Halloween is about to be upon us and there's no better time to tell horror stories to get you into a spooky mood. And we don't have to look far for horror stories to send a chill down your spine. A few fairy tales from Thai childhood can do the bloody trick. Here are two local fairy tales that, in hindsight, are way too bloody and depressing for children.
The Twelve Sisters
A rich man and his wife have 12 daughters but they can no longer afford to raise them. He decides to abandon them in a forest and succeeds on the second attempt (wow, what a FOTY). A widow giantess, who rules a giant town sees the distraught girls and her maternal instinct kicks in. She transforms herself into a woman and adopts them as her own and also tells her subjects to disguise as humans, too.
One day, the girls discover piles of bones and realise that their adoptive mum is a giantess and abandon her. As luck would have it, they meet a king who takes them all as his wives and also manages to impregnate them, too (what a champ, right?). The scornful giantess casts a spell on the king to make him fall for her and appoint her his major wife. The giantess casts another spell to make him hate the 12 sisters and imprison them in a cave. She then pretends to fall ill and claims that the only remedy is to use the sisters' eyeballs as medicine to cure her (what a biatch!) and the king freaking agrees.
Therefore, the heavily pregnant sisters who are incarcerated in a cave have their eyeballs forcibly gouged by the king's two henchmen, beginning with the oldest. A hunchback servant, who is loyal to the 12 sisters, successfully convinces the king to stop the barbaric crime. However, she arrives late and only the youngest sister gets to keep one of her eyeballs.
The sisters' god-awful ordeal doesn't stop there as their imprisonment continues. One by one, the blind sisters give birth unassisted in the cave and get by with whatever leftovers their servant manages to sneakily provide for them. Eleven babies from the first 11 sisters are born dead so they resort to cannibalism. Yep, you read that right. The surviving baby goes on to be a hero and restore dignity and sight to his mother and 11 aunties in the end. Not sure how his aunties live with the fact that they ate their own babies, though.
The Golden Goby
A rich fisherman (can you be rich catching fish?) has two wives, one of which is good and the other is evil. The good wife accompanies him on a fishing trip but it is a bad day as he barely catches anything until he gets a golden goby in his net. The wife asks him to spare it but the fisherman, who is already frustrated, smacks her hard with a paddle and she falls into the river. The husband of the year lets her drown (as you do).
The good wife's only daughter Auay is made a slave of the evil wife and her two daughters -- a la Cinderella but much more effed up. She has to work hard and cries over her dead mum at a pier during her breaks. Her mum has been reincarnated as a golden goby and calls out to her. Yeah, Auay gets to reunite with her mum in fish form. However, once the evil wife learns of this, she asks one of her daughters to pretend to be Auay to lure the goby out to catch her and turn her into dinner. A duck sees the planned murder, manages to keep a piece of the goby's golden scale in its mouth and gives it to Auay. She makes a wish that her mother would return to her again and plants the fish scale in the earth. The mother returns as a Thai eggplant tree (the roundish kind that you find in green curry) and bears a lot of fruit. And -- yes, you guessed it -- the evil stepmother has it destroyed.
Auay then collects its seed and plants it so her mother returns once again as a gold-and-silver banyan tree. A king sees the majestic tree and orders to have it replanted at his palace. Somehow, the tree can't be uprooted without Auay permission so she is ordered to replant it at his palace. The king takes a liking to her and makes her his wife, obvi.
The evil stepmom visits Auay at the palace to lie that her father is very ill. She goes home to visit him but walks into a trap, that the evil stepmother has set up, into a pan of boiling water, resulting in her death. The evil stepmother tells one of her daughters to disguise herself as Auay and return to the palace. Auay is reborn as a bird, which the king is very fond of. While the king is away, she is caught by her stepsister and narrowly escapes being cooked with the help of a rat.
She flies away and meets a hermit who does necromancy (perhaps with help of Necronomicon) to bring her back into human form and magically gives her a son, too. Eventually, Auay, her son and the king happily reunite. The stepsister, who disguises as Auay, takes her own life for fear of being executed. Auay even asks the king if he would let her stepmum and dad live with them. Girl, don't be a doormat.