Two Halloween books for preschoolers can wear the same not-scary label and one will end the night. What decides it is where the scare sits, and the child’s age in March.
A mouse past five frights, each over before the page turns. A monster’s face coming apart in the child’s hands. A pumpkin head saying BOO BOO, and fifteen children saying it back. Carrots at the foot of a bed.
Thirteen books, by what each asks of the child.
- These go through the night before the child has to
- The child is the one holding the frightening thing
- The book doesn't work unless the room joins in
- The child sits still and finds out
- Two honorable mentions, one below the band and one above it
- Notes that hold across the whole list
- Which of these is yours, and where to start
These go through the night before the child has to
Mouse’s First Halloween — Lauren Thompson
2000 · picture book · two minutes aloud · ages 3–6
Mouse comes out on a spooky night and meets five things, one at a time. Bats going flit flit flit, apples dropping plop plop plop, a jack-o’-lantern, children singing trick or treat. Each one alarms him for a beat and turns out to be nothing.
Every scare is over before the page turns. The book runs the fear-and-relief cycle five times in two minutes, which is a dose rather than a story, and it is the right dose for a child at the bottom of this band.
The jack-o’-lantern is the one that matters. It is the only thing in the book that is a face in the dark, and Mouse finding out it is smiling is the argument the rest of the book is making.
Nothing escalates. The fifth encounter is built like the first, so the book stops rather than ends, and in the picture-book edition you are paying picture-book money for something doing a board book’s job. It is also saturated: one librarian abandoned a planned reading when she found her group knew it by heart.
Lap and rug both, and good at bedtime. The sound words are group material and it is short enough to open a storytime with. Little Simon’s 2003 board edition is the same thirty-two pages at six inches, which makes it a car book rather than a shorter book.
Simon & Schuster print it at four to eight. Brodart catalogs it at three to six, Follett at K–3, and the Accelerated Reader level is 1.4, which leaves the publisher’s number on its own. Three to six is what this list uses.
Wrong for a five-year-old, who will find it thin. Right for a two-to-four-year-old’s first Halloween, on a lap, at bedtime.
Also Read: THE 13 BEST Halloween Books for Kids
Pick a Pumpkin — Patricia Toht
2019 · picture book · four minutes aloud · ages 3–7
This is the one book here whose starred review names both reading situations: Booklist says in a single line that it suits a lap at home and a group storytime equally. Almost nobody else in this field will commit to that in print.
The book is the ritual in order: the patch, the cider and toffee apples, hauling it home, laying out the tools, calling friends over, scooping, carving, lighting the candle. Rhyming couplets, one stage a spread. Kirkus calls the rhythm nearly flawless, and it is the best meter here after Donaldson’s.
The scooping is the page a child will ask to do afterward. It is the one physically disgusting thing in the book and Jarvis draws it with relish.
Halloween with the frightening part left out. No witches, no ghosts, nothing with a face until the family cuts one, and the last spread sends the children out in costume to trick-or-treat. That makes this the book for a family carving this weekend and for a child who wants the night without being frightened by it. Wrong for a child who came for monsters.
The board edition published on 7 July 2026 runs about seven inches square against the hardcover’s eleven — same story, half the picture. Buy Candlewick’s hardcover.
It is a companion piece and the structure shows: Pick a Pine Tree came first and this is that book with pumpkins in it. There is no story either, only a sequence, so a fiftieth reading rests on the art.
The candle spread is the calmest page in the field, and the one I open the book to. Penguin Random House and Candlewick put the hardcover at three to seven and the 2026 board edition at two to five, which is the binding talking rather than the text.
The child is the one holding the frightening thing
Go Away, Big Green Monster! — Ed Emberley
1992 · die-cut picture book · ninety seconds aloud · ages 2–5
Die-cut pages build a monster’s face against black, one feature at a time: two big yellow eyes, a long bluish-greenish nose, a big red mouth with sharp white teeth. Halfway through, the monster is told it doesn’t scare anybody, and the pages take the face apart again until the paper is empty. The child’s hands are the mechanism, and nothing else in this field hands over the switch like that.
Ninety seconds, and the child does the dismissing.
The turn is the whole book: the page where a child stops being shown a monster and starts getting rid of one. School Library Journal read it as handing children control of the monsters they already have.
The monster has to be built before it can be banished, and for a frightened child the first half is not a game. For a child not yet afraid of monsters, it may hand them the idea. And the die-cuts tear.
Go Away, Big Green Monster! is not a Halloween book, and its publisher’s own copy says so: silly fun for Halloween and every other day of the year. Ed Emberley’s Caldecott Medal was for Drummer Hoff in 1968, not for Go Away, Big Green Monster! The jacket line calling him a Caldecott winner is true and gets read the wrong way every October.
Lap and small group; past about six children nobody can see the page edge. It is one of very few books here a three-year-old can work alone and get the whole point of. The 2005 revised edition is the standard text, and the board edition keeps the die-cuts, which is the part that matters.
Kirkus puts it at two to five. Give it to the child with a live monster fear who wants something to do rather than something to hear.
There’s a Ghost in This House — Oliver Jeffers
2021 · picture book with transparent pages · four minutes aloud · ages 4–8
One lap, one child, and nobody else can see it. A girl gives you a tour of the house she is sure is haunted, saying she has never actually seen a ghost. Transparent pages laid over Jeffers’s black-and-white photographed rooms put white sheet-ghosts in beside her, standing where she isn’t looking.
The reader knows more than the narrator and the knowledge is in the reader’s hands: lift the sheet and the ghosts are there, drop it and they are gone. Same physical trick as Emberley’s, different payoff. That one is mastery and this one is a joke. A child who hasn’t worked out what the transparent page does works it out in one second, then turns back to do it again.
Tracing paper, in a house with a four-year-old.
Philomel’s hardcover is eighty pages, thirteen inches tall, $28.99, and there is no board or paperback edition. That is the point: the object is the book, and a torn overlay ends it. It is also a one-idea book at that price, and once a child knows the trick there is nothing underneath to come back for.
It is for the careful four- or five-year-old who likes being in on a joke, with an adult who has seen the price. Wrong for a rough handler, wrong for a rug, and wrong for a child who is frightened of ghosts, because here the ghosts are everywhere.
The book doesn’t work unless the room joins in
Skeleton Hiccups — Margery Cuyler
2002 · picture book · three minutes aloud · ages 3–6
A skeleton in a bathrobe with the hiccups. That is the whole of the frightening content, which is why this one opens a mixed group.
He tries every cure a child has ever been given — holding his breath, sugar, water upside down — and each fails in a way only a skeleton can fail. Water poured into an upside-down skull comes back out of the eye sockets. Kirkus said Schindler’s paintings carry the day over the concept. The comedy is anatomical and it belongs to the illustrator.
One syllable, and every child can do it. Hic, hic, hic, on every spread. Nothing to memorize and nothing to get wrong.
The cure is his own face: Ghost holds up a mirror and Skeleton frightens himself. Everything before it is a list, and a child who needs a story has nothing to follow.
Margaret K. McElderry publish it, and Publishers Weekly reviewed it at three to six. Cuyler’s skeleton titles are easy to mix up on a search page.
Not a bedtime book; it ends on a startle. Its place is a rug with the youngest in it, at the age when hiccups are still a personal event.
Big Pumpkin — Erica Silverman
1992 · picture book · six minutes aloud · ages 3–7
Fifteen children on a rug is what this book is for, and after thirty-four years of October use it is still the best pure group read here.
A witch grows the biggest pumpkin ever and can’t get it off the vine. A ghost tries, then a vampire, then a mummy. A bat suggests they all pull together, gets sneered at for it, and is right.
It is a variant of the Russian folktale “The Gigantic Turnip” with the moral moved. In the turnip story the smallest helper supplies the last bit of force; here he supplies the idea. The smallest one has the idea and gets sneered at. That is the sharper version for a four-year-old, whose trouble is usually being taken seriously rather than being weak.
The structure is strict. Each creature arrives, brags, fails and joins the chain, and the chain is recited again every time, so by the second character a room can predict the pattern and say it with you. Kirkus called it a nicely cadenced variant. Publishers Weekly said the mood stops short of scary, which is right — the monsters are a cast list, not a threat.
The cast is also generic. A ghost, a vampire and a mummy doing nothing to distinguish themselves means the middle is built like a dozen other cumulative books, and the pie-sharing arrives after the actual climax.
Long for a lap and right for a class doing sequencing and retelling. Kirkus says three to seven, Publishers Weekly says four to eight, and an Accelerated Reader level of 2.8 is a demanding text to sit through at three.
Aladdin’s 2011 refreshed edition is a redesign, not a re-illustration. Schindler’s paintings are the same ones.
We’re Going on a Ghost Hunt — Susan Pearson
2012 · picture book · four minutes with actions · ages 3–7
Four children leave the house at night to hunt a ghost, through a muddy murky swamp, a rustling rattling cornfield, a swishy fishy river, wild windy woods, up a tree and into a graveyard, where they meet one and run all the way home. The ghost is met rather than avoided, so the fright is real. It stays survivable because the form promises the sprint home before the book starts.
Two different picture books are called We’re Going on a Ghost Hunt: Marcia Vaughan’s, illustrated by Ann Schweninger, in 2001, and Susan Pearson’s, illustrated by S.D. Schindler, in 2012. Booklist distinguishes the two and notes that the Pearson follows the original text more closely and reads older.
This entry is about the Pearson and Schindler. Two Lions, ISBN 9780761463078. Classroom recommendations for this title circulate without an author attached, so the number is the surest way to get the one you want.
S.D. Schindler illustrated Skeleton Hiccups, Big Pumpkin and We’re Going on a Ghost Hunt, three of the four books in this section, and he is not a name most parents could produce.
The structure is there-and-back, four sound-beats to an obstacle, then the whole route again at speed. Booklist singles out the sound effects, and Schindler hides nocturnal animals in the moonlit scenes for the second reading.
Booklist’s praise also names the problem: following the original closely makes it faithful and makes it less itself. One reader found some of the sound words forced and advises reading it to yourself first, which is fair: this is a performance, and performances get rehearsed.
Not a bedtime book. It ends with children running away from a graveyard. Right for a group that will stand up and do the actions, and for the child who already loves the bear hunt.
The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything — Linda Williams
1986 · picture book · five minutes with actions · ages 3–7
A rug, a reader who will commit, and not a bedtime. Everything this book does well and the one thing it does wrong come out of the same decision.
A little old lady walks home through the woods at night and is followed, one at a time, by two shoes that go clomp clomp, a pair of pants that go wiggle wiggle, a shirt that goes shake shake, two gloves that go clap clap, a hat that goes nod nod, and a pumpkin head that goes BOO BOO. She says the whole way that she is not afraid of anything.
Every sound is recited again on every page after it arrives, so the refrain grows from two syllables to twelve and the room has to keep up. The entry cost is one noise and the difficulty scales as the book goes on, which is why it is still the most-used Halloween participation book in American preschool practice. Horn Book named the mechanism at the time: noisy actions, built for storytelling.
The pumpkin head comes last, it is the only one that speaks, and it is where fifteen children shout with you. I can do all six sounds without the book in front of me.
The scare is in the last third. There is a real chase in the dark and the pursuit goes unexplained almost to the end. That is the right shape for a rug, where the tension has somewhere to go and then everyone gets up for lunch, and the wrong shape for a bedtime with an anxious child.
The resolution is a lecture. She tells the garments what they can usefully do instead, they comply, and the tension drains rather than releases.
Starred in School Library Journal and in Kirkus in 1986, and in print for forty years since; HarperCollins’s paperback is 9780064431835. The same book currently sells under at least three appended subtitles — a read-aloud about overcoming fears, a story about being brave, a Halloween book for kids — and one of them asserts ages four to eight. None of that is the title. Practitioner use starts at three, which is what this list uses.
Read it to a child who likes being chased inside a safe room, and do the voices. It does not work read flat.
The child sits still and finds out
Ghosts in the House! — Kazuno Kohara
2008 · picture book · two minutes aloud · ages 4–6
Nothing here is frightening, because the ghosts go through the wash.
A girl moves into a big old house at the edge of town and finds it full of them. She happens to be a witch. She catches them, washes them, pegs them out to dry, then cuts and hangs them as curtains, tablecloths, sofa covers and bed sheets.
The ghosts are laundered, not defeated. No conflict, no victory, no explanation — a haunting reclassified as a supply problem.
It is the solution The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything reached twenty-two years earlier, when the clothes chasing her are put to work as a scarecrow. Give the frightening thing a job and a three-year-old stops asking what it wants.
The washing line is the page everyone remembers. Ghosts pegged out in a row, drying.
It is a demonstration rather than a story, so there is nothing to worry about and nothing to resolve, and it is very short for the price. Kohara works in linocut in three colors — orange, black and white — bold enough to reach the back of a rug, and it was a New York Times Best Illustrated book in 2008.
Buy the Roaring Brook hardcover. The 2012 board edition takes a ten-inch book down to about five and a half inches square — half the picture, in a book whose effect is scale — and new copies are scarce anyway.
Follett files it K–3 and one retailer tags it four to six. Right for a child at the bottom of the band meeting the idea of ghosts, at bedtime, because somebody goes to sleep at the end.
Where’s My Mummy? — Carolyn Crimi
2008 · picture book · five minutes aloud · ages 3–6
The same book works on a lap and a rug. Four of the fifteen here survive that move and this is the cleanest, because the repeated line is a chant with fifteen children and a shared joke with one.
Little Baby Mummy wants one more round of hide-and-shriek before bed. He hides, gets bored, goes looking, and meets Bones, Glob and Drac in the middle of their own bedtime routines, each warning him about what is out there. He insists he is not scared. A mouse settles that, and his mother is already there.
The monsters are not the danger. The distance is. And the joke is that every monster in the woods is also getting ready for bed, so the dark the child is walking through turns out to be entirely domestic.
The mother’s arrival is instant and unexplained, which drains the tension the book spent four spreads building, and a child who has been worried gets no acknowledgment that he was. Three published ranges for one book, too: the retail subtitle says two to five, Kirkus says three to six, library catalogs target four to seven.
Candlewick’s paperback is eight inches against the hardcover’s eleven, worth knowing if you are buying for a group. It suits a three- or four-year-old doing separation at bedtime, with a reader who enjoys doing voices, and not a child frightened of the dark rather than playing at it.
Room on the Broom — Julia Donaldson
2001 · picture book · six minutes aloud · ages 3–7
One dragon, two spreads, comprehensively beaten. That is the whole of the frightening content in the book most households reading this already own.
A witch loses her hat, her bow and her wand to the wind. A dog, a bird and a frog each hand one back and each ask for a ride. The broom snaps under the load, drops her in front of a dragon who intends to eat her, and the animals come back covered in bog mud, indistinguishable and enormous.
The engine is a favor ledger. Every yes adds weight to the broom and also buys a rescuer, so what breaks and what saves her are the same set of decisions, and a four-year-old tracks it perfectly.
The mud monster is the best page Scheffler has drawn.
The same title is sold at 0–3 and at 4–7. The board edition is cataloged for under-threes, retail listings say two to five, and a US editorial review of the picture book says four to seven. Buy the picture book.
The threat is stated flatly and defused within two spreads, so the only tension in the book is over before a young three notices it and too thin to hold a five-year-old. It is tuned to the middle of this band and loose at both ends, and the fact that most people reading this already own it is a fact about the shelf rather than a reason to skip it.
It is the same accumulating cast as Big Pumpkin, on the same cumulative chassis, built the other way around: Silverman’s wants the room to say the line, Donaldson’s wants the room to listen. Reading the two in one week shows a child that difference better than any explanation. Upstream of both sits the British witch-and-cat line — Meg and Mog in 1972, Winnie the Witch in 1987 — which is where the shape came from.
Rug, lap and bedtime, all three, and any three-to-five-year-old anywhere on the gradient. The rhyme is exact and survives the fiftieth reading, and the 2013 animated short means many children arrive knowing the plot, which turns the read from suspense into recitation.
Gustavo, the Shy Ghost — Flavia Z. Drago
2020 · picture book · five minutes aloud · ages 3–7
A lap, and close enough to see the background. Drago’s pages are the densest here — papel picado, pan de muerto, Catrinas, monsters in every crowd — and on a rug half the book is invisible past the second row.
Gustavo can walk through walls, move objects and glow, and he plays the violin beautifully. What he cannot do is be seen. He is too shy to line up for eye-scream or speak to the other monsters, so he writes out an invitation to a concert at the Day of the Dead party, and plays alone when nobody comes. Being a ghost and being shy are the same condition here, which is why this lands harder than the shelf of friendly-ghost books around it.
The empty room is the page. It is the only one in this field that asks a child to sit with disappointment before relief arrives, and Drago holds it longer than a 2020 picture book usually dares.
The rescue is a coincidence. The monsters were lost and the music guided them, so the friendship is not produced by his courage. He is found rather than met, which is softer than the setup earns. The party is a Day of the Dead party rather than a Halloween one, and the book is clear about that even where the marketing isn’t.
A book with no scare in it frightened a three-year-old. Gustavo, the Shy Ghost won the Klaus Flugge Prize in 2021, Candlewick print it at three to seven and the UK jacket says three to five, and a Goodreads reviewer records her three-year-old telling her the story was scary for her — inside the stated range, with nothing frightening in the book. The monsters look like monsters. That is this article’s argument, made by a reader rather than a writer.
For the shy child, on a lap, at bedtime. Not for a young three.
Creepy Carrots! — Aaron Reynolds
2012 · picture book · five minutes aloud · ages 4–8
Sustained paranoia, a scare in a bedroom, and no comic release until the last page. This is the top edge of the band and the only main entry here that reaches it.
Jasper Rabbit eats carrots out of Crackenhopper Field, compulsively, on his way everywhere. The carrots start following him — in the bathroom mirror, at the window, at the foot of his bed — and every time he looks properly they turn out to be ordinary objects. He builds a fence around the field to keep them in.
Peter Brown took the 2013 Caldecott Honor for this book, which is an illustration award and belongs to him rather than to Aaron Reynolds. He draws in pencil, black and white with one deep orange, in black-bordered panels of varying size, and School Library Journal described the result as film noir staged like early children’s television. The dread is built by the layout rather than the text, which is deadpan and very short.
The carrots at the foot of the bed is the image that leaves the book. I have looked at that spread more often than a five-minute picture book needs.
The five-year-old who has asked for something creepy. That is the reader, and the four published verdicts on this book disagree only because each is describing a different child.
Simon & Schuster print it at four to eight, and Common Sense Media judges it more funny than frightening for most kids. School Library Journal calls it horror pitched at the age it was written for, taking a child’s fear seriously and then handing back a laugh. A parent records a child terrified by the audio version who would not go near a carrot for a week. All four are accurate.
The ending rewards the reader at Jasper’s expense, and very young listeners frequently miss the reversal altogether and leave with the scare and none of the relief. Where’s My Mummy?, above, also puts a small creature alone in the dark and resolves it inside a single page; a child comes out of that one calm. This one holds the same feeling to the last spread. Where the scare sits, not how big it is, is what decides whether a book is a bedtime mistake.
Rug, strongly; one librarian records a group still talking about it two weeks later. Not at bedtime, not after a run of bad nights, and not as an audiobook for a sensitive child. In daylight, for the child who asked.
Two honorable mentions, one below the band and one above it
Little Blue Truck’s Halloween — Alice Schertle
2016 · lift-the-flap board book · ninety seconds aloud · ages 0–3
A lap or a car seat, ninety seconds, a flap on every spread. Blue and Toad drive to a costume party picking up friends as they go, each hidden behind a flap the child lifts, and the last flap is Blue’s own costume.
A mask taken off, repeatedly, by the child’s own hand. Kirkus names the function: the book makes costumes less mysterious and less frightening, and costumes are the largest single source of Halloween distress in two- and three-year-olds. The last flap does the work, because every flap before it revealed a friend and this one reveals the truck, which tells a child the rule covers everybody.
Its own catalogers stop at three.
Little Blue Truck’s Halloween was published on 5 July 2016, not 2019. Library catalogers give the target audience as up to three years, and the Lexile measure of 170 and the Accelerated Reader level of 1.3 agree with them.
It sits below this list’s band, which is why it is here instead of in the thirteen. It is the most-recommended preschool Halloween title in the field and it is a board book for two-year-olds, and saying so is worth more than leaving it off.
The flaps tear, and they are bought for exactly the age most likely to tear them. The story is thin and the flaps carry it, so a four- or five-year-old has solved the costume problem and outgrown the format at once.
Later books in the series are illustrated by John Joseph in McElmurry’s style. This one is McElmurry’s own.
Buy it for a two- or three-year-old meeting costumes, or for the younger sibling of the child this list is for. It runs the night in advance, the same job as the two books at the top of the list.
Los Gatos Black on Halloween — Marisa Montes
2006 · picture book · six minutes aloud · ages 5–8
The dead rise, werewolves come out, and the dark holds for fifteen spreads before anything lets up. This is the most visually frightening book named in this article.
A rhyming procession in English with Spanish braided through it: las brujas on broomsticks, los muertos out of their coffins, los esqueletos rattling in, all converging on a monsters’ ball in a haunted hall. Then somebody knocks at the door, and the only thing in the book that frightens them is a crowd of trick-or-treating children.
The Spanish nouns land where an English-only reader can get them from the rhyme and the picture, so the new word and the new creature arrive on the same beat. The book teaches without ever stopping to teach.
Yuyi Morales took the 2008 Pura Belpré Illustrator Medal for it and Marisa Montes took a Pura Belpré Author Honor the same year. The ALA’s own citation describes Morales’s art as blending traditional Halloween and Día de los Muertos symbols, which is the honest description of the book — a Halloween story, trick-or-treaters at the door, painted in Day of the Dead imagery.
Not at bedtime, for anyone in this band. The tension has no release until the final page, so a child unsettled by spread three waits out the whole book.
It sits above the band, which is why it is an honorable mention rather than one of the thirteen. No publisher range is printed on the listings; the five comes from retail tags and from where practitioners put it. Twenty years in print, a Tomás Rivera Award and a reversal nobody else in this field has pulled off is not something to drop from a preschool list without saying so. Square Fish keep the paperback in print, and readers single out the audio edition, which is unusual for a picture book.
Right for the five-year-old at the top of the band who is enjoying being scared, for a dual-language household, and for a classroom running Halloween and Día de los Muertos as a pair. Nothing else here asks a child to sit still for as long.
Notes that hold across the whole list
Why aren’t half of these Halloween books?
Seven of the fifteen actually happen on Halloween: Room on the Broom, Big Pumpkin, Mouse’s First Halloween, Pick a Pumpkin, We’re Going on a Ghost Hunt, Little Blue Truck’s Halloween and Los Gatos Black on Halloween. Books for the season, not books set on the 31st. What preschoolers need in October is a rehearsal for costumes, dark and monsters, and a plot about the holiday doesn’t supply one.
Día de los Muertos falls on 1 and 2 November and is its own observance, not a regional Halloween. Gustavo is set at a Day of the Dead party; Los Gatos Black is a Halloween story drawn in Day of the Dead imagery. A reader who wants Day of the Dead books needs a list built for them, and this is not it.
Nor is this a Spanish-language list. Los Gatos Black and Boo! / ¡Bu! are English-first books with Spanish in them, and Spanish-language picture books are a different shelf.
Why does the same book say 0–3 on one cover and 4–8 on another?
Two mechanisms, and neither of them is editorial.
The first is the binding. A board reissue of a 4–8 picture book inherits the board shelf’s 0–3 tag, which is how Room on the Broom ends up cataloged for under-threes and reviewed at four to seven. Board reissues also halve the trim, and here the size is the book: Pick a Pumpkin goes from eleven inches to about seven, Ghosts in the House! from ten to about five and a half.
The second is retail metadata. Those appended subtitles are marketing, not part of the title. Publishers bolt keyword-stuffed strings onto listing titles and some of them assert ages, which is how a 1986 book takes its age range from whichever string was written last. Every entry above carries one range with a source behind it instead.
Two more things a buyer can act on. Where the scare sits decides whether a book is a bedtime mistake, not how big it is: Mouse’s First Halloween and Where’s My Mummy? resolve theirs mid-book and land calm, while The Little Old Lady, We’re Going on a Ghost Hunt and Creepy Carrots! put the payoff at the end, which is right for a rug and wrong for a bedtime. And the first-Halloween books expire as a group: the day a child has done a Halloween, a rehearsal has nothing left to rehearse.
Why does the same title get you a different book?
Search by author and illustrator, not by title. Two picture books are called We’re Going on a Ghost Hunt.
Meg and Mog reaches US buyers as imported Puffin printings under at least five live ISBNs, and which one arrives depends on the retailer. Winnie the Witch was rebranded Winnie and Wilbur across the series in 2016, so the title you search may not be the title on the book that comes. And series covers are near-identical by design, which is fine until you order the wrong season.
There is no song book on this list, and a teacher scanning it will notice. Five Little Pumpkins, The Spooky Wheels on the Bus, Dem Bones, There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bat! and Ten Timid Ghosts borrow their power from something the child already knows by ear. Read rather than sung they are inert, and the edition you buy changes the pictures rather than the words. If you can sing, sing them; they don’t need a list.
Which of these is yours, and where to start
Which book for which reader
Mouse’s First Halloween is for a first Halloween at bedtime, for the child who needs every scare over quickly. Pick a Pumpkin is for a family carving this weekend, and for a child who wants Halloween without being frightened by it. Little Blue Truck’s Halloween is for a two- or three-year-old who won’t keep the mask on — below this list’s band, and right for the child who is.
Go Away, Big Green Monster! is for a live monster fear, and it is one of very few books here a three-year-old can work alone. There’s a Ghost in This House is for a careful four- or five-year-old, one-to-one, with an adult who has seen the price.
Skeleton Hiccups is for the youngest or most mixed group, with a reader who will commit to the hiccup. Big Pumpkin is for a rug of fifteen and a class doing sequencing. We’re Going on a Ghost Hunt is for a pre-K group that will stand up and do it, in the Pearson and Schindler edition. The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything is for a rug with a reader who will do the actions, and not for a bedtime with an anxious child, because the scare is in the last third.
Ghosts in the House! is for a child at the bottom of the band meeting the idea of ghosts, at bedtime. Where’s My Mummy? is for separation at bedtime, and it makes the move from a lap to a rug more cleanly than anything else here. Room on the Broom is for a three-to-five-year-old anywhere on the gradient. Get the picture book, not the board edition.
Gustavo, the Shy Ghost is for the shy child, on a lap, and not for a young three. Creepy Carrots! is for the five-year-old who has asked for something creepy, in daylight and not on audio. Los Gatos Black on Halloween is for a five-year-old at the top of the band who likes being scared, away from bedtime, and for a dual-language classroom.
For a dual-language household with a two-year-old, Boo! / ¡Bu! — Leslie Patricelli, Candlewick, 2017. For a house with children at several ages, the 0–12 list on this site picks up where this one stops.
Where to start, and in what order
At home, in this order:
- Go Away, Big Green Monster! — ninety seconds, and the child does the dismissing.
- Mouse’s First Halloween — five small scares, each one over before the page turns.
- Ghosts in the House! — ghosts given a job, and somebody goes to sleep at the end.
- Room on the Broom — the first real plot, with one dragon in it.
- Where’s My Mummy? — the first managed scare, and it lands harder after rung four, because the child now knows a story can hold a threat and hand it back.
- The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything — the first proper chase. Not at bedtime.
- Creepy Carrots! — the first sustained dread, and only once the child has asked for it.
The best first book here is nobody’s favorite.
With a group, start the October run with Skeleton Hiccups, because the entry cost is one syllable and it tells you inside a minute who will join in. Then Big Pumpkin, which asks them to hold a chain, then We’re Going on a Ghost Hunt, standing up, then The Little Old Lady, once the room can carry a refrain that grows from two syllables to twelve. That order is by what the group can do, not by how frightening the books are.
After Creepy Carrots!: Creepy Pair of Underwear! and Creepy Crayon!, then the Jasper Rabbit’s Creepy Tales! chapter books. After Gustavo: Drago’s Vlad, the Fabulous Vampire, then Leila, the Perfect Witch.
After Pick a Pumpkin: Apples and Pumpkins, by Anne and Lizzy Rockwell, and Toht’s Pick a Pine Tree in December. After Ghosts in the House!: The Little Ghost Who Was a Quilt, by Riel Nason and Byron Eggenschwiler, at bedtime. The first-Halloween books expire in the same year, which is the year a child graduates to Room on the Broom.
Don’t start with:
- Creepy Carrots! as an audiobook, for a sensitive child.
- Los Gatos Black on Halloween below the top of the band, and not at bedtime for anyone in it.
- The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything at bedtime with an anxious child.
- Gustavo, the Shy Ghost with a young three.
Hold the candle spread in Pick a Pumpkin a few seconds longer than the rhyme wants. It is the quietest page in any of these books, and at bedtime it is where to stop.
