What was the scariest/most chilling book you read as a child?

beanieb yes they did, it was a good few years ago. I think it was set in the uk and not america and the older sister had learning difficulties in the book but I'm not sure about the film. It was made for childrens telly I think

Diana Wynne Jones' "The Time of the Ghost" was really disturbing too. There's a Chthulu-like creepiness about the force that haunts the girls.

I re read The Dark is Rising recently and found it quite boring but I loved it as a child. I used to recite the rhyme in it in the playground etc.

We listened to the Weirdstone of Brisingamen on Audiobook this summer. I had forgotten how claustrophobic the scenes underground are. They are really horrible. Ds and Dh really enjoyed it too.

We also listened to the Owl Service but frankly is wasn't as good as I remember.

I would love a copy of The Amazing Mr Blundel as I loved it but it is so expensive on Amazon.

Moondial was good

Z for Zachariah terrified me but I loved it.

Ozziegirly, I liked Moondial too. I thought Siri Neal was the height of glamour

Paperhouse is very moving, I agree.

Misty comics were brilliant, we used to have that and Bunty (the hairstyles of the four mary's were a bit scary) delivered. When we were back in the uK over the summer, dd found my old Misty annuals and now scares herself witless at them. They are pretty pathetic TBH, but then I'm 45 and she's 8. DD was terrified by the witches. Roald Dahl had too much imagination, six months after she scared herself into such a frenzy that she couldn't sleep, she happily re read it.

The Fog.
I shouldn't have read it; nor The Rats either - I was only about 10 I think and far too young to cope properly. I couldn't get out of bed properly for ages after in case there were rats under my bed waiting to attack me, pull me under the bed and eat me from the middle out.
Ugh.
I still have an almost phobic reaction to rats.

Paperhouse was one of the scariest films I saw as a child - but weirdly I saw it again a couple of years ago and found it really moving, especially at the end.

As a child I was also scared by Z for Zachariah and another apocalyse one called On the Beach.

Also I watched a children's series called Moondial which was scary but also really good.

The Amazing Mr Blunden

scared the living shit out of me

Naturopath: I think the story about crashing into something that's pn the wrong side of the road is The House Of The Nightmare. Which scared several shades out of me when I was a kid too.
Grinny was another bad one: read bits of it in the bookshop and had nightmares, never read the whole thing, couldn't bear to.
Mind you, aged 11 on holiday, spent too much time dipping into the Pan Books of Horror Stories on sale in the cafe nearby (I used to read the shortest ones so I could finish them before the shopkeeper yelled at me to put the book down and get lost - which of course meant they were the worst sucker-punch ones of the whole books).

The Owl Service is just uneasy-making when you are a kid because it's incomprehensible until you a) hit adolescence and b) actually read a bit of welsh mythology. Basically it's a prolonged (very 70s) riff on sexuality and class prejudice.
Oh, and if anyone can explain the end of Red Shift to me I would be grateful. Only 30 fucking years of having no fucking idea what happened as the last few pages are in fucking code!

Robert Bloch!

Tothesea, I remember a horrible story about an imaginary friend called 'Enoch', maybe that's where you're remembering it from?

Can't remember the author - hang on...

sheepgomeep - I wonder, did they make a tv film of that? It rings a bell but I don't think I read the book. Is there a lake involved? or a river?

beanieb, Yep here it is I remember the programme better though the opening credits and music were really creepy.

Ahhh! It was Chocky I was thinking of - I could have sworn the voice was called Enoch how bizarre. Makes total sense as we did quite a few of his books in school. Another mystery solved by Mumsnet!
The Girl in a Swing by Richard Adams I found very unsettling and dark but I would have been a bit older by then, maybe 12

Does anyone remember a book called 'The Dolls house' It was an American story

From what I can remember two young girls get to stay with thier Grandmother in thier school Holidays. The gm still lives in the house where she grew up but there is a big secret about the house and it turns out her parents were murdered there years before and her young brother (the girls dad) was the only survivor (gm was out at the time)

Anyway these girls find an old dolls house in the attic ehich is an EXACT replica of the house and every night the dolls inside the house reenact the murder, trying to tell the girls who killed them and why!

I read it when I was nine, and it still scares me now. I found the book years ago in a charity shop, its in the house somewhere but don't know where.

The Gerald Durrell short story about something coming out of the mirror is The Entrance from The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium and I agree, it's very creepy. I'm glad I read it as a teenager not a child!

I thought Paperhouse was very true to the spirit of the book and I can just vaguely remember a 1970s TV adaptation of Marianne Dreams - I can still see the boulders with eyes waiting outside.

peanut08 - I remember Chocky. By the writer of 'day of the triffids'.

Grinny
The Demon Headmaster
When the Wind Blows

and a collection of ghost stories that included one about a boy's dog that went and dug up a grave and brought a bit of the other dead boy's body (shudder) and one about someone driving late at night to an inn and kept seeing something in the road that seemed to change sides whenever he looked at it, so that he didn;t know how to avoid crashing into it - I think it was a stagecoach that he crashed into but the people where already dead and were ghosts ..

Please tell me if you recognise that - I have always wanted to remember what those stories were (not that I ever want to read them again - they scared me to death) - why on earth did I re-read them thousands of times??!

"The Farthest-Away Mountain is one of my very favourite books EVER"

oh me too . infact I couldn't remember what it was called for years and then I googled it, bought it and devoured it as an adult.