@Ginpostersyndrome
I remember a book of stories that my little sibling had called something like Stories For Six Year Olds. There was a couple who fell in love as small children and she always had a ribbon round her neck. Every year on his birthday he'd ask her to take the ribbon off and every year she'd say "no please don't ask that". Then one year she gave in and undid the ribbon and her head fell off. And how sad he was. The end.
That's the weirdest one I ever read.
@Ginpostersyndrome Ah! I remember the horrific story about the ribbon and the head falling off, but I think it was in a book called In a Dark Dark Room, which was generally absolutely terrifying. There were a variety of stories which after reading gave me real childhood insomnia and terrors, but the one about the ribbon, and another one about a boy and a graveyard and a sweater were the the worst.
Wiki lists the stories in that book as follows:
**"The Green Ribbon”
The third story in the book, "The Green Ribbon", follows a girl named Jenny. She always wears a green ribbon around her neck and meets a boy named Alfred. She refuses to reveal to Alfred why she wears the ribbon, and even when the two are wed, she wears the ribbon every day. After reaching old age, Jenny lets Alfred untie the ribbon while she is on her deathbed, causing her head to fall onto the floor.[2] "The Green Ribbon" is derived from a French story of unknown origin, which was popularized by Washington Irving's 1824 short story "The Adventure of the German Student".[3][4]
"The Teeth"
A kid is hurrying home and comes upon a man. The kid asks the man for the time, and when he replies, the kid sees he has long teeth, scaring him away. He runs and comes upon another man, who asks him why he is running before revealing that he has even longer teeth. The kid once again runs away, encountering a third man with yet longer teeth and finally running all the way home.
"In a Graveyard"
A "very short and very fat" woman asks three corpses in a graveyard if she will be thin like them when she is dead. She is surprised when the corpses spring to life to respond in the affirmative.
"The Night it Rained"
A man is driving in the rain at night when he sees a small boy alone in the rain and offers the child a ride home. The child, Jim, is visibly shivering in his car, so the man gives him a sweater to put on, dropping him off safely with the sweater. When the driver returns for his sweater the next day and knocks on the door, a woman in the home says that Jim was her son, but that he had died almost a year ago. The man apologizes and goes to visit Jim's grave, where he finds his sweater.
"In a Dark, Dark Room"
This story is presented as a series of "dark, dark" places and objects which narrow in scope from a woods to a house within the woods to a room within the house and so on. The final object in the series, a dark, dark box, is suddenly revealed to contain a ghost.
"The Pirate"
Ruth goes to visit her relatives and is playing with her cousin Susan when Susan tells her a pirate once lived in the room Ruth is staying in. Ruth boldly claims that she does not believe in ghosts and she is not afraid. She goes to bed that night, and checks everywhere and finds nothing. When she gets in bed, she laughs and says "There's no one in this room but me" and a scary voice from nowhere says "AND ME!".
"The Ghost of John"
A short limerick style poem about a skeleton.**
I’ve found the terrifying pics from the one with the ribbon, and there is a good buzz feed thread about it here.
www.buzzfeed.com/lyapalater/for-everyone-thats-still-fucked-up-over-that-stor
I also had Stories For Six Year Olds but don’t remember it having anything scary, or any pictures (though it was back in the 80s so I could be remembering wrong!).
Thanks for the reminder either way (shudder)