A collection of horror stories written for young adults. Some of these gave me nightmares!
I'm looking for a collection of horror short stories. Just as a warning, these stories have some gore and body horror even though I remember them being marketed for kids. Here are the ones I remember:
The main character is babysitting these two kids, a little boy and little girl. Their mother leaves strict instructions not to feed them after she leaves, they've already ate. The kids beg for more food though. They act desperate. They make up these stories that 'something' is asking them for food and threatening them if they don't get it. The babysitter tells no but they keep begging. She may give in once, but they are still not satisfied. She sends them to bed and watches TV. She hears a strange 'chittering' sound behind the door but when she opens it, the kids have just gone to sleep in their beds. The next morning when the mom comes home they go to check on the kids but something is wrong. They don't answer when their mother calls. She pulls back the covers to find their bodies eaten, nothing left of them but their heads and a few bones, picked clean of all meat and covered in teeth marks. I think it was called, 'Chittering' or something like that due to the sound the babysitter heard while the children were being devoured.
The other really good one was about this newlywed. She's married a widower and has just moved into his house. Every time it rains she gets this strange, uncomfortable feeling about this tree on his front lawn that you can see from one of the windows, (dramatically light by the moon light if I recall correctly). She gets the impression that there are streamers caught in its limbs. Maybe someone threw toilet paper in it? She goes out to see and when she tears down a piece, its not the consistency of paper but of flesh. She throws it in the sink inside but then it vanishes before she can show her husband. She asks him about the tree and he gets really weird about it. I forget the climax. I think the dead wife might be trying to save the new wife from something, but I don't really remember. The protagonist almost dies and then the husband tells her the whole truth about his late wife. She died in a car accident. It was a rainy night ("much like tonight") and the roads were really slick. She crashed into a tree and she was torn to bits in its branches. New wife guessed that it was the tree out front that late wife crashed into and the husband is like, "Yes! How did you know?" There's a good chance I'm wrong about everyone being married. They might just be dating or engaged. I'm 99% sure this one was called 'Streamers' but all I can find when searching for it is horror stories about twitch streamers.
There was a story about a roller coaster and the ticket salesman was selling death. One kid doesn't bye a ticket and he watches his friends die.
There was another story about pumpkin men. I think the faces of the people killed by the pumpkin men appeared in the pumpkins found in the pumpkin patch the next morning.
There was a story about a water tree spirit who would come and visit this woman at night. I think it was trying to give her a message from her husband, mothman style, but it was being really creepy about it. I remember this one being really scary but all I remember is the picture on the title page of a swamp monster thing looking out at you, all but it's eyes under the water.
There was a supposedly true story about how the author believed in ghosts because when she was a child a tornado tore through as she was on her way home from school (walking because I read this book as a kid in the 90's). She didn't known what to do but her grand father appeared to her and told her to lay down in a ditch before disappearing. It saved her life, the whole area around her was destroyed but she was safe. When she got home later she finds out that her grand father died of a heart attack when the tornado came through prior to her 'seeing' him.
The story I really want to find is one I believe the author told to an auditorium of us in person and wasn't in the book. It was about a woman who kept appearing outside of a window. She had "long red finger nails and big red lips."
So I want to say this was all written by one author, a woman. I believe she is from Appalachia because I remember giving a sales pitch at my school where she told an auditorium of us horror stories. I think I bought this book afterwards. This would have happened sometime in the mid to late 90's.