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My mother has a cassette tape she's kept in a dusty and cracked plastic tape case for 20 years. She re-discovered the tape recently and invited me over for lunch. "You've got to listen to it," she told me. When I stuck it in the stereo and pushed play, a high-pitched 8-year-old voice spurted from the speakers. For a moment I didn't recognize it as my own. But it soon sparked a memory of a winter evening when my younger brothers, John, David, and I sat huddled together on the staircase in the dark while I told them a story, the microphone to the portable recorder pressed to my lips.

"Whatever you do, don't go to the pond by yourself," I piped.

"Why? Why? Why?" My brothers yipped like baby seals.

There was a pause on the tape, a hiss of emptiness. Then, in my little-girl voice, I dramatically intoned, "Because, you'll be in big trouble-uble-uble-uble-uble-uble." Our individual voices were barely distinguishable between the ensuing giggles and shrieks of laughter.

I finally hushed them. Silence fell.

"You can't go to the pond because, there is a giant frog WHO WILL EAT YOUR FACES OFF!" I bellowed into the microphone. My voice was distorted because I'd held the microphone right to my lips to ensure everything I said would be captured for posterity.

There was silence again, except for my breath.

"Nu-uh," Dave, the 4-year-old, said. "There is not."

"You made it all up," stated John, the more mature 6-year-old.

I denied this accusation, telling them I'd heard the story from a neighborhood kid. The metallic ring of the microphone shutting off ended the conversation.

As the three of us grew up together, I often told them scary stories. They would ask me to create the "trouble-uble-uble" tales with aliens or mortal enemies or haunted houses. In the darkness, I would do my best to conjure worlds where battles between good and evil were valiantly fought. I made up stories and passed along to my brothers the gory urban legends my older cousins shared with me that kept me up all night nervously checking beneath my bed every 10 minutes. Despite the fear that occasionally made me run downstairs to crawl in bed with my mom, I always begged to hear another.

One afternoon, my family climbed into our brown station wagon and set out on a road trip to Mankato. I don't recall why we were going there, but I vividly remember the Jolly Green Giant billboard towering over the trees beside the highway. Late that night when we returned home from our visit, I nonchalantly said, "Hey, Dave."

"What?" he asked.

"You better not go to sleep tonight."

"Why?"

"Because the Jolly Green Giant will come and step on you."

"Nu-uh."

"Uh-huh."

I didn't hear another word about the giant until years later, while attending college on the East Coast. Dave traveled to visit me, and we sat talking about our childhood together.

"You know that time you told me about the Jolly Green Giant?" he asked. I nodded.

Dave laughed and said, "I stayed awake the entire night shaking and crying-waiting for him to come and step on me."

I started laughing and ended up with tears popping from my eyes. I apologized for scaring him to death, feeling horrible that I'd tortured him by turning the power of his own vivid imagination against him. He said he didn't mind. But I was haunted by the picture of a skinny little kid quaking beneath blankets stretched over a face wet with tears.

So, by the time my little sister, Kate-16 years my junior-was ready to hear stories at bedtime, I had done some thinking about how scary they should be. As I had discovered with Dave, I had to be responsible about the images I planted in my siblings' minds. When my sister was 9 years old, we were sleeping side-by-side in bunk beds up at the lake. She asked me to tell her a scary story.

"A real scary story?" I asked.

"Yes," she confirmed. She was no longer a baby.

"Are you sure?" I grilled her. "Because this one is really scary."

She was ready, she said again, insisting she was old enough and reminding me she was currently reading Moby Dick. So I told her the tale of the baby-sitter who gets prank phone calls from a strange man. When I got to the punch line and Kate discovered the man was actually calling from inside the house, she was silent for a moment.

Then she quietly asked, "Did that really happen?"

"Yup," I responded.

We turned off the lights and when I looked over I could see the moonlight glittering on the bright circles of her open eyes as she stared at the ceiling. She had pulled the comforter up to her chin and tightly gripped the fabric with her small hands. I thought of myself at her age, trembling beneath my covers, hating the fear, but thrilled by it at the same time.

"Do you want to tell me a story?" I asked her.

She jumped up, turned the lights back on, and came over to sit by me. "Well, once upon a time there was a bunch of kids at camp. And there was a madman loose in the woods . . ." mm

Jacquelyn B. Fletcher is an editor at Minnesota Monthly.