Construction Zombies

When I was younger my Grandmother (mom's mom) and Aunt (mom's sister) would tell me scary things to keep me from doing things. I can understand (barely) in hind sight that they were telling me these things to keep me safe. But it was mean and dumb to do to a little girl and I loathe it when I see/hear people using ridiculous scare tactics to scare their kids into obedience. Protect them? Absolutely. But tell them the truth already, don't terrorize them into behaving.

My Grandparents lived in an old old farm house with one of those dirt floor farm house basements. Years before I was born they added on a sunporch to the house, but the foundation didn't go all the way to the ground. When you would walk down the stairs to the basement you could see under the sunporch addition. There were some shelves built up against the ceiling towards the bottom of the stairs. It's where all the cleaning supplies were kept, windex, toilet cleaner etc. I used to love to clean the outside of the refridgerator with windex at that house. I mean, it sounds ridiulous, but I would BEG to clean the refridgerator when I went over there. So I was allowed to get the cleaning supplies off the shelf.
However, my grandparents always had boxes and boxes of ice cream bars and sometimes sandwhiches stashed away in one of those rectangle deep freezers in the basement. I would go down there sometimes with my great Aunt Ellen (of ellenjane fame)to retrieve a fresh box. I don't know if it was because of my voracious and unquenchable thirst for all things ice cream related, or because there were so many old canning jars and nooks and crannies in the basement for me to get into but I wasn't allowed in the basement by myself.
Was it enough for them to tell me that it wasn't safe or allowed for me to go into the basement? Nope. Here's what happened:

One afternoon my grandmother and aunt were in the kitchen while I was cleaning the fridge (I don't know where anyone else was). When I came up from retrieving the windex they told me that I should never go onto the basement stairs alone again. When I asked them why they said because the men would get me. (Ummm....that's creepy)
They said that when the sunporch was being built there were 2 men that were killed in the course of construction. (Looking back, that's just ridiculous. How on earth would have have happened?!) My grandmother said that the men still lived on under the sun porch and they had an affinity for little girls (WHAT?! WHY WHY WHY would you tell a child that?!). My grandmother said that if they saw little girls going down the stairs by themselves, not with an adult, that they would pull them under the sunporch and they would never see their parents again.
Needless to say, I didn't go in the basement alone ever again.