98 Fun Facts About Halloween Book

What is the subtitle of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein?

The Modern Prometheus casts Victor as the Titan who, in some Greek myths, shaped humankind from clay and was punished by the gods; Shelley's first edition of 1818 carried no author's name.

At whose villa on Lake Geneva did the 1816 ghost-story contest that produced Frankenstein take place?

Lord Byron's rented Villa Diodati hosted the contest: the rainy 'Year Without a Summer' of 1816 kept Byron, Polidori, Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin indoors, and her entry grew into Frankenstein.

Who leads the hunt for the Count in Dracula?

Van Helsing is called over from Amsterdam by his old student Dr Seward to treat Lucy Westenra, and he orders blood transfusions before he dares to name the cause.

Which English seaside town does Dracula plague after arriving from Transylvania?

Whitby: the Count's ship runs aground below the East Cliff in a storm and he leaps ashore as an immense dog. Stoker holidayed in the town in 1890 and is said to have found the name Dracula in its public library.

What is the profession of Jonathan Harker, whose visit to the Count opens Dracula?

Harker is a solicitor: he has just passed his examinations when his employer Peter Hawkins sends him to Transylvania to complete the Count's purchase of Carfax, an estate near Purfleet.

Which Washington Irving collection contains both The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle?

The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon came out in instalments in 1819-20 while Irving was living in England; he wrote Rip Van Winkle overnight at his sister's house in Birmingham.

What is found near the bridge the morning after Ichabod Crane vanishes?

His hat and a smashed pumpkin lie by the brook, a hint that the 'head' hurled at him was no ghost's; his rival, who soon marries Katrina, laughs whenever the pumpkin is mentioned.

What is the name of Ichabod Crane's rival for Katrina Van Tassel?

Abraham "Brom Bones" Van Brunt torments the nervous schoolmaster with pranks rather than confronting him.

In Poe's 'The Raven', the bird perches on a bust of which goddess?

Pallas Athena: the raven settles on 'a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door', and from the head of the goddess of wisdom it answers every question the narrator asks with 'Nevermore'.

Which Charles Dickens novel, with a talking raven, partly inspired Poe's "The Raven"?

Barnaby Rudge (1841) features Grip, a talking raven; Poe reviewed the novel and wished the bird had been used more prophetically. He also borrowed the metre of Elizabeth Barrett's 'Lady Geraldine's Courtship'.

In Poe's 'The Raven', which lost love is the narrator mourning?

Lenore is the 'rare and radiant maiden' he grieves for; Poe later argued that the death of a beautiful woman is 'the most poetical topic in the world', and built the poem around her loss.

What was the title of the first Goosebumps book, published in July 1992?

Welcome to Dead House, in which Amanda and Josh Benson move to the town of Dark Falls and find the neighbours are living dead, launched Goosebumps in July 1992.

Which Goosebumps book traps Carly Beth inside her Halloween costume?

The Haunted Mask fuses to Carly Beth's face after she buys it for Halloween; Stine says the idea came one Halloween when his son Matt pulled on a mask and struggled to get it off.

Which actor plays a fictionalised R. L. Stine in the 2015 film Goosebumps?

Jack Black plays a fictionalised R. L. Stine in Goosebumps (2015), whose monsters escape from his locked manuscripts; he also voices the dummy Slappy and returned for Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween (2018).

Who wrote the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books?

Alvin Schwartz drew the three collections (1981-1991) from folklore and urban legends; Stephen Gammell's nightmarish drawings were replaced by Brett Helquist's in 2011, then restored in later printings.

Per the American Library Association, what distinction did Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark hold in the 1990s?

Most challenged book series: Scary Stories topped the ALA's list for 1990-1999 and was still seventh for 2000-2009, with complaints calling it too violent and unsuited to its age group.

Who wrote Room on the Broom, the picture book about a kind witch and her cat?

Julia Donaldson's witch keeps making room for strays, and they repay her by scaring off a dragon that wants to eat her; the 2012 animated film of the book was nominated for an Oscar.

Which three animals join the witch and her cat on the broomstick in Room on the Broom?

Dog, bird and frog each return something the witch dropped (hat, bow and wand) and hitch a ride; when the broom snaps over a bog, they pose as one muddy monster to scare off a dragon.

In Roald Dahl's The Witches, what does the Grand High Witch plan to turn all of England's children into?

Mice: the Grand High Witch unveils Formula 86 Delayed-Action Mouse-Maker to turn every child in England into a mouse; the narrator, eavesdropping at a Bournemouth hotel, is transformed himself.

Who played the Grand High Witch in the 1990 film of The Witches?

Anjelica Huston's witch sheds her glamorous disguise to reveal a monster built by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, on the last film project Henson worked on before he died.

What does the Other Mother want to sew over Coraline's eyes?

Buttons: everyone in the world beyond the door has black buttons for eyes, and the Other Mother offers to sew a pair onto Coraline so she can stay forever. Gaiman began the novella in 1990 and published it in 2002.

Which director made both The Nightmare Before Christmas and the 2009 stop-motion film of Coraline?

Henry Selick directed both films; for Coraline he added a boy called Wybie, who is not in Gaiman's book, so that Coraline would not seem to be talking to herself all the time.

What is the name of the boy raised by ghosts in Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book?

Nobody Owens, called Bod, is adopted by the ghosts Mr and Mrs Owens after his family is murdered by the man Jack; his guardian Silas, neither living nor dead, brings him food from the world outside.

The Graveyard Book was the first book to win which two children's book medals?

Carnegie and Newbery: no book had taken both the leading British and American children's prizes before; Gaiman got the idea watching his small son ride a tricycle among gravestones.

In James and Deborah Howe's Bunnicula, what does the pet rabbit seem to feed on at night?

Vegetables turn up drained white with two tiny holes, which convinces Chester the cat that the new rabbit is a vampire; Harold the dog narrates.

Which Bradbury novel follows eight boys and Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud on a journey through time?

The Halloween Tree sends the boys from ancient Egypt to Mexico's Day of the Dead in a race to save their friend Pipkin; Bradbury himself wrote and narrated the animated film of it in 1993.

In Something Wicked This Way Comes, which fairground ride can make its riders older or younger?

The carousel adds years when it turns forwards and takes them away in reverse; the boys watch Mr Cooger ride it backwards and step off as a twelve-year-old.

Which Shakespeare play supplies the title Something Wicked This Way Comes?

Macbeth: the Second Witch says 'By the pricking of my thumbs, / Something wicked this way comes' in Act 4, Scene 1, just before Macbeth enters to demand prophecies from the witches.

Which character's investigation of Jekyll's will drives Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?

Gabriel John Utterson, Jekyll's lawyer, starts digging when the doctor's will leaves everything to the unknown Mr Hyde; Stevenson had long been fascinated by Deacon Brodie, an Edinburgh councillor who burgled by night.

Who wrote the 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House?

Shirley Jackson's Dr Montague rents Hill House for a summer and invites people who have brushed against the paranormal; only two say yes, the artist Theodora and the shy Eleanor Vance.

Which real Colorado resort inspired the Overlook in The Shining?

The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park: King and his wife were its only guests for a night in autumn 1974, the day before it shut for the winter, and he wandered the empty corridors imagining the story.

Who rescued the first three pages of Carrie from the trash after Stephen King gave up on it?

His wife Tabitha pulled the pages out of the bin and said she wanted to know what happened next, so he turned the abandoned short story into his first published novel.

Which 2023 film is loosely based on Hallowe'en Party?

A Haunting in Venice: Kenneth Branagh's third Poirot film moved the novel's children's-party murder to a seance in a Venetian palazzo in 1947, keeping Ariadne Oliver as the mystery writer who calls Poirot in.

Who wrote the 1902 short story "The Monkey's Paw"?

W. W. Jacobs made his name with comic tales of sailors and dockside life, yet the story that outlived them all is this horror tale, first printed in Harper's Monthly in September 1902.

What does the Whites' first wish cost them in 'The Monkey's Paw'?

Their son Herbert is caught in the machinery at work, and his employers, admitting no liability, send the Whites two hundred pounds, exactly the sum they wished for.

Which vampire tells a young reporter how Lestat turned him in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire?

Louis de Pointe du Lac was a Louisiana planter when he was turned in 1791; Rice wrote the 1976 debut after the death of her young daughter Michele, the model for the child vampire Claudia.

Who wrote the 1967 horror novel Rosemary's Baby?

Ira Levin's tale of a young wife carrying the Devil's child sold in the millions and, with Roman Polanski's 1968 film, set off the boom in horror fiction that followed.

The Dakota stood in for it on screen, but what is the apartment building in Rosemary's Baby called?

The Bramford comes with a warning: the couple's old friend Hutch tells them of its history of witchcraft and murder, and they take the flat anyway.

William Peter Blatty heard of the 1949 possession case behind The Exorcist while at which university?

Georgetown: Blatty was a student there when he heard of the 1949 exorcism of a Maryland boy, which is why his 1971 novel is set beside the campus in Washington.

Meg and Mog, the picture books about a witch whose spells go wrong, were illustrated by whom?

Jan Pieńkowski drew Meg, Mog and Owl for Helen Nicoll's words from 1972; after she died in 2012 he kept the series going with his partner David Walser.

Which Henry James ghost story follows a governess who believes her two charges are haunted?

The Turn of the Screw strands its governess at Bly, sure that the ghosts of a valet and her predecessor want the children; her struggle ends with the boy Miles dead in her arms.

At the 1889 dinner where The Picture of Dorian Gray was commissioned, which other author was signed up?

Arthur Conan Doyle left the Langham Hotel dinner with a commission of his own and promptly delivered The Sign of the Four, his second Sherlock Holmes novel, months before Wilde's story appeared.

Which horror star did Tim Burton want to narrate his poem The Nightmare Before Christmas?

Vincent Price was Burton's idol and had just narrated his short film Vincent; the TV special Burton planned was never made, and the 1982 poem became a stop-motion feature eleven years later.

In which fictional Maine town does Pennywise prey on children in Stephen King's It?

Derry is King's portrait of Bangor, Maine: the idea grew once he thought of Bangor's canal and the old stories about its sewers, and put the monster underneath a whole city.

Which fairy tale came to Stephen King's mind on a bridge, seeding the idea for It?

Three Billy Goats Gruff: crossing a wooden bridge in Boulder, Colorado, in 1978, King thought of the troll beneath it and of a monster under a whole town; he twisted Marianne Moore's line into 'real trolls in imaginary gardens'.

In Pet Sematary, what lies in the woods beyond the pet cemetery?

A burial ground once used by the Mi'kmaq lies past the deadfall; Jud Crandall shows his new neighbour that what is buried there comes back, and never comes back the same.

What is the name of the cat in Pet Sematary, belonging to the Creeds' daughter Ellie?

Winston Churchill, Church for short, is run over on the road outside the Creeds' house while Ellie is away, and Louis's attempt to spare her the news is where the horror begins.

In The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, the Headless Horseman is said to be the ghost of what kind of soldier?

A Hessian trooper, one of the German soldiers who fought for Britain, lost his head to a cannonball in 'some nameless battle' of the Revolutionary War and rides out nightly in search of it.

Who starred with Nicole Kidman in the film Practical Magic?

Sandra Bullock plays Sally to Kidman's Gillian in the 1998 film of Alice Hoffman's novel; when Sally accidentally kills Gillian's violent boyfriend, their spell to bring him back goes badly wrong.

Which vampire novella, set in Styria, predates Dracula by 25 years?

Carmilla (1872) by Sheridan Le Fanu: its narrator Laura is slowly preyed upon by a house guest who is really the long-dead Countess Mircalla Karnstein, 'Carmilla' being an anagram of Mircalla.

Who wrote The Vampyre (1819), featuring the aristocratic vampire Lord Ruthven?

John Polidori, once Byron's travelling physician, saw his tale printed in 1819 under his former employer's far more famous name, and both men had to insist that Polidori wrote it.

Which 1764 novel by Horace Walpole is considered the first Gothic novel?

The Castle of Otranto: Walpole's first edition of 1764 posed as a translation of a 1529 Italian manuscript found in a Catholic family's library; he admitted authorship in the 1765 second edition, subtitled 'A Gothic Story'.

Which Jane Austen novel satirises Gothic fiction through heroine Catherine Morland?

Northanger Abbey, written around 1798-99 and published posthumously in December 1817, has Catherine Morland imagining Gothic horrors at the Tilneys' abbey; the seven 'horrid novels' Isabella recommends were all real titles.

The Phantom of the Opera is set in which real Paris opera house?

The Palais Garnier, opened in 1875: Leroux drew on a real accident there in May 1896, when a chandelier counterweight crashed into the auditorium and killed one person, and on the water cistern beneath its foundations.

Which 1971 haunted-house novel by I Am Legend author Richard Matheson is set in the Belasco mansion in Maine?

Hell House: a dying millionaire pays a physicist, his wife and two mediums to spend a week in the Belasco house and settle whether anything survives death; the 1973 film was The Legend of Hell House.

The Amityville Horror recounts which family's 28 days in the house?

The Lutzes bought the house where Ronald DeFeo Jr. had shot his family thirteen months earlier; Jay Anson's book sold their story as fact, and it has been disputed ever since.

In 'Salem's Lot, which ancient vampire takes over the Marsten House with his human partner Straker?

Kurt Barlow grew out of a classroom: King was teaching Dracula and wondered aloud over supper what would happen if the Count came back in twentieth-century America.

In Misery, who is Paul Sheldon's self-proclaimed 'number-one fan'?

Annie Wilkes, a former nurse, keeps the injured novelist in her remote Colorado farmhouse and makes him bring her beloved Misery Chastain back to life; the idea came to King in a dream on a flight to London.

Cujo, the rabid dog in Stephen King's 1981 novel, is what breed?

Saint Bernard: Cujo, the Camber family's Saint Bernard, is bitten by a rabid bat and traps Donna Trenton and her son in a stalled Ford Pinto; King has said he barely remembers writing the book.

Stephen King's Christine is a possessed car of which make and year?

A 1958 Plymouth Fury, bought by teenager Arnie Cunningham from the bitter old Roland LeBay; King got the idea imagining an odometer that ran backwards, making the car younger.

Doctor Sleep, the 2013 sequel to The Shining, features which group of psychic nomads?

The True Knot, led by Rose the Hat, travel America in RVs and feed on 'steam', the essence released when children with the shining die in pain; grown-up Dan Torrance helps Abra Stone fight them.

Where does Arthur Kipps settle the Drablow estate in The Woman in Black?

Eel Marsh House is cut off whenever the tide covers the Nine Lives Causeway, leaving Kipps alone with Alice Drablow's papers and a ghost whose every sighting is said to foretell a child's death.

Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart introduced which demonic beings?

The Cenobites, summoned by solving the Lemarchand puzzle box, belong to the Order of the Gash and no longer tell pleasure from pain; one of them, unnamed in the 1986 novella, was nicknamed Pinhead by the film's crew.

'The Call of Cthulhu' first appeared in 1928 in which pulp magazine?

Weird Tales printed 'The Call of Cthulhu' in its February 1928 issue, after editor Farnsworth Wright had first rejected it; Lovecraft wrote the story in the summer of 1926.

In 'The Call of Cthulhu', the monster rises from which sunken 'nightmare corpse-city'?

R'lyeh lies sunk in the South Pacific, where dead Cthulhu waits dreaming; the narrator traces its brief rising to a 1925 Sydney Bulletin report on the derelict yacht Alert and its lone survivor.

What does Mr Otis offer the ghost in Wilde's The Canterville Ghost?

Oil for his chains: the American minister hands over a bottle of Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator, and his young twins follow up by hurling a pillow at the ghost.

The mansion said to have inspired Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables stands in which Massachusetts town?

Salem's Turner-Ingersoll Mansion belonged to Hawthorne's cousin Susanna Ingersoll; by his day it had only three gables, and he knew the other four from her stories.

In Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown', which aptly named wife does Brown fear he has lost to the Devil?

Faith: when one of her pink ribbons flutters down in the forest, Brown cries 'My Faith is gone!', and the pun holds, for he never trusts his wife or his neighbours again.

Who played the devilish Darryl Van Horne in the 1987 film of The Witches of Eastwick?

Jack Nicholson's Van Horne is the rich stranger who seduces three friends in turn; Updike set Eastwick in Rhode Island, though the film was shot in Massachusetts.

In Gregory Maguire's Wicked, what is the Wicked Witch of the West's given name?

Elphaba is Maguire's tribute to the creator of Oz: say the initials of L. Frank Baum aloud, L-F-B, and you have the name that Baum's own witch never had.

Mildred Hubble of The Worst Witch attends which school?

Miss Cackle's Academy for Witches hands Mildred a tabby instead of a black kitten, and it cannot stay on her broomstick; Jill Murphy began the book at 15, drawing on her own school days.

Who illustrated John Bellairs's The House with a Clock in Its Walls (1973)?

Edward Gorey supplied the cover and interior drawings for the 1973 novel, in which orphan Lewis Barnavelt moves in with his warlock uncle Jonathan, whose house hides a doomsday clock left by the dead sorcerer Isaac Izard.

In 'The Green Ribbon', what happens when Jenny's husband finally unties her ribbon?

Her head falls off: Jenny wears the green ribbon all her life and refuses to say why; on her deathbed she lets Alfred untie it. The tale is one of seven in the 1984 reader In a Dark, Dark Room.

Creepy Carrots!, about Jasper Rabbit, earned illustrator Peter Brown which 2013 award?

Caldecott Honor: Peter Brown's shadowy grey pictures with bright orange carrots won it; Jasper Rabbit fences and moats Crackenhopper Field to pen the carrots in, which is exactly what the carrots wanted.

In Dav Pilkey's The Hallo-Wiener, the monster that scares the other dogs turns out to be what?

Two cats in disguise send the other dogs fleeing; Oscar, mocked all night for his hot dog bun costume, pulls off their robe and is known from then on as 'Hero Sandwich'.

Erica Silverman's Big Pumpkin, in which monsters tug at a stuck pumpkin, reworks which folktale?

The Gigantic Turnip (also The Enormous Turnip), the Russian tale in which a family and their animals pull together; in Big Pumpkin a witch, ghost, vampire and mummy each fail alone until a tiny bat suggests pulling together.

In Burns's Tam o' Shanter, what does the fastest witch tear from Tam's mare Meg?

Her tail comes off in the hand of Nannie, the witch Tam had cheered as 'Cutty-sark' for her short shift, just as Meg reaches the bridge; the famous tea clipper is named after her.

In Tam o' Shanter, at which ruined church in Burns's birthplace village do witches dance to the Devil's bagpipes?

Alloway Kirk got its poem through a bargain: Burns asked Francis Grose to draw the ruin for his Antiquities of Scotland, and Grose agreed if Burns supplied a witch story to print with it.

Burns's 1785 poem 'Halloween' shows young Scots burning nuts and pulling kail stalks to foretell what?

Their future spouses: Burns's own notes explain that a lad and lass are each named to a nut on the fire, and whether the pair burn quietly together or jump apart foretells the courtship.

In Twilight, Bella Swan moves from Phoenix to which rainy Washington town?

Forks, a logging town on Washington's Olympic Peninsula that Meyer chose for its record rainfall; Bella moves there to live with her father Charlie, the police chief, and meets Edward Cullen at Forks High School.

In Let the Right One In, what afflicts Eli on entering a home uninvited?

Bleeding: Eli bleeds heavily until Oskar gives in and says the words; the title plays on the old rule that a vampire cannot enter a home unless asked.

Max Brooks's World War Z is a follow-up to which earlier book of his, published in 2003?

The Zombie Survival Guide (2003), Brooks's deadpan manual on outlasting the undead, preceded World War Z (2006), whose oral-history format he borrowed from Studs Terkel's The Good War.

In Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart', which feature of the old man drives the narrator to murder?

His pale blue eye: the old man's filmed 'vulture eye' drives the narrator to kill him; after dismembering the body over a tub he hides it under the floorboards and is undone by a heartbeat only he can hear.

In 'The Cask of Amontillado', Montresor walls up Fortunato during what festivity?

Carnival: Fortunato is drunk and dressed as a jester, in motley with cap and bells, when Montresor lures him into the catacombs; a jingling of those bells is the last sound from behind the wall.

Where does Poe's Prince Prospero hide from the Red Death?

An abbey: Prospero and a thousand courtiers weld the bolts of its iron gates and hold a ball in seven coloured rooms, where the Red Death walks in regardless.

What is the name of the narrator's first black cat in Poe's 'The Black Cat'?

Pluto, the narrator's favourite until, in a drunken rage, he cuts out one of its eyes and later hangs it; the story ran in The Saturday Evening Post in August 1843, the same year as 'The Tell-Tale Heart'.

Which short story caused New Yorker readers to cancel subscriptions in summer 1948?

'The Lottery', the tale of a village stoning, ran in The New Yorker on 26 June 1948 and drew some three hundred letters that summer, several asking where such lotteries were held so the writers could go and watch.

In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, what poison killed the Blackwood family?

Arsenic, stirred into the sugar bowl six years before the story opens; Constance was tried and acquitted of the poisoning, and narrator Merricat survived because she had been sent to bed without dinner.

In Peter Straub's Ghost Story, four elderly men call their club what?

The Chowder Society: Ricky Hawthorne, Sears James, Lewis Benedikt and John Jaffrey meet in evening dress to tell ghost stories in snowbound Milburn, New York; the 1981 film starred Fred Astaire and Melvyn Douglas.

In Mexican Gothic, what grows through the mansion High Place and holds the family's memories?

A fungus threaded through the walls stores the memories of the family's dead in a web they call the gloom; the patriarch wants Noemí to marry in and renew the bloodline.

In The Exorcist, Regan first talks to the demon through a Ouija-board entity called what?

Captain Howdy, the 'imaginary friend' Regan says answers her on the Ouija board, is the demon's first mask; Father Merrin has already met it as Pazuzu, on a dig in northern Iraq in the opening pages.

Varney the Vampire (1845–47) was issued in what cheap weekly format?

Penny dreadfuls: Varney filled 876 double-column pages in cheap weekly parts, and it gave vampires the fangs and twin puncture wounds that Dracula would inherit fifty years later.

In The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Kit Tyler arrives in Puritan Connecticut from where?

Barbados: orphaned Kit Tyler sails from the island in 1687 to her aunt's Puritan household in Wethersfield; she is first suspected of witchcraft for diving in to rescue a child's doll, since respectable women could not swim.

In the first Harry Potter book, what gets loose inside Hogwarts on Halloween night?

A troll corners Hermione in a bathroom on Halloween night; Harry and Ron go back to save her, and the rescue is what turns the three of them into friends.

Which Sesame Street character begs readers not to turn the page in a 1971 Little Golden Book?

Grover begs the reader not to turn the page and puts up one obstacle after another, only to discover that the monster at the end of the book is himself.

R. L. Stine's Fear Street books are set in which fictional town?

Shadyside's Fear Street is named for the cursed Fear family, whose dark power, the Saga books say, taints everyone connected with them, the whole town included.

At which university does Victor Frankenstein create his creature?

Ingolstadt, the Bavarian university where Victor studies under Krempe and Waldman after his mother dies of scarlet fever; he animates the creature there on a dreary November night and flees his rooms.

Dracula sails to England aboard which ship, carrying boxes of earth?

The Demeter, a Russian schooner out of Varna: its crew vanish one by one during the crossing, and it runs aground in a storm with its dead captain tied to the wheel and fifty boxes of earth in the hold.