Room For One More

Room For One More is a short scary story about a woman who is frightened when she runs into a weird man who drives a hearse. It is based on a supposedly true ghost story from Ireland called “Lord Dufferin’s Ghost Story” or “A Ghostly Warning”. A version of this story appeared in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.

There was a young woman who had just started a new job in a large office building. She was walking to work one day when a long black hearse drove up slowly next to her, matching her pace. This made her nervous and she anxiously watched it out of the corner of her eye.

The driver leaned out the window and called to her in deep, booming voice: “Do you need a lift?” She turned to look at him got a terrible shock. The driver’s face was incredibly hideous and deformed. His skin was a deathly pale and one of his eyes was noticeably higher than the other. The man pointed to the rear of the vehicle, which contained a coffin. “Room for one more,” he said.

Frightened by his bizarre appearance and unwelcome suggestion, she refused his offer of a lift. Profoundly disturbed, the woman ran down the street until she came to the office building where she worked. For the rest of the day, she couldn’t stop thinking about the strange man in the hearse, and was glad when work finally was over.

The woman worked up on the ninth floor and when the elevator came it was almost completely full. She hesitated a moment before stepping in. “Are you sure you don’t want to come in?” asked a familiar, booming voice. “There’s room for one more.”

The woman gasped. It was the hearse driver from this morning, eyeing her with his lopsided, horrible gaze. Now thoroughly spooked, the woman backed away stuttering, “I-I think I’ll take the stairs!” The hearse driver just stared at her as the doors slid closed.

The woman had only taken a few steps down the stairs when she heard a chorus of screams followed by a deafening crash. She hurried downstairs and discovered the elevator cable had broken and all the passengers aboard had plunged to a grisly death.