The Scariest Sites on the Web

No, this is not a review of social networking sites,  I'm talking good old Halloween scare ‘em sites. You can't eat virtual candy from a site quite yet, but you can get all sorts of other hair-raising thrills.

Traditionalists: Sometimes good old-fashioned text is just the thing to make our imaginations go wild. Halloween Online serves up Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and the Poe classics "The Premature Burial" and "The Tell-Tale Heart." Modern classics include real-life hauntings and those creepy urban legends like the dead-guy smell in the hotel room.

True or False: Do madmen poison children on Halloween? Are black cats routinely sacrificed? Have people died of fright in haunted houses? Because urban living can be scarier than fiction, check out Snopes for true (and not so true) stories.

Personal favorite? "Chainsaw of Fools," the tale of a chainsaw-wielding madman who turned out to be a partygoer with the wrong address. The terror, as it turns out, is not without basis: Yoshihiro Hattori, a 16-year-old Japanese exchange student, was mistakenly shot to death in Louisiana in 1992 when he knocked on the wrong door in search of a Halloween party and the resident mistook him for an intruder.

Reality Bytes: Universal Orlando's Halloween Horror Nights/Carnival of Carnage sets the mood with its eight all-new terrifying haunted houses based on the popular films "Friday the 13th," "A Nightmare on Elm Street," "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," "The Thing," and "Dead Silence"; four shows, including Bill & Ted's Excellent Halloween Adventure; hundreds of horrific "scare-actors"; and the "Midway of the Bizarre." (All for $64.95.) To find haunted houses in your area, HauntedHouse.com offers a "haunt directory."

Big Spenders: Fright Catalog offers a huge selection of props and costumes, including a walking, groaning zombie for $2,600. Some good discounts on Goth-looking fallen angels and priests, though.

Mad Scientists: "Serving your mad scientist needs" is Terror Labs with biology-type horrors for purchase. For rotting corpses and instructions on how to motorize them, it's off to The Haunted Manor.

Do-It-Yourselfers: Halloween how-tos offered by the Scary Guys include a monstrous-sized Swamp Thang. True DIYers belong at MakeZine where you can learn to make guillotines that really behead or a $20 ghoul. Order the special Halloween issue of the magazine to learn how to create proper-looking spurting blood wounds and coffins. (The scariest part of this one is discovering just how DIY-challenged you are.)

The Perfect Touch: While some find Martha Stewart scary enough all by her lonesome, projects like the head-waiter tray show her flair. Print and video directions to mimic Martha are available.

Couch Potato: Tired of hearing from kids who don't like your choice of candy or think the going rate is $5 for UNICEF? Lock the door and make your own Halloween film series with Tim Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas," "Donnie Darko," or any of Netflix's top 25, including "The Hills Have Eyes," "The Messengers," or "The Saw." If the kids are still up, stick to TV specials like It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and the annual Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episodes.

Music to Scare By: Count on Rachael Ray to offer an iTunes iMix of spooky sounds/songs. If you're looking to mix your own sounds you'll find royalty-free scare-sounds at Partners in Rhyme.

Video Games: Silent Hill is the classic and the fifth one is the charm. BioShock, according to its creator, "will offer a horror-themed gameplay experience in which what you observe, and what happens to you, will be tempered by your own choices." Yikes.

Just don't get what all the fuss is about? See "How Halloween Works."