This is the season when the world turns dark. Even with daylight savings time in place, the sun sets earlier and earlier. As the nights get longer, cold winds nudge us back inside our brightly lit homes. Our windows look out onto the deep blue night.
Halloween Jack-o’-Lanterns are a traditional way to cope with darkness. They’re scary, sometimes, but that’s the point! Jack-o’-Lanterns get their name from a trickster character, Jack, who storytellers say was too naughty and too clever for a normal life and death. After he died, Jack became a creature with nothing, not even a light, to guide him. So he made a lantern for himself out of a root vegetable, and he used that for illumination as he roamed the earth.
The ancestors who invented early Jack-o’-Lanterns made some of them out of pumpkins, but others were carved from rutabagas, turnip, beets, and other root vegetables. While we carve some of our pumpkins to look cheery or silly, our ancestors made all their Jack-o’-Lanterns scary, in memory of “Jack”—and to scare away evil.
Scaring yourself is part of a long Halloween tradition. If you’re a kid or parent who wants some Halloween chills and thills, try these!
Spine-Tingling Tales from Folklore and Literature
Ghoulish Ghost Stories by Joan Axelrod-Contrada
Describes classic ghost stories, including "The Bell Witch" and "The Amityville Horror."
Scary: A Book of Horrible Things for Kids by Joaquín Ramon Herrera
Describes things that crawl, things that feed on you, things that go thump in the night, and places that will scare you into screams!
Ask the Bones: Scary Stories from Around the World by Arielle North
Features a collection of scary folktales from countries around the world including China, Russia, Spain, and the United States.
A Terrifying Taste of Short and Shivery: Thirty Creepy Tales by Robert San Souci
An anthology of classic creepy tales from around the world.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Includes traditional and contemporary stories about ghosts, witches, vampires, monsters, and other scary things.
More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Schwartz gets super serious with even scarier tales of tales of horror, dark revenge, and unexplained mysteries.
Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
The master of horror is back at it, with even more stories of ghosts, hauntings, monsters, and other scary things.
The Legend of the Werewolf by Thomas Kingsley Trope
Describes popular werewolf legends and traces their history.
Frightlopedia: An Encyclopedia of Everything Scary, Creepy, and Spine Chilling by Julie Winterbottom
A compendium of scary stuff, from Borneo’s Gomantong Cave, full of bats, cockroaches, and spiders to the the Mongolian Death Worm. This book also incudes ghost stories from around the world. Each entry includes a “Fright Meter” measurement from 1 to 3, because while being scared is fun, everyone has their limits.