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Help A Reader Out: Spooky Story Collection for the Younger Set

Someone HAS to know this one. How many children’s books out there can possibly have housecleaning witches, spooky skeletons, Nessie, and a family of ghosts, all inside the same covers?

Tracy says:

This book isn’t part of a series like “scary stories to tell in the dark” or “goosebumps” and it’s for a younger demographic than those. It is illustrated and has several spooky themed short stories. One was about a grumpy witch who finds happiness by opening a cleaning service. I specifically remember her kicking a child’s tricycle and saying “get your ding-dang tricycle out of my driveway”.

There was also a story about a skeleton who liked to jump out from behind a gravestone to scare people, but one day he tried to scare a scotty dog and the dog stole his tasty leg bones.

There was a story about someone playing bagpipes on Loch Ness and disrupting Nessie.

The last story was about an extended ghost family getting ready to go out haunting for the night. The mom was ironing everyone’s sheets, the kids were playing with the ghost dog. The last page of the book showed the mom and dad ghost kissing the kids and tucking them in to bed. I think the back cover had the ghost family on a pirate ship. I can’t remember what the front color looked like but it may have been ghosts in a castle.

I obtained the book in the early 1990s.  It’s probably first published around then.

Thank you.

Let’s see if we can help Tracy out. Please let me know if you have ANY ideas!

Help a Reader Out: Petrified Heads, Metal Crosses, and a Phantom Horserider

Our reader says:

When I was a teen or a kid (I forgot how old I was), I remember my mom getting me a book with a cover of these metal cross-like things being on the cover and there were several petrified faces on them. I think the cover was kind of a dark purple or something.

Anyways, I remember vaguely two stories from the book. One was about a phantom horserider that rode by a school everyday repeating the events of her death. And, the other was about a father recalling his memories about a childhood friend that he couldn’t save from drowning or something.

I’ve been looking for this book for the past two days and I have came up with no luck.

I thought this might be Robert San Souci’s Short and Shivery, which is a children’s anthology with a purplish cover and an iron fence topped with crosses, but there are no petrified heads, and I’m not familiar enough with the stories to be able to know for sure. I’ll make you all the same offer I did last time– if you can identify the book, I’ll send you candy.

Help A Reader Out: Tunnels Under A Slaughterhouse

Gentle readers–

Can anyone identify this book?

Shane wrote:

I’ve been SEARCHING to no avail  for this book I read and I know nothing about it other than it probably came out in 2000-2002. It was a “scary” book. And the only details I have was it was about a boy and his friend who go to or maybe investigate a slaughterhouse and they end up getting lost in the tunnels underneath it? And they hear the cows, something or other, and in the end the boy makes it out and his friend he claimed to have lost in the tunnels never existed (when he told family and police). If you know ANYTHING could you please please help me?

 
I’ll make you a deal. Identify the book correctly and I’ll send you candy. It’s getting to be that trick-or-treating time of year, anyway. 🙂