21 Scary Halloween Short Stories For Middle School

The creepier the tale, the more middle school students love it. October is the perfect month to introduce middle school students to scary short stories. Download these 21 short stories that are perfect for your Halloween-related units. I have tried to include other resources such as YouTube videos, TV show adaptations, paired texts, and related songs. If I can find existing lesson plans online, I may will link to those, as well. Happy Halloween!

The creepier the tale, the more students love it. October is the perfect month to introduce them to scary short stories. These stories are perfect for Halloween-related lessons! #shortstories Click To Tweet

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1. The Possibility of Evil by Shirley Jackson | Assessment Activity & Writing Project | Assessment Activity & Writing Project on TpT
   
2. The Masque of the Red by Death by Edgar Allan Poe* | Assessment Activity | Assessment Activity on TpT
   
3. The Landlady by Roald Dahl | Assessment Activity | Assessment Activity on TpT
   

   

4. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
   
5. A Ghost Story by Mark Twain
   
6. The Bottle Imp by Robert Louis Stevenson
   
7. The Mortal Immortal by Mary Shelley
   
8. The Tomb by H.P. Lovecraft
   
9. The Tree by H.P. Lovecraft
   
10. The Screaming Skull by F. Marion Crawford
    
11. The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe (Available in our All Access Membership)
    
12. The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe (Available in our All Access Membership)
    
13. The Spectre Bridegroom, a Traveller’s Tale by Washington Irving (Available in our All Access Membership)
    
14. The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs
    
15. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce (Available in our All Access Membership)
    
16. The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe*
    
17. The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe
    
18. The Hitchhiker by Orson Welles (Available in our All Access Membership)
    
19. Contents of a Dead Man’s Pocket by Jack Finney (Available in our All Access Membership)
    
20. A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner (Available in our All Access Membership)
    
21. The Boarded Window by Ambrose Bierce (Available in our All Access Membership)
    
22. A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury
    

Note: An RTE subscriber recently emailed me to ask if there was a simple way to subscribe to all the curated resources in one place, without having to enter an email address for every short story. At the time, there wasn't, but we have worked out a way to make it easy for you to access all the resources in one place — right here on this page! For just $3 per month, you can have ongoing access to current and future curated resources! Let us do the late-night searching for you. Sign up here for instant digital access.

Order Now!

Purchased access but still not seeing links to the resources? Make sure you login to your account by clicking the Customer area link at the top of the page and entering the login information you created. You can then return to this post, or click the “All Curated Short Story Access Membership” link in your customer area. Once you login, your short story list will look like this.

NOTE: Curated resources do not include the units that RTE has developed in house.

*These stories may be more appropriate for students with higher-level reading skills, or may require extra scaffolding from the teacher.

Copyright notice: These stories are published on sites other than reThinkELA.com and NO copyrighted stories are excerpted or quoted in RTE-created materials. Some stories are in the public domain (not copyrighted), or are excerpts of larger works, while others are not. In some cases, teachers may print a class set for their own classroom usage, but there are exceptions. Please check with your district regarding its policies and licenses for reproducing printed copies. Generally speaking, you may ask students to download their own copies (outside of the one you download for your own use) to their devices for their own educational studies.