Since it's Halloween, what's the scariest story or novel you've ever read?

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For me, it’s an older story dating from the 1930’s called “Second Night Out” by Frank Belknap Long.
(It can be found in some anthologies.) It’s about a malevolent entity which haunts an ocean liner. It gives me the creeps even now just to think about it.
 
Petet Straub “Ghost Story”, I was young and slept with the lights on for a couple of weeks.
 
:rotfl: This is funny! I was going to start a thread like this for Hallowe’en…the thread was swept under my feet!😃 Anyhoo…

The most scary movie I have seen is, going back in the day when it was really scary,

Jaws! I had a hard time swimming even in the lake…:rolleyes:

The Exorvist…A lot of that is real…of course there is hollywooding in it…I know only because I was part of an exorcism team!:eek:
 
Any Lovecraft story is scary. I especially like "The Thing on the Doorstep.

I think Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is one of the scariest short stories ever. Also, her novel The Haunting of Hill House is very scary.
 
Amityville Horror.

Freaked me out. Could barely turn the pages.
Never saw the movie, and I’ll tell you why.

When I was a teenager, still at home, I was up late
alone watching tv. Commercial came on for this movie.
Now I was sitting on the floor just a few feet from the tv, and
I swear I felt something from that commercial.
All I can describe it as, is pure evil. Scared me badly,
and I changed the channel FAST.
Even telling it now is creeping me out.
So, most horror stories, i.e., Nightmare/Elm Street, Fri 13th, ect,
no problem, I will actually laugh at parts.
But AH? Uh-Uh, no way, ever.
 
IT by Stephen King. I couldn’t look at clowns the same after reading that novel. Brrr…gives me the shivers even now.

A man named Le Fanu(Might have his name wrong) wrote a book called Camilla about a vampiress that was very, very creepy.
 
Hands down, Misery, by Stephen King, and Thinner, by Stephen King is also scary…so scary I had trouble sleeping!!! (Misery that is) Much creepier than the movie that they made out of it. But, Kathy Bates was totally what I pictured when I read that book many moons ago.
 
I would vote for The Haunting of Hill House. There is something eerie about it, though nothing really happens.
 
The Shining by Steven King.

Steven King novels usually don’t really freak me out, but this one did. Maybe I shouldnt have read it when I was staying at a hotel 😃
 
estesbob said:
The Exorcist followed by Salem’s Lot
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Reading *The Exorcist * was the first thing that made me want to be a Catholic.

When I was a kid those “Scary Stories” books used to scare me to death. I know they are still in print. I think the one that scared me the most was the one where the woman finds a big hairy toe in the cemetary and then puts it in the soup. Later she hears the dead guy coming for it saying, “Who’s got my big toe?”

The Monkey’s Paw and The Pied Piper of Hamelin always freaked me out.

Nowadays the scariest things I read involve Socializing medicine in the United States.
 
The book Hostage of the Devil by Malachi Martin. I read it a long time ago. But then I guess, this book is not considered a novel. Nevertheless, the stories are written in a very riveting style and beyond creepy.
 
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson was pretty scary. I couldn’t read it if I was alone in the house.
There was another book I read a year or two ago, I think it was called Possessed. It’s the true story that the exorcist is based on.
I read It by Stephen King last year and that was pretty creepy.
I’ve been tempted to read the exorcist, but haven’t gotten around to it.
Dracula, while not scary, but a very creepy book. I don’t find most books about vampires to be scary, but Dracula was very good.
 
still can’t beat Edgar Allen Poe, the Telltale Heart, Fall of the House of Usher, Cask of Amontilado, etc. because they do not rely on outside monsters and horrors, but explore the evil and horror that lurk in the human heart
 
The Beckoning Fair One by Oliver Onions is a quietly creepy ghost story. How Love Came to Professor Guildea by Robert Hitchens is another quietly creepy story.

For something more in your face, you can’t beat The Color Out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft.
 
Would you believe “Farenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury?

Think about it… total banning of books, classic works of fiction…

:bigyikes:

The only other story that REALLY bothered me (it was more disturbing than scary) was “The Anastasia Syndrome” by Mary Higgins Clark. Still can’t bring myself to read it again.
 
The thing with me is, I love horror stories, but then I know I’ll never be able to go to sleep for about the next month or so, so I try not to read them now. But anyway… “And Then There Were None” is pure brilliance- it creeped me out SO BAD but I loved it!

Can we put movies, too? I have to say… every Shyamalan film I’ve ever seen (especially “Sixth Sense” and “The Village”)
 
The Shining is the only book that ever really scared me. I’ve been creeped out by others, but that one had me not wanting to go upstairs in the dark alone, if you know what I mean. :eek:
 
Baptista said:
The Shining is the only book that ever really scared me. I’ve been creeped out by others, but that one had me not wanting to go upstairs in the dark alone, if you know what I mean. :eek:
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That book helped push me into AA.

The movie was a classic but i couldnt watch the mini-series. problem is they filmed it at the Stanley hotel in Estes. At that time i Lived on the other side of the hill from the stanley. When they had all this supposedly scary scenes on the gounds i kept thinking-if the turn that camear 90 degrees theyll see me sitting on my front porch.
 
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