Aside from making me very thankful that I have never had to spend a night on an island like Shutter Island, the movie got me thinking about why islands feature heavily in scary stories.

What is it about islands that makes scaring the pants off people such an easy task?

Far away from anywhere familiar…

To begin with, scary stories are usually about isolation.

This isolation isn’t always necessarily physical – at times it can be emotional or psychological – but in most scary stories the main characters are cut off from the ‘normal’ world in some way.

Perhaps they work late at night in a spooky building when everyone else has gone home; or perhaps they took a wrong turn down a country road and they are now far away from anywhere familiar. Regardless of exactly how the story delivers the characters into the scary situation, one of the basic rules of many scary stories is that the characters must be cut off from the world they understand.

Islands, then, are a perfect setting for a sense of isolation. What could be more isolated than being physically broken off from the ‘normal’ world by savage and dangerous seas? Being stuck on an island means that any real escape is much more difficult, if not entirely impossible – and so the characters must make a stand against the menace that is threatening them.

The only rule is that there are no rules…

Another common element of scary stories is that the ‘rules’ are changed. The characters can’t expect to be able to solve problems in simple, ‘normal’ ways. They must cope – or, in stories where characters are killed one-by-one, fail to cope – with the fact that they can’t rely on familiar mechanisms to save them.

In scary stories set on an island, it’s very easy to change the rules. All you really need is a very bad storm, and suddenly an isolated setting is entirely cut off from the outside world.

When the bad storm hits the island, the phone lines are down, the seas are too dangerous to navigate, the power generators have been destroyed, help can’t reach you for hours or perhaps even days. You are stuck on the island and there is simply no hope of rescue.

The rules of the ‘normal’ world no longer apply, and you must now fight for your very survival [1].

Like the back of his murderous hand…

And a final element that makes scary stories set on islands even scarier is the fact that the bad guy often knows the island much better than the main characters.

Because an island represents a limited landscape, the bad guy can move from place to place with relative ease. He knows exactly what to do to eliminate any remaining remote chance of escape or rescue [2]. He knows when to attack, and where to hide when the tables are turned. He can fade like a ghost into the forest, and he can make his way into locked rooms through secret tunnels and passages that everyone else has forgotten about.

For most of the story he is seemingly invincible, and the island almost seems to conspire with him to eliminate the characters, one-by-one.

Back on dry land…

For all that islands often represent a menacing locality in books, television series and movies, the comforting reality is that very few psychos have gone about murdering entire island communities during very bad storms.

In fact, after trolling for a couple of hours through newspaper databases, I haven’t been able to find a single reference to a situation that seems anything like the standard ‘remote island, bad storm, psycho gets stabby with everyone,’ plot.

When you think about it, that’s probably a good thing, because something like that would be hell on tourism.

That isn’t to say that there have never been any disquieting mysteries relating to islands. If you’d like to explore the topic further, you might like to read about the entire colony that vanished from Roanoke Island, North Carolina, somewhere between 1587 and 1590, or perhaps about the mystery of what, exactly, is buried on Oak Island, Nova Scotia.

Footnotes:

1.	In fact, the plot device of ‘the very bad storm is on its way’ is so common in scary stories that if I lived on an island, I think I’d be pushing my boat into the water and heading for the mainland on any days when it was even just slightly cloudy…
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2.	The two-way radio is destroyed, the boats in the harbour are sunk, the lighthouse has been disabled.
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Okay, another book to go onto my ever-increasing reading list.

Greg over at Book Obsessions writes:

Devil’s Footsteps by E.E. Richardson offers up a dark and entertaining tale reminiscent of Stephen King’s It, the Candyman movies and of course the Bloody Mary urban legend. Speaking of the latter…After reading this book, I felt compelled to do some research on the Bloody Mary legend. The version of the legend that I have always heard requires the person who is summoning Bloody Mary to say her name 13 times while holding a candle in front of a mirror in a dark room. After the 13th utterance of the name, Bloody Mary will appear in the mirror and basically stare you down. However, I learned through my research that other variations of the legend include Bloody Mary scratching off the face of the person who summoned her, driving the person mad, or even dragging the person through the mirror to live with Mary for all eternity…Yikes!

If you’re a fan of the Bloody Mary tale, then Devil’s Footsteps sounds very much like a fun, scary read!

If you have already read it and you’d like to let us know whether you enjoyed it or not, please share your comments below.

In this rendition, Bloody Mary is a witch who lives in a forest and who lures children from a nearby village to use them in black magic that will give her back her youth.

Predictably, things don’t go well at all for the wicked witch once the villagers discover that she has been lying, and she is burned alive for murdering their children.

Before she dies, however, Bloody Mary curses the village, and to this very day anyone who chants her name three times in front of a darkened mirror will summon her vengeful spirit from the grave.

You can read the tale in full over at: Bloody Mary: A Scary Urban Legend from Pennsylvania Folklore

To Jacob, sitting at the counter next to the man, the diner seemed to be too harshly lit, as if every object within had been rendered with almost painful intensity. He glanced at the man sitting on the next seat and sighed. One of those, he thought. Just my luck.

“It used to bother me,” the man said. “I thought people would treat me like I was a freak or a weirdo or something. You know, because of the puddles. But no-one ever seems to notice.”

Jacob signaled for a waitress and ordered a coffee. She was a distracted looking woman with a nice smile when she allowed it to flicker across her face. She wore a name badge with ‘Beth’ written on it, over the faded lettering of ‘Juanita,’ which had been the name originally stenciled onto the plastic. She hurried off to pour the coffee, and Jacob wondered who Juanita had been, where she had gone.

“Then it started bothering me that people don’t notice. You’d think that would be something people would pick up on, a man who has puddles beneath his feet everywhere he goes. For some reason it was worse that no-one noticed.”

Beth placed the cup in front of Jacob, and he thanked her. On a whim, he asked her who Juanita had been. She appeared momentarily confused, and then, “Oh, you mean the name on my badge?” She swiveled it around, twisting the fabric on her blouse into a knot, and tucked her chin down to read it. “I honestly don’t know. I never met her. I think she went away.”

Jacob thanked her again and she moved off to serve another customer.

“I thought about asking people about it. You know, if they ever noticed the puddles. And then I got scared that if I did, they’d start noticing them all the time, and that would be worst of all.”

Jacob stared into the slightly oily surface of the coffee, catching a distorted vision of the interior of the diner in its reflection. He could hear the man tapping his feet nervously against the footrest of his seat, making soft, wet squelching noises with his shoes. On the floor below, a puddle of water had gathered.

“I think it’s supposed to mean something,” the man said, staring out at the darkness, “but I don’t know what.”

Jacob took a sip of coffee; it was too bitter and too hot but he drank it anyway. He briefly considered telling the man that the puddles had something to do with his final moments, with the way his life had ended. Maybe he had slipped on some tiles, or been electrocuted, or perhaps even drowned – something to do with water.

But then, he thought to himself, what’s the point? The dead, they never listen.

“Excuse me, Miss,” he said on a whim as the waitress walked by. “I was wondering who Juanita was?”

“Oh,” said the waitress, momentarily confused, “you mean the name on my badge? I honestly don’t know. I never met her. I think she went away.”

Take, for example, the tale below – something spooky is said to happen on the campus of Adelaide University, in South Australia. Something to do with the professor who died late one night on the 6th floor, and who is rumored to be there still.

If only in spirit…

Do you have a Ghost Story you’d like to share? Send it in via the submit a ghost story link!