Southern Fried Rat and Other Gruesome Tales Read Online Free

reported as one that is "going about town" and is "worthy of attention."
    A very similar tale was also collected in the 1920s by the British Society for Psychical Research. It too was supposed to be true.
    Professor Brunvand points out that this story has many similarities to the phantom hitchhiker legend—the most popular and widespread of all modern American ghost legends.
    Sometimes in the phantom hitchhiker story, the person who has picked up the hitchhiker sees a photograph and identifies the girl in the photo as the one he picked up. The response is always something like this:
    "That's a picture of my daughter. She was killed ten years ago, at the very spot that you picked up the hitchhiker."

Oven Ready
    Mr. and Mrs. Collins received a last-minute invitation to a very important cocktail party at the country club. It was the sort of invitation they had been hoping to get for more than two years, and now that it had arrived, even at the last moment, they were thrilled. Naturally they wouldn't be able to take their six-month-old son, Christopher, to the party, and they needed a baby-sitter badly.
    Lucy Collins quickly called her regular baby-sitter but found the girl already had a date that evening. Her second-choice baby-sitter had another job that evening; so did the third. Mrs. Collins was getting a bit frantic. She was afraid that she would have to miss the cocktail party after all, an enormous disappointment since she had waited so long and wished so hard for the invitation.
    She called her regular baby-sitter back to plead with the girl to break her date and do her a favor "just this once." The girl's date was every bit as important to her as the cocktail party was to Mrs. Collins, and she refused. Still, the girl felt very sorry for her. Mrs. Collins was pleading and asking her if she knew of anyone, anyone at all, who was free that evening to baby-sit for Christopher.
    The girl thought for a moment. She knew these last-minute jobs were always hard to arrange, particularly on a Saturday night. Mentally she ticked off a list of names, discarding first this one and then that one because she knew they would be busy. Then she remembered Carrie Barker. Sure, Carrie was a little weird, a little mixed up. But basically she was a good kid, eager to please, and she would probably welcome the job. She didn't get many sitting jobs because most parents didn't like her looks.
    "Well, if you are really desperate," the girl said, "there's Carrie Barker. She doesn't live too far away. I'll give you her phone number."
    Mrs. Collins was deeply grateful for the information and called Carrie Barker immediately. On the phone Carrie sounded strange and a bit out of touch. But she was perfectly willing to baby-sit and said she would come right over.
    By the time Mrs. Collins made the arrangements on the phone, Mr. Collins was pacing up and down anxiously looking at his watch. It was all right to be a little late to a cocktail party, but if you were too late, then everyone would notice, and that wasn't a good idea. When the doorbell rang, signaling the arrival of the sitter, he was very much relieved. "Thank God, she's finally here," he said.

    It was easy to see why Carrie Barker had trouble getting baby-sitting jobs. Her clothes were strange and her hair was wildly unkempt. Most unsettling and disturbing was the distant, almost vacant, look in her eyes.
    As Mrs. Collins showed Carrie around the house, the baby's room, the kitchen, and the bathroom, the girl moved almost like a sleepwalker. When she presented Carrie with a piece of paper on which had been written a name and number where they could be reached in case of emergency, the girl didn't even glance at it but crumpled it and pushed it into the pocket of her jeans.
    Carrie Barker's appearance and actions were so strange that Mrs. Collins toyed with the idea of making up some excuse, paying the girl off, and then just staying home herself. Mr. and Mrs. Collins had a heated