Before a long train journey I grabbed a copy of Alfred Hitchcock’s Book of Horror Stories, a cheap paperback anthology from the early 1980s. My intention was to read some stories that aren’t part of the canon and perhaps make a discovery or two. Frankly, most of the contents were pretty terrible, but this piece of forgotten folk horror made it worth the slog.
It’s similar in tone to Thomas Tryon’s cult 1973 novel Harvest Home and is about a young woman, known only as ‘the girl’, who goes to visit distant relatives in the country. The matriarch of the clan, Aunt Abbie, collects human hair in different colours, which she is slowly weaving into a beautiful wreath of flowers. She covets ‘the girl’s’ red hair – a rare colour:
“‘See?’ Aunt Abbie’s long finger pointed. ‘I ain’t got that rose in yet.’ Reflectively, she gazed at the girl in the chair. ‘I just got the rose left.’”
But as a point of principle, she only uses hair from dead people. So how else can this go? Art is art, after all.
First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July 1968. Collected in various Alfred Hitchock story collections over the years
A Personal Anthology 