In Murphy's story collection Night Terrors, a grimly humorous figure who calls himself "Digger" is a guide to the stories, most of which feature young adults in frightful trouble. Digger himself does not seem to be in trouble; he follows a gloomy profession and takes a great deal of pleasure in digging graves, but he points out that he has never seen any of the weird stuff he has heard about, and he has doubts about the veracity of the stories, but he likes them. "Served him right," he says about a boy supposedly buried alive. "It's hard enough keeping a cemetery neat without a bunch of kids digging it up," he adds.

This misanthropic figure intersperses stories with tales of his own hard life, wandering America looking for paradise—a good cemetery with knolls and trees where he can dig graves with a shovel and be left alone by outsiders. His accounts of himself form a plot independent of the other stories in Night Terrors, culminating in "Footprints in the Snow" and "Digger's Good-bye," which form two parts of the same story— Digger's transformation into a werewolf.