The best Halloween books for kids differ in what they do with the scary part.
A witch makes room on her broom for one more. Green pants turn out as scared of the boy as he is of them. An old woman won’t admit the clothes following her home are frightening. A green ribbon holds a girl’s head on.
An eight-year-old wants that last one. It would keep a three-year-old awake. Gentlest first, and the last section means it.
Nothing in these books is trying to frighten anyone
Room on the Broom — Julia Donaldson
2001 · picture book · about five minutes aloud · ages 3–7
A witch keeps saying yes. A dog, a bird and a frog each hand back something she dropped, each asks for a ride, and each gets one, until the broom snaps in two and a hungry dragon turns up wanting to eat her. That dragon is the only frightening thing in the book, and the passengers see it off within a few spreads. It is a witch story rather than a Halloween-night story, which matters only if your child is expecting costumes.
It’s a first Halloween book, with no fright to manage. The engine is that every yes does two jobs: each passenger adds weight to the broom and becomes a rescuer later, so at the moment the broom breaks under everyone she said yes to, the answer is already sitting on it. Donaldson and Axel Scheffler are the pair behind The Gruffalo, and the rhyme is why teachers use this one for phonics and speech pathologists use it for sounds.
Publishers Weekly called it lightweight, which it is, by design. The danger arrives late and resolves fast, so a small child gets the shape of a scary story with almost none of the scare. Hand it to a seven-year-old who asked to be frightened and you’ll get it straight back. There is a 2012 animated film and a long-running stage version too, so a child may turn up already knowing how it ends.
The Room on the Broom lift-the-flap and push, pull and slide board books carry a short retelling, not Donaldson’s rhyme. Both are UK Macmillan editions, and the push, pull and slide one is sold on Amazon.com.
The full text is in the Puffin paperback, pitched at three to seven. Dial publishes a standard board book for ages one to three. Check your shelf before you buy either, because this is the book most families already own.
Also Read: THE 13 BEST Halloween Books for Preschoolers
The Princess in Black and the Trick-or-Treating Trouble — Shannon Hale and Dean Hale
2026 · early chapter book · one or two bedtimes · ages 5–8
Princess Magnolia goes trick-or-treating in half her hero outfit, in a year when Princess in Black costumes are on every second child. Somewhere in that crowd is a small horned orange monster that eats an onion, an eraser, a bar of soap and a rock, and asks politely at each door for a goat. Duff’s goat shack is further along the route. That monster is the whole of the fright, and it is played for laughs.
When everyone is the hero, a real monster blends in. The costumes that hide the princess hide the monster too, which is a good thing to hand a five-year-old on the one night of the year they are thinking about disguises. LeUyen Pham illustrates in watercolor and ink, with close-ups and full-bleed spreads, and the chapters are short enough for a child still deciding whether chapter books are for them. School Library Journal puts it between spooky and sweet.
It came out in July 2026, so it has one trade review and no reader history behind it, and it is book twelve of a series with a running cast. Candlewick has it in hardcover at 96 pages, and the unabridged audiobook runs twenty-two minutes — the length of a school run. If the series is new to your child, book one is the other place to start.
The frightening thing turns out to be on the child’s side
Little Blue Truck’s Halloween — Alice Schertle
2016 · lift-the-flap board book · three minutes aloud · ages 0–4
Blue and Toad drive to a Halloween party, picking up friends in disguise on the way: a duck in a tutu, a sheep dressed as a clown, a cow as a queen, a pig as a witch, a horse as a dragon. The child lifts the flap and finds out who it is. Kirkus says it takes some of the mystery, and the fear, out of costumes, which is the job.
Little Blue is in costume too. Jill McElmurry leaves enough of each animal showing around the edge of its own that a toddler gets the guess right first time, which is the design working.
The story underneath is thin — the flaps and the familiar truck carry it, and a child past board books is done in a minute. Clarion has it in print at sixteen pages, with flaps sturdy enough for the age it is aimed at. For a toddler who won’t have the mask on.
How to Make Friends with a Ghost — Rebecca Green
2017 · picture book · seven minutes aloud · ages 4–8
This one is a care manual. Your ghost eats mud tarts and earwax truffles, it likes a bedtime story, and it must never be mistaken for whipped cream or a marshmallow. The joke is played straight the whole way through, in gouache and colored pencil, in a palette of black, gray, brown, rust and one pinkish red. Then the last section, called Growing Together, follows the friendship through moving house, working, having a family and growing old.
The last page is the girl’s own death.
How to Make Friends with a Ghost ends with its heroine dead: on the final page she is a ghost herself, hand in hand with her ghost friend, floating above a new gravestone. It is peaceful, it is not hidden, and the adults are the ones who cry at it. A child anxious about death should not meet it here first.
Two other things a parent should know before buying. There is a page of ghosts served as food that one reader flagged as too much for little ones. And Kirkus finds the art rather adult, with the girl drawn older than she reads.
It was Rebecca Green’s first picture book, and the Globe and Mail listed it that year. Kirkus files it with the guidebooks for looking after monsters, trolls, fairies and dragons. That is the shelf it is imitating, and the reason the comedy holds for six pages before the ending changes what you have been reading. Tundra prints it in hardcover and paperback.
Nothing in it happens at Halloween. Its introduction speaks to a reader who has already been frightened by a ghost, and that is the child it is for: the one who needs the ghost turned into something to look after. That last page has had more of my attention than a picture book usually gets.
What Was I Scared Of? — Dr. Seuss
1961 · picture book · five minutes aloud · ages 5–9
A narrator who says nothing frightens him keeps running into a pair of pale green pants with nobody inside them. The pants turn up in the woods. They ride a bike through Grin-itch, they fish on Roover River, and eventually the two of them end up hiding from each other in the same Snide bush, where he works out that he was as strange to the pants as the pants were to him. That is the plainest version on this list of the monster being the frightened one, and the pants are eerie for about six pages and harmless after that.
Many families already own this story inside a Seuss collection. The standalone is a glow-in-the-dark edition with a soft-touch cover and more than fifty glow stickers, and what the price buys is the flashlight effect rather than more story. The same text sits in The Sneetches and Other Stories.
It is not a Halloween story and the publisher does not pretend otherwise; it works in March. It is here because a child wary of anything that looks strange gets more from this than from most books set on the night. Penguin Random House prints it at five to nine, and a preschool teacher reports three-year-olds asking for the pants book by name, so treat the floor as soft. One reader held a camp group aged three to twelve with a dramatic reading of it, which tells you what the verse can do out loud.
Something comes for them, and they win
The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything — Linda Williams
1986 · picture book · seven minutes aloud · ages 4–8
An old woman walks out on an autumn night to gather herbs, spices, nuts and seeds, and on the way home she is followed: a pair of shoes that go clomp clomp, a pair of pants, a shirt, a hat that goes nod nod, and a pumpkin head. Each one joins the chorus and nothing lets up until she reaches her door and asks what they want. The pumpkin head tells her: to scare her.
Then she gives the whole lot of them a job, and the fright ends in work rather than in a rescue.
The whole room joins in on the sounds. That is why this is read at storytime rather than at bedtime: children learn the sounds on the first pass and shout them on the second, and a two-year-old will join in on the clomping without following the plot. The cost is that the pattern is obvious early, so a child who wants to be surprised won’t be.
Linda Williams ran a child development center and this was her first book, with pictures by Megan Lloyd. It is an autumn book rather than a Halloween one. School Library Journal starred it on release, and HarperCollins still has the paperback nearly forty years on.
The Teeny-Tiny Woman — Paul Galdone
1984 · picture book · four minutes aloud · ages 4–7
A teeny-tiny woman walks into a teeny-tiny churchyard, finds a teeny-tiny bone on a grave, and takes it home to boil for supper. Something wants it back. The voice comes from the cupboard where she put it, it gets louder every time she tries to sleep, and the book ends on the woman’s two-word answer, shouted.
It only works if the adult performs it.
A teacher’s method is the right one: squeaky voice for the woman, low moan for the bone, then hold the pause and shout the last line. The class jumps and then laughs, in that order. Read flat, the repetition is just repetition, and handed to a child to read alone it does nothing at all.
The relentless teeny-tinying is what lets pre-readers come in — by the third page they are saying it with you — and Galdone hides things in the pictures for the second reading. The publisher’s line is spooky rather than scary, which is accurate as long as somebody is doing the voices.
Galdone retells “Teeny-Tiny” from Joseph Jacobs’s English Fairy Tales of 1890. The same collection prints “The Golden Arm,” the tale Mark Twain used in “How to Tell a Story” to teach the timed pause, so the instructions for reading this book were written down a century before the book existed.
No Halloween in it; a churchyard and a cupboard are the whole set. Clarion keeps it in print in the 2016 Folk Tale Classics hardcover, forty pages with gold foil on the cover. The 1980s art looks its age, and a child who startles badly should skip this one, because the ending is built to startle and it does.
Creepy Carrots! — Aaron Reynolds
2012 · picture book · six minutes aloud · ages 4–8
Jasper Rabbit eats the carrots in Crackenhopper Field on the way to school, on the way to Little League and on the way home, and then the carrots start following him. Every time an adult turns around to look, they are ordinary carrots in an ordinary field.
A thriller parody where the stalker is a vegetable. Peter Brown took the 2013 Caldecott Honor for the pictures and they are doing the work: black-bordered panels, pencil art colored digitally, everything in black, white and gray except the orange. The angles come from film noir and so does the paranoia. Publishers Weekly called it a paranoid thriller in miniature.
The greed comes first and the fear follows, and the joke depends on recognizing the form. School Library Journal describes it as horror scaled for the age: a real fear, taken seriously, then let go through comedy. A four-year-old who takes shadowy faces literally will take these literally too, so for the most sensitive child it is a daytime read. There is a nightmare sequence as well.
It is not set at Halloween. It is set in October the way a Twilight Zone episode is, which is close enough for most families. Simon & Schuster has the hardcover.
The Skull — Jon Klassen
2023 · illustrated chapter book · one long sitting · ages 6–9
Otilla is running from something the book never explains. She comes to an abandoned house on a hill where a talking skull lives alone, and they take tea, and eat pears, and dance in masks in the empty ballroom. Every night a headless skeleton comes to the house for the skull, and eventually Otilla deals with it.
The retail listing title puts this at four to nine. Candlewick says six to nine, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center agrees, and School Library Journal says grades two to four. The listing says four; Candlewick says six. There are voices calling Otilla’s name in the woods, a headless thing that comes back every night, a bottomless pit, and a skeleton smashed to pieces — bloodless, but thoroughly smashed.
It is built in five parts, in graphite and ink, lit by burnt-umber sun and candles against a great deal of dark. Candlewick’s hardcover runs 112 pages. The best scene in it is Otilla pouring tea into the skull’s mouth as though that were an ordinary thing to do at an ordinary house.
Klassen’s author’s note says he first read this Tyrolean folktale in a library, found on rereading that he had misremembered significant parts of it, and wrote the version his memory had kept. That note is the best thing in the book. It also explains the shape of what you are holding: a folktale with the joins showing, where one reader’s memory filled the gaps. It was a finalist for the 2023 Governor General’s Literary Award, and Klassen took the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award this April.
Halloween does not come into it. The book is brief for a folktale, and what Otilla ran from stays unexplained; some readers take that as the point and some as a gap. A child who needs answers is in the second group, and so is a child who will be upset by a girl alone in the woods at night.
For everyone else at six to nine, it is the right step past friendly ghosts and well short of nightmares. The ballroom is the reason this one stays on a shelf I can reach.
Goosebumps: The Haunted Mask — R.L. Stine
1993 · short novel · four or five bedtimes · ages 8–12
Carly Beth is eleven, small for her age, and the favorite target of two friends who think their pranks are funny. She buys a hideous mask from a new party store after closing time, meaning to get even on Halloween. The mask won’t come off, and she is turning into something as cruel as the fear she is causing.
This is the Goosebumps book set on Halloween night.
That matters at the till. The Haunted Mask is number eleven in the original series and number four in Classic Goosebumps, which is the edition Scholastic has in print; the Classic text makes small changes to the 1993 original. Welcome to Dead House is the book that launched the series and the one a parent tends to reach for first, and it is not a Halloween book at all.
The best moment is Carly Beth pulling at the edge of the mask and starting to wonder whether there is an edge. Underneath the horror it is a book about being the smallest child in the group and nobody’s first choice for a joke, which is the part that lands for the reader who has been that child.
The series formula shows — every chapter ends on a fake-out, the last page turns — and a child who has read four or five Goosebumps books will see all of it coming. As a first one, at eight, it is the easiest way in. There was a two-part television special in 1995 that some parents will remember better than the book. I am not going to say anything about the ending.
It lands, and nobody softens it
Los Gatos Black on Halloween — Marisa Montes
2006 · picture book · six minutes aloud · ages 5–8
Cats, witches, skeletons, a mummy, the wolfman, ghouls, zombies and the dead climbing out of their coffins all make their way to a ball in a haunted hall under the October moon. Then three knocks at the door, and the monsters are gone, because the one thing that frightens them is children trick-or-treating. That last turn is the same move What Was I Scared Of? makes — the monsters are the frightened ones — except that nothing on the way there has been softened.
Booklist warns the monsters may frighten preschoolers. That warning is correct, and it is also the reason the book exists. Yuyi Morales paints in curving jewel tones and deep dark, and her dead have the flat black eyes of Day of the Dead figures rather than the friendly cartoon faces the rest of the picture-book shelf uses. The story is a Halloween story, with trick-or-treaters at the door; the imagery is drawn from Día de los Muertos, and both things are true at once.
Marisa Montes writes in rhymed verse, with Spanish words carried by context and a glossary at the back, so a family learning Spanish gets a year’s worth of use out of one reading. It won the 2008 Pura Belpré Medal for Morales’s illustration, a Belpré Honor for the writing, and an ALA Notable the year before that. Some of the jokes in the art go past younger children entirely — a zombie child in a smiley-face T-shirt, a wolfman in spectacles.
Booklist puts the book at kindergarten to grade two, which is where the five comes from. Holt has hardcover and paperback, and there is an audio CD read by the author. For a five-to-eight-year-old who has decided Halloween picture books are for babies, this is the correction; for a sensitive preschooler at bedtime, it is the wrong book.
In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories — Alvin Schwartz
1984 · easy reader · a story a night for a week · ages 5–8
Seven short folk scares at reading level two — “The Teeth,” “In the Graveyard,” “The Ghost of John,” and the one everybody remembers, about the girl who wears a green ribbon around her neck her whole life and won’t tell her husband why. Each builds and then drops. These are the jump tales The Teeny-Tiny Woman performs, with the shout moved out of an adult’s mouth and into a child’s own reading, which is a different and larger thing to survive.
The in-print edition has Rivas’s art, not Zimmer’s. Victor Rivas re-illustrated the book in 2017 for I Can Read, and his ghouls are silly as well as spooky; Dirk Zimmer’s 1984 pictures are the ones adults remember, and they are not what arrives. Nothing here is set at Halloween.
The listing says four and up. School Library Journal says kindergarten to grade two, and that is the floor to use. Past eight or nine it is over in an afternoon.
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark — Alvin Schwartz
1981 · story collection · a story a night for a month · ages 8–12
Schwartz collected American folklore built to be spoken aloud and frighten people: jump stories, ghost stories, death omens, a witch, a man who turns into an alligator, a version of Blackwood’s “The Wendigo.” The chapters are grouped by kind of scare, and the first group is jump tales written to end on a shout, so you can hand a child that chapter and keep the rest for later. This is the grown-up end of the same shelf as In a Dark, Dark Room — same author, same folklore — and that book is where a child under eight who is asking for this one should start.
For the eight-to-twelve-year-old who wants to frighten their friends.
Two illustrated versions are in print under the same title: Stephen Gammell’s original drawings, in the paperback ISBN 9780062682826, and Brett Helquist’s milder ones, in the paperback ISBN 9780060835200. The ISBN decides the pictures, and the pictures decide how frightening the book is.
The cover will not tell you which one you are getting, and neither will the price. The film tie-in paperback has Gammell’s art inside despite looking like a movie product, and so does the three-book box set. HarperCollins keeps both editions in print.
The stories themselves are thin on the page. Read cold, several of them are a paragraph and a punchline. Gammell’s drawings are what people remember — the faces coming apart, the figures that are mostly ink — and they do close to all of the frightening. Horn Book framed the Helquist edition as letting a reader choose how scared to be, which is a fair description of the decision a parent is making.
The series topped the American Library Association’s list of the hundred most challenged books of 1990 to 1999. That is more than a decade before the milder art existed, so what was being challenged was Gammell’s version, which is the one your child wants.
Nothing in the book happens at Halloween. It is a sleepover book that surfaces in October because October is when children ask. I was eight when I met these, and I could still draw two of those pictures from memory.
Two honorable mentions
Gustavo, the Shy Ghost — Flavia Z. Drago
2020 · picture book · seven minutes aloud · ages 3–7
Gustavo is so shy that the other monsters do not see him. So he invites every one of them to a violin concert, and then plays to what looks like an empty graveyard.
He fades into the background until he plays. Flavia Drago makes that literal: the palette is earth-toned and the bright color goes to everyone else, so Gustavo recedes into spreads where a child has to hunt for him, and he starts to glow only once the music is working. Then he looks up and the whole neighborhood is there, seeing him for the first time. There is no fright in this book at all, and loneliness is the hard part. It belongs with the second section above, where the monster turns out to be the one who needs something from you.
The honorable mention is a matter of the calendar. The concert is at the Day of the Dead party in the cemetery, and Candlewick’s own copy sets the story as the Day of the Dead approaches, while the retail listing calls it a Halloween picture book. It sits a day or two outside what this list is for.
It is the second book here drawn from Día de los Muertos, and the two come at it from opposite directions: Los Gatos Black on Halloween is a Halloween story painted in the holiday’s imagery, and this is a story set at the holiday itself, with papel picado, pan de muerto, Catrinas and a skeleton goldfish in the art. Neither is an explainer, and a family wanting to learn the observance needs a different book.
Candlewick has the hardcover. The shyness resolves in a single act and the crush subplot barely exists. For a shy three-to-seven-year-old, neither of those matters much.
Bony-Legs — Joanna Cole
1983 · easy reader · seven minutes aloud · ages 4–8
Sasha is sent to borrow a needle and thread and arrives at the house of a witch with iron teeth who is waiting for a child to eat. On the way in, Sasha oils a gate that squeaks and feeds a hungry dog and a hungry cat, and on the way out they are the reason she gets away: the gate opens, the animals stay quiet, and a mirror and a comb thrown behind her become a lake and a wall.
The witch has iron teeth and means to eat her.
That is stated, not implied, which is what separates this from every friendly witch on the shelf. The chase is real and the ending is safe. A teacher’s verdict is the useful one here — frightening enough to make children jump, not frightening enough to generate phone calls — and she read it two to four times a school year for years. It belongs with the third section above: something comes for the child, and the child wins.
The witch is Baba Yaga, whose house in the Russian tales stands on chicken legs, and Cole keeps the chicken legs and changes the name. The book never says where any of it came from, and that missing source note is its real flaw, because a child who loves it has nowhere obvious to go next. There is no Halloween in it either; it is a Russian folktale that happens to be what an October evening wants.
Dirk Zimmer’s pictures are the only ones it has ever had. The other complaint readers make is length: it is over in seven minutes and they wanted twice as much. Joanna Cole went on to write The Magic School Bus, which is how most families know the name.
Bony-Legs is out of print. Copies come from the used market and from libraries, and the Internet Archive lends one.
That is the honorable mention reason. Used prices swing wildly, so compare two or three before you buy.
Notes that hold across the whole list
Which of these actually happen on Halloween?
Four of them. Little Blue Truck’s Halloween and The Princess in Black and the Trick-or-Treating Trouble are set on the night, and so are Goosebumps: The Haunted Mask and Los Gatos Black on Halloween. Everything else is a book for the season: a witch, a ghost, a skeleton, a scare, read in October because October is when families go looking for one.
The gap is not random. The books written about Halloween night sit mostly at the gentle end, and the books that frighten are mostly not Halloween books at all.
Every folktale here is in the two frightening sections. Bony-Legs, The Teeny-Tiny Woman, The Skull, In a Dark, Dark Room and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark are all inherited material, and every one of them either threatens a child or scares straight. The gentle books were invented by the people who wrote them.
Two titles here draw on Día de los Muertos, which is observed on 1 and 2 November and is its own observance, with its own origins, whatever it has come to share with Halloween in the United States. Both are labeled in their entries. A family looking for a book about the observance itself should start with Bob Barner’s The Day of the Dead / El Día de los Muertos, and with a list built for it.
Why don’t these ages match the listings?
The printed ages run from zero to twelve and they are the publisher’s, with two exceptions. Where a reviewer or a library sets a higher floor on a frightening book, the higher floor is what is printed here and the entry says why: In a Dark, Dark Room is listed from four and reviewed at kindergarten to grade two. Los Gatos Black on Halloween has no publisher range at all, so its ages come from Booklist.
On a frightening book, trust the higher floor. Retail age fields are written for a catalog, not for your child at eight in the evening.
There are no ten-and-up novels here. The two books for eights and over are forms a family does read in October — one short novel, one collection of five-minute stories. Halloween novels for that age are worth a list of their own, and this is not it.
Which one to get, and where to start
Which book for which child
Room on the Broom for a three-to-five-year-old’s first Halloween, and The Princess in Black and the Trick-or-Treating Trouble for the same child two years on, once chapters have started. For a first Halloween, nothing else on this page competes. Dial’s board book covers a toddler who wants the same witch.
Little Blue Truck’s Halloween for a toddler who won’t keep a mask on, and Go Away, Big Green Monster! if the fear is monsters at bedtime rather than costumes. What Was I Scared Of? for a child wary of anything that looks strange, and for reading under a flashlight. How to Make Friends with a Ghost for a child frightened of ghosts, in a family for whom a death on the last page is all right. Gustavo, the Shy Ghost for a shy child, in October or November.
The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything for a room of children who will shout along. The Teeny-Tiny Woman for an adult who will do the voices and time the shout. Creepy Carrots! for a four-to-eight-year-old who wants the scare and the joke in the same book.
The Skull for six to nine, past friendly ghosts and nowhere near nightmares. Goosebumps: The Haunted Mask for an eight-year-old’s first real scare, read alone. Bony-Legs for a child ready for a witch who means it, if you turn up a copy.
Los Gatos Black on Halloween for a five-to-eight-year-old who finds Halloween picture books tame, away from a sensitive preschooler’s bedtime. In a Dark, Dark Room for a new reader who wants to frighten themselves. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark for eight to twelve, in Gammell’s edition if they want the real thing.
At seven to nine, three books here do three different jobs: The Princess in Black and the Trick-or-Treating Trouble has no fright in it, The Skull is dark, long and illustrated, and Goosebumps: The Haunted Mask is a genuine scare that starts at eight.
The order to read them in
- Room on the Broom — no fright in it.
- The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything — a fright given a job.
- The Teeny-Tiny Woman — a planned jump, heard rather than read.
- Creepy Carrots! — the first is-it-real scare.
- In a Dark, Dark Room — a jump read alone. It lands harder after Teeny-Tiny.
- The Skull — a longer, darker folktale, and easier after a short one.
- Goosebumps: The Haunted Mask — a real scare on the night, read alone.
- Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark — the real thing, in Gammell’s edition, once the child asks for it.
Bony-Legs is an optional rung between three and four, if you find a copy. The Gammell edition waits until the child asks for it.
Off the list: after Room on the Broom, Erica Silverman’s Big Pumpkin, which is set on Halloween. After Creepy Carrots!, Creepy Pair of Underwear! and Creepy Crayon!, then the Jasper Rabbit’s Creepy Tales! chapter books from about six. After The Haunted Mask, The Haunted Mask II, then Katherine Arden’s Small Spaces at nine to twelve.
After Gustavo, Drago’s Vlad, the Fabulous Vampire and Leila, the Perfect Witch. After the 2026 Princess in Black, the series from book one, or Kate DiCamillo’s Mercy Watson: Princess in Disguise at the same level. For a class, The Teeny-Tiny Woman early in October, as the way in to the scarier stories later in the month.
Don’t start with:
- Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark in the Gammell edition, under eight.
- Los Gatos Black on Halloween at a sensitive preschooler’s bedtime.
- How to Make Friends with a Ghost with a child anxious about death.
- Bony-Legs with a child who isn’t ready for a witch who eats children.
When you read The Teeny-Tiny Woman, hold the pause before the last line about twice as long as feels comfortable. That pause is the whole book.
