5 Creepy Things from The Thousand and One Nights

The frame story that holds all the tales of The Thousand and One Nights together feels more like horror than anything else. In it King Shahrayar, after discovering that his wife has been unfaithful to him, resolves to marry a new woman each day, spend the night with her, and kill her in the morning. This homicidal arrangement continues until he marries Shahrazad (Scheherazade), who has a plan to rescue the kingdom from the king. Each night she tells Shahrayar a story. These are invariably cut short when dawn arrives, and the king, not wanting to miss the ending, allows Shahrazad to live and continue the story the next night. After 1,001 nights he gives up his plan. Still, it’s not hard to picture Shahrayar as a modern horror-movie villain.

The haunted house, a mainstay of modern horror, also appears in the Nights. The story “Ali the Cairene and the Haunted House in Baghdad” tells the tale of a trader named Ali on a visit to Baghdad. He inquires about a particular house in one of the neighborhoods and is told that it is haunted by jinn and that anyone who stays the night there dies before morning. The corpses have to be dragged out with ropes since the local people are too scared to enter the house. Although the story has the makings of a chilling tale, modern haunted-house aficionados will be disappointed by the ending: Ali spends the night in the house, but the jinn do not frighten or torment him. Instead, they welcome him and give him a large amount of gold.

The Nights’ all-purpose supernatural creatures, these shape-shifting otherworldly beings appear throughout the stories. In pre-Islamic myths, jinn were spirits that haunted the deserts of Arabia. The myths say that their bodies are composed of fire. Jinn are not intrinsically malevolent—in some tales they grant wishes and give help to humans in need—but running afoul of an angry jinni is a hair-raising experience. In “The Merchant and the Jinni,” for example, a merchant finds himself face-to-face with a powerful jinni who demands his death after he carelessly tosses the pit of a date, killing the jinni’s invisible son. Although the merchant is ultimately able to avoid his fate when three old men appear to fascinate the jinni with stories, in the future he must have thought twice about where he threw his date pits.

One of the eeriest episodes in the Nights is the tale of the City of Brass. In the story, a crew of explorers, after following a long path marked by sinister statues and a dark castle full of tombs, come to a walled city. On the outer walls they encounter charming young women, who on closer inspection reveal themselves to be cunningly constructed automatons meant to fool invaders into jumping off the walls to their deaths. A few of the men are killed before the illusion is discovered. The rest venture inside, where they find buildings of unbelievable opulence, with every surface seemingly covered in gold and jewels. But the city is ominously silent. The only inhabitants are human corpses, some still sitting in their homes and shops, giving the impression of life frozen in time. The party eventually reaches the city’s queen. Her sparkling eyes cause them to briefly mistake her for a living person, but they soon learn that she too is dead and that the light from her eyes comes from quicksilver placed there by an embalmer. A nearby inscription tells the whole story: the city was struck by a famine, and the people, once they had exhausted every effort to save themselves, went back to their places and awaited their fates. In the end, it’s a cautionary tale about the transience of wealth. It’s also supremely creepy.

The source of the English word ghoul, the ghūls of Arabian myths are a species of fearsome creatures that roam the wilderness at night. Unlike the jinn, ghūls are invariably sinister: they have an appetite for human flesh, often lurk in cemeteries, and are known to assume pleasing shapes in order to lure humans into the wilderness. Arabic folklore says that a ghūl can be killed with a single blow but that a second blow will bring the creature back to life.