The Lady with the Emerald Ring

A rich man’s wife became deathly ill the night before Christmas in 1798, so he called for the doctor. By the time the doctor arrived, his wife had died, or so it seemed. Her husband was so grief stricken that he locked himself in his room and did not attend the funeral the following day. Just before the clergyman fell to sleep later that night, he remembered the beautiful emerald ring on the finger of the woman he had laid to rest. Wanting the ring and thinking no one would find out, he went downstairs, unlocked the lid, opened it, and tried to pry off the ring. It would not budge. He ran and brought back a file to cut the ring off her finger. When that did not work, he severed her finger and pulled the ring off. As he left, he turned around to pick up the iron lid, and screamed at the top of his lungs. He dropped the ring and ran. The woman had awakened, was moaning, and held her severed finger towards him with an evil smile on her face…

The woman walked back to her home, knocked on the door, and rang the bell, but to no avail. The servants had all gone to sleep, for it was late on Christmas Eve. She lifted a heavy stone, threw it at her husband’s window, and waited. He came to the window with a sorrowful look on his face. To her surprise, he yelled, “Go away. Why must you torture me so? Don’t you know my wife has just died? Let me mourn and do not bother me again.”

With this he shut the window. He did not realize it was his wife who had thrown the rock at the window. She repeated her actions, again throwing a rock at the window. He opened the window again, and she yelled to him, “I am no one but your so-called dead wife. Now come down here and open this door, unless you’d like me to die a second time on our doorstep.”

“You are a ghost then?” he said to her.

She said, “No, for ghost’s don’t bleed. Now come down here before I catch my own death of cold.”

Meanwhile, the clergyman ran home and up the stairs. In a state of fright, he hung himself from the rafters of his home. If he had only known that the woman only wanted to thank him. She had not died after all but had gone into a coma. When he cut off her finger, the pain woke her up.

Hunted

In the town of Blakeslee, Arkansas, there was a house that everyone knew was haunted. It was an old neglected house on a side street in the oldest part of town. Sometimes, the most wonderful smells issued from the house and filled the street with the heavenly odor of fresh baked bread. Whenever that happened, people would say that the old house must have been a bakery or, at the very least, the former home of a fabulous baker. Sometimes, the neighbors would hear the sound of music and laughter coming from the empty house as if there was a wonderful party in full swing.

One day a man moved into town from a distant city. He saw the empty house and asked the neighbors. No one told the stranger about the house’s curious history. The man went to City Hall and purchased the property. Soon after moving in, however, strange things began to happen… odd noises in the night, weird lights drifting from room to room, the smells of baking from a cold kitchen and, worst of all, the sound of a party when the new owners were trying to sleep.

After a few days, the man’s wife declared that she could no longer live in so haunted place and moved out taking the children with her. Before long, the man was forced to find another place to live but he was angry at the town board for not telling him that the house was occupied by ghosts. The mayor refused saying he never misrepresented the house as anything it was not.

So the man went to the Pastor of the local church and told him his problem. He agreed to visit the house and see exactly what the man was talking about. The Pastor accompanied the man to the house. As they approached the block the house was on, the Pastor’s smelled a delicious smell. “What’s that wonderful smell?” he asked.

“It’s the ghosts baking bread,” the man replied.

When they got closer, the Pastor stopped to listen. He turned to the man and inquired, “I hear music. Is someone having a party?”

“It’s the ghosts having a party,” replied the man.

They went inside and looked around the empty house. The Pastor sat at a table while the man looked for something to serve his guest. He found an old bottle of whiskey and poured a glass for the Pastor and one for himself. They toasted each other’s health and drank.

The man, it turned out, knew some of the Pastor’s relatives. They talked and joked about those things they had in common and felt a friendship growing. They were having such a pleasant time that before they knew it, three hours had passed.

The man’s wife began to get nervous, so she went to the Pastor’s house. Nor the Pastor, nor her husband were there. Together, the two wives, and went to the haunted house. They peeked in the windows and saw the two men sitting at a table drinking, laughing and having a good time. The wives joined their husbands and found that they had much to talk about.

One by one, the neighbors were attracted to the house by sound of laughing.. And just like that, there was a party. The old house filled with real smells and real laughter. It was alive again and that, of course, was what it wanted all along. From that day to this, the old house came alive again and its ghosts were laid to rest never to be seen or heard of again.

The end.

The long-dead boy

Once upon a time, there was a 10 year old girl who lived in London in a very old house. She hated the house. It was cold and damp all of the time. None of her friends would visit because it was believed that a ghost lived in the house. The little girl was curious about the ghost, but nobody would talk to her when she asked questions about it or the history of the house.

One night she was in her room reading, when the lamp went off, she decided not to bother her sleeping mom and prepare herself to sleep. All of a sudden, there was a quiet knocking on the window next to her bed. She saw the reflection of a boy, about her age, reflected on the window glass.

The girl turned to look in her room, but saw nothing. She got out of bed and went over to her lamp. She felt something wet on the ground. She flicked on the lamp, which now worked, and saw a red stain where she was standing. Then it disappeared. It wasn’t blood, because the red was too bright, almost pink, like paint.

The girl ran out of her room toward her parent’s room. But then she saw something that made her open her mouth to scream, though no sound came out. The attic door was right above her staircase, really high up; only her dad could reach it. Hanging from it was a noose, the thing they hung people on. The girl ran back to her room and there was a body in her bed. She grabbed her phone and took a picture of her bed, and, without looking at it, ran to get her mother.

Grumpily, her mother came up the stairs. The girl pointed to where the noose had been, but now it was just a piece of string from her mother’s sewing kit. She led her mother up to her room, to show her the child’s body, but now there was nothing. As her mother turned to leave the room, the girl remembered the camera. She grabbed it and turned it on, showing it to her mother.

There was no longer a photo of her bed. Instead there was a photo of a teenage boy, with a red mark around his neck, and pink paint all over his torn clothes. Her mother told her stop joking around. However, her mother had an extremely worried look on her face. When asked what was wrong, she said, “He is back!” The little girl never saw the boy again and her mother refused to tell her who he was.

The Hitchhiker

A recently married couple were on a long road trip through the heart of the United States. One night it was raining hard and the headlights of their car flashed across a bearded man on the side of the road hitchhiking. Not usually one for picking up hitchhikers, the husband stopped and pulled over to offer the guy a lift because the weather was so bad. The man thanked the husband and climbed in the back of the car. He seemed agitated and edgy, barely speaking a word for the whole journey. Eventually the couple dropped him off where he asked, at a crossroads.

The couple drove on for a good while and, to pass the time, the husband turned on the radio. The couple heard a news report about an escaped lunatic, considered very dangerous, who should not be approached under any circumstances. The description matched the hitchhiker and the couple looked at each other, clearly shocked, but happy nothing bad had occurred.

Just then the car gave out, and no amount of keying the ignition would make it start again. The husband told his wife to stay in the car while he set off through the rain to try and get help. Eventually she doses off. A while later, she wake up seeing flashing police lights through the water coming down the windshield and a voice through a loud speaker, “Lady, open the door, get out of the car and run towards us as fast as you can. Do it NOW!”

The woman was so confused. She got out of the car with her hands above her head.

“Run and don’t look back!” ordered the police officer.

The woman filled in curiosity turned. In the flashing blue lights of the police car and illuminated by flashes of lightning she saw the top of the car where the hitchhiker with a machete was hacking at the dismembered corpse of her husband. Blood was streaming down the sides of the car. She screamed and faint as a flurry of gunshots rang out…

Está comprobado que para aprender un idioma, la mejor manera de hacerlo es a través de un acercamiento directo con el mismo y con la cultura del idioma a un nivel adecuado, en especial cuando se trata de niños. Si bien la gramática es importante, no hay nada mejor que aprender a través de actividades lúdicas y divertidas para los niños, desde caricaturas, cantos o historias de terror.

Practicar el inglés con lecturas de este género será una experiencia agradable para toda la familia. Reúnanse todos para realizar un concurso de historias de terror, prueben con el mismo párrafo dando diferentes entonaciones, agregando sonidos ambientales, etc. Esto les ayudará a practicar la pronunciación. Cuéntale a tu hijo o hija alguna de estas historias; proporciónale imágenes de la historia que hayan elegido y ordénenlas juntos de manera cronológica.

Estos son algunos ejemplos de lo práctico y divertido que puede ser aprender inglés a través de historias de terror, sean creativos y no olviden dejar una luz encendida…