back, with his hands crossed upon his stomach and tied was something that he easily broke without profitably altering the situation. The strict confinement of his entire person, the black darkness and profound silence, made a body of evidence impossible to controvert, and he had accepted it without Cavill Henry Cavill, but dead. No,

he was only very very ill. He had withal the invalid's apathy, and did not greatly concern himself about the uncommon fate that had been allotted to him. No philosopher, was he just a plain, commonplace person, gifted for the time being with a pathological indifference the organ that he feared consequences with his torpid so with no particular apprehension for his immediate future, he fell asleep and all was

peace with Henry Armstrong. Before we go on here, Chuck, I just want to point out, so this man has come to his senses in a coffin, been like, well, I guess I'm dead, and then went to sleep. But then then he went to sleep. That's some mellow gold totally. You want me to pick up here, please, But something was going on overhead. There was a dark summer night shot through with in frequent shimmers of lightning silently firing a cloud lying low in the west, and pretending a storm.

These brief, stammering illuminations brought out, with ghastly distinctness the monuments and headstones of the cemetery, and seemed to set them dancing. It was not a night in which any credible witness was likely to be straying about a cemetery, so the three men who were there digging into the grave of Henry Armstrong felt reasonably secure. Two of them were young students from a medical college a few miles away.

The third was a gigantic man known as Jess. For many years, Jess had been employed about the cemetery as a man of all work, and it was his favorite pleasantry that he knew every soul in the place. From the nature of what he was now doing, it was inferable that the place was not so populous as this register may have shown it to be. Back to you, Charles, back to you outside the wall, at the part of the grounds farthest from the public road, or a horse

in a light wagon waiting. The work of excavation was not difficult. The earth with which the grave had been loosely filled a few hours before, offered little resistance and was soon thrown out. So they're Grave Robin here, right. Oh yeah, it ties him very nice to do our episode on Grave Robins. Right. Removal of the casket from its box was less easy, but it was taken out where it was a prerequisite of Jess, who carefully unscrewed the cover and laid it aside, exposing the body in

black trousers and white shirt. At that instant, the air sprang to flame. A cracking shock of thunder shook the stunned world, and Henry Armstrong tranquility sat up with inarticulate cries. The men fled in terror, each in a different direction, for nothing on earth could Two of them had been

persuaded to return, but Jess was of another breed. In the gray of the morning, the two students, pallid and haggard from anxiety and with the terror of their adventure still beating tumultuously in their blood, met at the medical college. You saw it, cried one god, Yes, what are we to do? They went around to the rear of the building, where they saw a horse attached to a light wagon hitched to a gate post near the door of the dissecting room. Mechanically. They entered the room. On a bench

in the obscurity sat Jess. He rose, grinning. I'm waiting for my pay, he said. Stretched naked on a long table lay the body of Henry Armstrong, the head defiled with blood and clay from a blow with a spade. Wow, so jest to care business? Huh he did? He said, Oh, you're gonna sit up right now while I'm trying to make some money. No, we're not going to have that. We're going to put you back in the grave. Well that was great, but we have more to come. Everyone.

We have one more short story from the great Ambrose Beers that we will read after these commercial messages. All right, So Chuck, we're gonna do president a hanging it. Okay, I'm gonna start this one, all right. An old man named Daniel Baker, living near Lebanon, Iowa, was suspected by his neighbors of having murdered a peddler who had obtained

permission to pass the night at his house. This was an eighteen fifty three when peddling was more common in the western country than it is now and was attended with considerable danger. The peddler with his pack, traversed the country by all manner of lonely roads, and was compelled to rely upon the country people for hospitality. This brought him into relation with queer characters, some of whom were not altogether scrupulous in their methods of making a living,

murder being an acceptable means to that end. It occasionally occurred that a peddler with diminished pack and swollen purse would be traced to the lonely dwelling of some rough character, and never could be traced beyond. This was so in the case of old man Baker, as he was always called. Such names are given in the western settlements only to elderly persons who are not esteemed to the general disrepute of social and worth has affixed the special reproach of age.

A peddler came to his house and none went away, and that is all that anybody knew. All right, So we're talking about peddler's being murdered on the road. I have to say, Ambrose beerst makes me look succinct. Yeah, he can write a paragraph about like a lightning bolt flashing the sky in parentheses. All right, here we go. Seven years later, the Reverend Mr Cummings, a Baptist minister well known in that part of the country, was driving by Baker's farm one night. It was not very dark.

There was a bit of moon somewhere above the light veil of mists that lay along the earth. Mr Cummings, who was at all times a cheerful person, was whistling a tune which he would occasionally enter up to speak a word, a friendly encouragement to his horse. Get on, boy, like that, that's friendly. As he came to a little bridge across the dry ravine, he saw the figure of a man standing upon it, clearly outlined against the gray

background of a misty forest. The man had something strapped on his back and carried a heavy stick, obviously an itinerant peddler. His attitude had in it a suggestion of abstraction, like that of a sleepwalker. Mr Cummings reined in his horse when he arrived in front of him, gave him a pleasant salutation and invited him to a seat in his vehicle. If you're going my way, he added. The man raised his head, looked him full in the face,

but neither answered nor made any further movement. The minister, with good natured persistence, repeated his invitation. At this the man threw his right hand forward from his side and pointed word. As he stood on the extreme edge of the bridge. Mr Cummings looked past him over into the ravine, saw nothing unusual, and withdrew his eyes to address the man again. He had disappeared. Wow, I think you can

take his home. Okay. The horse, which all this time had been uncommonly restless, gave at the same moment a snort of terror and started to run away. Before he had regained control of the animal, the minister was at the crest of the hill, a hundred yards along it's like a football field. He looked back and saw the figure again, at the same place and in the same attitude as when he had first observed it on the

twenty yard line. Then, for the first time, he was conscious of a sense of the supernatural, and drove home as rapidly as his willing horse would go on. Arriving at home, he related his adventure to his family, and early the next morning, accompanied by two neighbors, John White Corwell and Abner Ray, Sir, surprised they didn't talk about those guys here, returned to the spot, they found the body of old man Baker hanging by the neck from one of the beams of the bridge. Immediately beneath the

spot where the apparition had stood. A thick coating of dust, slightly dampened by the mist, covered the floor of the bridge, but the only footprints were those of Mr Cunning's horse. In taking down the body, the men disturbed the loose, freeable earth of the slope below it, disclosing human bones already nearly uncovered by the action of water and frost. They were identified as those of the lost peddler at

the double inquest. The coroner's jury found that Daniel Baker died by his own hand while suffering from temporary insanity, and that Samuel Morritts was murdered by some person or persons to the jury unknown. The end one of the least satisfying endings of any short story, Samuel Moritz. They didn't even name the guy until that point. Oh yeah,

I thought that was great. I mean, I love Ambrose Beers for some reasons, but not for that reason, you know what I mean, to get the feeling that like at the end of that book, he's just like, face down in a like a methodone torpor right, and a trough of whiskey. Well, Chuck, I think that was short stuff. Huh, that's right, Special Super Short Halloween Edition. The point of this is to get your prime for tomorrow's spectacular. So

don't miss it, everybody. And because I said don't miss it everybody, that means short Stuff is Stuff you should know. Is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.