Cindy, your post reminded me of when I read (re-read, mind you!) The Haunting of Hill House right after Pete and I had moved into our house. Our house that makes odd creaky noises, and that I had not gotten at ALL used to. That was not a good night.

Oh man. This reminds me of when I was in 7th grade and read The Amityville Horror, very shortly after moving to a new room (new addition) in our house. It's silly, because it was the same house I'd been living in for years, but I managed to convince myself that it was possible that the land that the addition was built over was haunted (old Indian burial ground, naturally) but the rest of the house wasn't. The freakiest thing was that my bed would shake sometimes, and it took me months to figure out why (in response to the vibrations when someone would walk up the stairs), so I just quietly freaked out every time it happened, convinced that Satan was about to spring out from underneath my bed.

I don't do very well with horror.

Everyone knows that you're supposed to put scary books in the freezer.

Oh, yeah, The Amityville Horror. I read that in 4th grade. What a bad move. We'd been in the house for a year, but the house was over 100 years old, and I'd already had a bad experience (I dreamed of my room burning for the first two weeks straight after moving there, until my parents told me that that part of the house had in fact burned down in the 1950s...oddly this settled me down). I couldn't see a fly without panicking.

But the freezer is in the house, Dana. The car was not in the house, nor was its trunk. It wasn't even in the garage.

Plus? Some sunlight could (in theory) get into the trunk of the car. That's far less likely than it getting into the freezer.

I should have left it on the dashboard.

Kate, I remember reading AH. So scary! I think I was 15 or so. I went on vacation with my cousin, her husband and kids, to babysit for them, on nights they wanted to go out. I also read The Godfather, that week, and something else that's slipping my mind (possibly a re-read of The Shining).

While I was reading Salem's Lot, I did go into the kitchen at about 3 a.m. to make sure there was garlic in the refrigerator.

Totally girly, but I remember reading Forever in bed at night in fourth grade, all sneaky and self-satisfied, and wondering what "Love and Other Indoor Sports" meant, when one of the guys signed a letter to Katherine that way. And then passing it around during school one morning, until our very male and very panicky teacher took it away from us.

I also remember the summer I was seventeen staying up one night reading Peter Straub's Floating Dragon until I was terrified. I was at the beach with friends, in an unfamiliar house and an unfamiliar bed, and for the first time I slept with the light on all night.

I tried three times to get into that book, since it's one of my mom's favorites. I just couldn't.

The worst part was that a friend gave it to me for my birthday because she loved it, and she left little notes throughout the book for me. The notes were the best part and the main reason I kept reading.

And then the book perished in the Great Postal Service Disaster of 2003. I wouldn't have minded losing the book if it hadn't been a birthday present.

Everyone knows that you're supposed to put scary books in the freezer.

That reminds me of the time Joey put Little Women in the freezer.

Yes, that was the joke.

also vaguely remembering being somewhere where I couldn't really read it - maybe my sister's softball game? and being frustrated that I couldn't give my book 100% of my attention

Hee! I remember being in 4th grade and attending my brother's freshman football game one Saturday morning and being really pissed off because my mom wouldn't let me read my book during the game. Since I was forced to "watch your brother play!", I learned the rules of football out of sheer boredom--it's the only sport I truly love as a result.

Watership Down was an 8th-grade Language Arts class requirement that I enjoyed after getting past page 58. I remember that page number because it took me six full days to get to page 59--it was like there was a mountain range on page 58 that I had to scale to move past it. Once I did, I finished the rest of the book in a day or two. Later that year, my cousin, who was a senior in high school, called me out of the blue. Her mom knew from my mom that I had read WD, and Laurie had to read it for her English class. Of course, it was the night before the test, and she hadn't read it, so I spent the next 45 minutes giving her a detailed summary of the book. She ended up getting an A- on her test, and thanked me profusely!

My copy of Watership Down was a gift from a friend of my aunt's when I was around that age. I think we'd talked about books, and she bought me a copy. I should pull it off my shelf and see exactly what she wrote on the inside cover -- something about hoping I'd like it, I think.