Alligators

The Alligators is a scary story for kids. It is based on “The Alligator Story” in Sticks in the Knapsack and Other Ozark Folk Tales by Vance Randolph. A version of this tale appeared in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz.

There was a young woman who married a man from the South. They lived together in a small cabin by the river. The pair got along pretty well and they had two little boys. The woman only had one problem. Her husband was always going out at night. Sometimes he would be gone for hours and sometimes he would stay out all night.

He would always go swimming in the river and the darker it was, the better he liked it, because he could see at night just like an owl. As soon as the boys were big enough to walk, he took them swimming with him. They would stay in the river all night long and the woman had to sleep at home by herself.

After a while, the woman started acting very strange. She told the neighbors that her husband was turning into an alligator and he was trying to turn their little boys into alligators too. “Something has to be done about it!” she said.

The neighbors thought the woman was losing her mind. They told her it was normal for boys to go swimming with their father, and everybody knew there weren’t any alligators in that part of the country.

Finally, one Sunday morning, the woman came running into town. Her clothes were soaking wet and she told the preacher that a big alligator and two little alligators has pulled her into the river. She said they were trying to make her live in the river and forcing her to eat raw fish. She claimed it was her husband and her two little boys and they were trying to turn her into an alligator too, but she broke loose and managed to crawl out onto the bank.

It all sounded so crazy that the townspeople took the woman to the doctor. They were afraid she might hurt herself in some way. They could hear her hollering all over town, until the doctor gave her an injection to knock her out.

The sheriff went out to the cabin by the river, but there was nobody there. About a week after that, the doctor sent the woman to a mental institution, and she never came back. Her husband and the two little boys never showed up again either, and to this day, nobody knows what became of them.

For years after that, hunters and fishermen would see alligators in the river on moonlit nights. They said there was always one big alligator and two little ones, but nobody believed them. Everybody knows there aren’t any alligators in this part of the country.