September 30, 2020 | strande
Ready to hide under the covers to avoid the bumps and spooks outside your window? Here's a collection of spine-tingling stories. Books are suggested for Fifth Grade, but remember that each reader is different and might find something interesting at another level.
Timid twelve-year-old Teddy Mathews and his mother move to a small, remote desert town in eastern Washington, where the tree next door, mutated by nuclear waste, eats children and the friends Teddy makes turn out to be dead.
Zach, Alice, and Poppy, friends from a Pennsylvania middle school who have long enjoyed acting out imaginary adventures with dolls and action figures, embark on a real-life quest to Ohio to bury a doll made from the ashes of a dead girl.
In the tradition of their Cree ancestors, Shelly and her grandmother help these lost souls transition to the next world by catching them in their hair. But when Shelly's mom dies, her relationship to ghosts--and death--changes. Instead of helping spirits move on, she starts bringing them home and hiding them in her room. But no matter how many ghosts she collects, Shelly can't ignore the one that's missing. Why hasn't her mom's ghost come home yet?
During the summer before ninth grade, intrepid Gilda Joyce invites herself to the San Francisco mansion of distant cousin Lester Splinter and his thirteen-year-old daughter, where she uses her purported psychic abilities and detective skills to solve the mystery of the mansion's boarded-up tower.
Nobody Owens is a normal boy, except that he has been raised by ghosts and other denizens of the graveyard. As he grows older, a terror tied to his past returns. You can enjoy his story as a graphic novel too.
This anthology of very short, scary stories by an assortment of authors and illustrators includes works by Chris Raschka, Joyce Carol Oates, Neil Gaiman, Jack Gantos, and Lane Smith.
Shares the sometimes gruesome details of the deaths of nineteen famous historical figures, including King Tut, Pocahontas, George Washington, Edgar Allan Poe, and Marie Curie.
Eleven-year-old Corinne must call on her courage and an ancient magic to stop an evil spirit and save her island home.
The haunted season has arrived in the Antler Wood. No fox kit is safe.
When Mia and Uly are separated from their litters, they discover a dangerous world full of monsters. In order to find a den to call home, they must venture through field and forest, facing unspeakable things that dwell in the darkness: a zombie who hungers for their flesh, a witch who tries to steal their skins, a ghost who hunts them through the snow . . . and other things too scary to mention.
After eleven-year-old Ollie's school bus mysteriously breaks down on a field trip, she has to take a trip through scary woods, and must use all of her wits to survive. She must stick to small spaces.