I Read Scary Stories: The Big Toe

The Big Toe

. . . What the hell did I just read?

Our first tale opens with a boy discovering a toe sticking out of the ground in his family’s garden. He immediately pulls it off, hears something groan, and runs to present it to his family. The mom approves it as the Iron Chef ingredient for the night and throws it in the stew.

Hold on. I got questions.

Let’s get out of the way that eating a toe in stew is crazy. We know, that’s the obvious question, and we’ll move on past. Folk-tales are weird sometimes. Having your child hand you a piece of corpse and not asking where it came from is even weirder. The big question I want to know is, “Why wasn't this kid surprised to find a corpse buried in his garden?”

Seriously, it’s not like he found it in a strange far hill while scrounging for berries. This kid went out to work the garden and thought, “Hey, the corpse in the west field looks about ripe!” He wasn't even surprised, and neither were his folks.

Are these people really cannibal killers? It’d be pretty hard for anyone to bury someone in their garden without getting their attention, and bodies don’t bury themselves. We must conclude that little Junior’s gardening responsibilities include checking the murder victims to see if their ready to be soup yet. Is the kid our prospective victim or the tale’s true monster? Should we perhaps reserve that title for the psychopaths who taught him to eat human flesh?

Man, this story has so many levels.

In any case, something returns for the toe, moaning about his lost fleshy athletic equipment, and the junior cannibal listens to it smash through door after door, spouting “Where is my to-o-o-o-o-e?" until it finally wanders into his room, asks the $64,000 question . . .

And you jump at a nearby audience nearby as you scream, “You've got it!”

This section of stories is clearly labeled as the tales you tell to friends before pouncing at them. It’s a classic campfire story used to efficiently draw urine out of the bladders of the young. In fact, the structure of this one is downright familiar to me. I was spooked by one like this as a kid, one that I think had a better narrative hook than the cannibal family.


The Tailypo.

“The Tailypo” has roots in the Native American tales of Appalachia, where it was called the “Teh-Li Po.” The current version is probably influenced from a tale the Brothers Grim called “The Man from the Gallows” involving a liver instead of a toe. I was fond of this one as a kid because it had, of course, a monster.

In this version, a lone woodsman is starving after a long day of fruitless hunting. Right before he goes to bed, some unknown critter streaks across the bedroom floor. Our woodsman is a regular Davy Crockett outdoors-man ninja, and just as the thing runs into a hole in the wall he manages to toss a hatchet at the wall. The critter nearly gets away, but leaves a bloody tail behind.

Our hungry hero immediately fries the tail up and eats it.

Bad move.

Over the next few days, the man is stalked by the skittering unseen creature, who speaks in an inhuman voice, “Tailypo, tailypo, give me back my tailypo!”

The critter (usually referred to as the “Tailypo”), ignorant of the workings of the human digestive system, finally guts the man to look for his lost tailypo.

Optionally, the storyteller can mention then that the critter never found his tailypo, pause, and dp the whole “You've got it” leap at the audience as desired.

There’s a lot of Tailypo art online, and none of it is the one I grew up on. All the Tailypos I see are black . . .


. . . and the kid’s book I read it from depicted it as a yellow wolf-thing.

Mark Twain told a similar story about a man stealing a golden arm from a grave, and I bet you can guess by now how that ends. He is very insistent on the where-fors of the telling. He said:

The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a frequently recurring feature, too. It is a dainty thing, and delicate, and also uncertain and treacherous; for it must be exactly the right length -- no more and no less -- or it fails of its purpose and makes trouble. If the pause is too short the impressive point is passed, and the audience have had time to divine that a surprise is intended -- and then you can't surprise them, of course.

On the platform I used to tell a negro ghost story that had a pause in front of the snapper on the end, and that pause was the most important thing in the whole story. If I got it the right length precisely, I could spring the finishing ejaculation with effect enough to make some impressionable girl deliver a startled little yelp and jump out of her seat -- and that was what I was after.

But jumps aren't the only meaning here. Types of folktales are classified by the Aarne-Thompson system, a Dewey Decimal system for types of stories. These are type 366, where a corpse or mysterious animal won’t stop until they complete themselves again.

There’s a moral inside these, like most folk-tales or the urban legends they evolved into, a strong sense of “Don’t take what isn’t yours.” Still, I can’t quite fault the woodsman as much as the others. Dead man’s livers, big toes, and golden arms are a stretch too far, but fryin’ up critters is what mountain men do best. I think Tailypo taps into a slightly different vein of fear. It’s not being afraid of punishment; it’s the fear of learning that you’re in over your head with no way out.

As to the reading, I managed not to wake my wife. I crawled into bed while she was napping, pulled up the cover, and blew through the story relatively quickly. When she woke up, I asked her how her sleep was and only received the response, “Unconscious.” My wife has, of yet, no idea that I am crawling into bed to read scary stories with a flashlight. Not, admittedly, as creepy a thing as if I crawled into someone else’s bed to do it, but she might still be unnerved upon the discovery.

Or not. She’s my wife. She catches me doing a lot of weird stuff.

Next: The Walk