Striped Sweater

The Striped Sweater is a spooky story written by a member of this website named Pete (with a little help from ScaryForKids). It’s about a group of boys who find some bloody clothes in the woods and stumble on an old, abandoned shack.

In the woods, near the school playground, there is a path. Students from the school are banned from setting foot on it. If you follow the path, it leads to a clearing in the woods where there is an old, abandoned shack with a rusty lock on the door. The students would often tell stories about the old shack, claiming that it was haunted and that any kids or teenagers who went there would disappear, never to be seen or heard from again.

One Saturday afternoon, in late October, a teenager named Ryan was hanging around with his younger brother Wayne and his best friends, Marcus and Brent. All four of the boys attended the school and Ryan, Marcus and Brent were in the same class.

They were playing football in the school playground when they saw two teenage couples going down the path. Wayne and Brent recognized them as older students from the school. The boys got the idea into their heads that they should go down that path and see just what the old shack was really all about.

Wayne led the way, followed by Brent, Marcus and Ryan. They had just gotten into the woods when they noticed a striped sweater lying there on the ground. When Ryan picked it up and turned it over, he saw dark stains on it that he thought looked like dried blood.

The boys continued down the path, laughing and joking about it. Marcus was saying that maybe it belonged to Freddy Kreuger or Jason Vorhees. He was just trying to scare the others.

All of a sudden, a flock of birds shot out from the bushes. It was a murder of crows. An ominous sign. The boys continued down the path for a little longer until they came to a huge ditch. The shack was on the other side of the ditch.

Ryan jumped across it first, then Marcus, then Brent, then Wayne. The shack was green, rusty and really small. When walked up and looked through the dusty windows, they saw it had two rooms. There were a number of tools strewn across the floor. As they peered through the windows, they were confronted by four big black dogs. Two Dobermans and two Rottweillers to be exact.

Behind the snarling dogs, there was a man with a knife in his hand. He had long black hair, a red and black striped sweater and a dirty face. He seemed to scraping something into a bucket and feeding it to the dogs. The man got up to sharpen his knife and the boys got a better look at what he was working on.

They were horrified when they recognized the bodies of the four teenagers they had seen going down the path before them. They were covered in blood and their corpses had been hacked up into pieces.

The terrified boys turned to flee, but they accidentally knocked over some paint cans that had been stacked outside. The cans fell over with a loud crash. The man with the knife turned around and spotted the boys. His face was twisted with rage and he started shouting and unleashed his dogs.

The teenage boys ran for their lives, the ravenous dogs hot on their heels. When they came to the ditch, Wayne, Marcus and Brent managed to make the jump, but Ryan slipped. He landed with a thud at the bottom of the ditch and one of the dogs pounced on him, sinking its teeth into his ankle. He managed to kick the dog in the face and free himself.

While the dog was stunned, Ryan climbed out of the ditch. Bleeding from his leg, he ran down the path, yelling for his friends. The man with the knife and his four dogs were still chasing him. He could see the others waiting for him at the start of the path. He looked back over his shoulder and saw that the man and his four dogs had stopped. The man was standing there, staring at the boys with a menacing look on his face.

When he reached his friends, Ryan collapsed from pain and exhaustion. The others picked him up and dragged him to the safety of the school grounds. While he was recovering, Ryan pulled down his pant legs to show them the bite marks.

The boys called the police and told them to come down to the school. A few minutes later, two officers showed up in a squad car. They went down the path with flashlights and were gone for almost an hour. When they came back, one of the policemen was carrying the striped sweater in his hand. Both of them looked pale.

“OK,” said one officer. “We found this striped sweater and a large amount of blood in that old shack. There was also some blood on the path leading up to the shack that was apparently hidden by the leaves. Aside from that the sweater is all we have as evidence. We didn’t find any man or any vicious dogs.”

Ryan lifted up his pants leg and showed them the bite marks. Then, the police took the boys down to the station for questioning. While Ryan was sitting in the office of the chief of police, he happened to notice an old, faded picture on the wall.

“That’s him!” he cried. “That’s the man with the knife!”

The chief of police looked puzzled. “That’s impossible,” he said. “The man in that photograph is Jack Monroe. He was a serial killer. Back in the early 80′s, he murdered a number of young couples. I was the one who caught him. He was executed 30 years ago…”