20 Fun Facts You Didn’t Know About “Goosebumps” Author R.L. Stine and His Spooky Series

For a whole generation of kids, nothing was scarier — or more fun — than cracking open a Goosebumps book.

It all began with Welcome to Deadhouse in 1992. R.L. Stine attracted millions of young readers with his creepy covers and horror-lite plots, and the series quickly spread through word of mouth.

“I never planned to write for kids. … Then I just realized what a great audience they are,” Stine told PEOPLE in June 2024. “There was no advertising, nobody really knew me. Just, kids found them and brought them in, and showed them to their friends in school. It was this secret kids’ network — kids showing kids, and then somehow it just took off all over the world just because of kids.”

Since then, Goosebumps has sold more than 400 million copies worldwide in 35 languages, making it the second-best-selling literary franchise behind Harry Potter. The success didn’t stop on the page: The first TV adaptation premiered 30 years ago on Oct. 27, 1995, paving the way for video games, comic books, two feature films and a modern series released in 2023 on Disney+ and Hulu as part of its Halloween programming.

In honor of spooky season — and the ’90s TV show celebrating its 30th anniversary — here are some fun facts about the Goosebumps books and the author behind all the nightmares.

R. L. Stine originally wanted to be funny rather than scary and ran humor magazines for decades

Despite his reputation for frightening multiple generations of children, Stine insisted that wasn’t his goal when he first set out to become a writer.

“I never planned to be scary, I always just wanted to be funny,” he told HuffPost in October 2015. “And I’d be typing up these funny stories, but I don’t know why. And my mother would be outside my door, and she’d say, ‘What’s wrong with you? Go outside and play!’ ”

Desperate for an audience, Stine distributed these self-penned joke magazines — upwards of 100 of them, he later told GQ in 2021 — around school, until his teachers got wind of it and demanded he stop.

Stine wrote fake interviews with The Beatles for an early writing gig before working at a BDSM magazine

Before running Bananas, Stine’s first job as a writer in N.Y.C. was faking interviews for a woman who ran six movie magazines out of a brownstone on 96th Street.

“I never saw her dressed,” he told The Verge in October 2015. “She was always in this brown bathrobe. She never went to the movies or anything. She just did these magazines. I would come in, in the morning, and she’d say, ‘Do an interview with Diana Ross.’ So I’d sit down — type, type, type, type, type — and I’d write an interview with Diana Ross. And she’d say, ‘Do an interview with The Beatles.’ Fine — type, type, type — and we made it all up.”

Stine continued, “It was a great job … And I had to write three or four of them a day, so it taught me to write really fast. It didn’t last very long.”

After that, Stine endured what he called “the worst year of my life” as an editor at a trade magazine for the soft drink industry.

“I would write about new syrups and flip-top cans, and there was a big debate back then over whether soda could come in plastic bottles,” he told the outlet. “I had to cover bottlers’ conventions.”

For this, he was paid a total of $140 a week.

By the end of the 1960s, Stine went to work for Scholastic after answering an ad in The New York Times.

Employed in the Scholastic Junior department, he began writing history and geography articles and news stories, and eventually ran his own magazine, Search.

“It was a history-current affairs magazine for junior high kids but written at a fifth-grade level,” he told Mental Floss in 2015. “That’s how I learned about reading levels. I learned all the vocabulary lists for fourth and fifth grade, and that’s how I keep Goosebumps easy to read.”

Stine created the beloved Nickelodeon kid show Eureeka’s Castle

Somewhere amid all this writing, Stine found time to co-create and script the Nickelodeon show Eureeka’s Castle.

“I’d always liked puppets,” he told the AV Club in November 2013. (He often spoke of how much he hated the PBS series Barney — “this simple, stupid puppet, this purple, blobby thing” — believing it to be lazy compared to other children’s programming.)

Stine called the collaborative process of TV “the hardest thing to get used to for me … I would write a script; I’d bring it to this script meeting at this long table with all the puppeteers, producers, directors, and all these people; and they would rip my script apart, and I’d go home and write another one. And I wasn’t used to that at all.”

The show debuted in 1989 and ran until 1991.

During his time working for the burgeoning children’s television network, Stine also served as the first editor of Nickelodeon Magazine. 

Stine’s big break into horror writing came totally by chance

Stine owes his big break in horror to another, unnamed horror writer.

“I was having lunch with Jean Feiwel, the editorial director at Scholastic at the time,” he told Mental Floss. “She’d just had a fight with a YA horror writer and said, ‘I’m never working with him again. You could write a good teen horror novel. How about it?’ I hadn’t read any teen horror novels, but I didn’t say no to anything in those days. I ran to the bookstore and bought a bunch of horror books.”

Stine’s first novel, 1987’s Blind Date, hit No. 1 on the Publishers Weekly list. He followed it up with a few more in the same vein: The Babysitter, Beach House, Hit and Run and The Girlfriend.

Goosebumps was preceded by a young adult horror series called Fear Street

Following his initial run of one-off teen horror books, he explained to the HuffPost that “the publisher wanted one a year, and I thought, gee, one a year? There must be a way to do a series. And then we started thinking about location and that kind of thing, and I thought, if I can think of a good name for the series, I’ll be off to a good start.”

He settled on Fear Street. (“I always wonder why they don’t move to Happy Street,” he joked.)

The teen-horror series is markedly different from what Goosebumps would become, mostly in its violence: “I killed a lot of teenagers, and I wondered why I liked it so much,” Stine told the Village Voice in January 2012. “Then I realized it’s because I had one at home.”

Fear Street proved to be an enormous success. As of 2010, over 80 million books from the series have been sold, with the number growing significantly due to Netflix adapting it into a film franchise, including the 2025 flick Fear Street: Prom Queen.

Stine was more than happy in his YA lane when his wife, Jane, and her business partner convinced him to skew a little younger.

“My editors, my wife and her partner, said, ‘No one’s ever done a series for 7- to 11-year-olds, scary books. We have to try it.’ And I didn’t want to do it,” he told Today in June 2022. “That’s the kind of businessman I am.”

The name “Goosebumps” came from a listing in TV Guide

Stine agreed to take a chance on this horror series for elementary school kids — but on one condition.

“I said, ‘Well, okay, if I can think of a good name for the series, maybe we can try a few of them,’ ” he told Strand Magazine.

Inspiration struck a few weeks later when he was thumbing through a copy of TV Guide.

“I was flipping through the TV listings, and there was an ad at the bottom of the page, and it said, ‘It’s ‘Goosebumps Week’ on Channel 11!’ And there it was. I thought, ‘God, that’s perfect.’ It’s the perfect name, right? So we tried it, and I didn’t have high hopes — no one had done it before, and none of us really expected much.”

The initial contract for the fledgling Goosebumps series was for four books, with a new one released every two months. Sales were slow at first. “They just sat around,” Stine told The Boston Globe in 2015. “There was no advertising or hype. I didn’t do any appearances. This was all before social media, so it was kids discovering the books and kids telling kids. It was entirely the secret kids network. The second contract was for eight more books, and then it took off.”

The books faced bans from many schools

The first Goosebumps book, Welcome to Dead House, was published in July 1992, and within two years the series was selling more than 4 million books a month.

“In ’93, ’94, ’95 — the height of Goosebumps — the USA Today Top 50 Books list was usually 20 to 25 Goosebumps books,” Stine told The Verge.

However, the series wasn’t without its detractors. “In the beginning, there was big resistance to the books, because no one had ever done a horror series for 7- to 12-year-olds,” Stine told The Boston Globe in October 2015. “And the covers were scarier than the books.”

In fact, the Goosebumps series landed near the top of the American Library Association’s challenged books of the ’90s list. At No. 15, it was above Madonna‘s Sex, The Anarchist Cookbook and Private Parts by Howard Stern. (No. 1? The Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series.)

That said, Stine “thought there would be a lot more protests than there were,” he recalled to The Hollywood Reporter in July 2022.

“I thought people would be very reluctant, but partly because the covers were so much more garish and scary than the stories … A lot of parents were upset,” Stine told the publication. “They were trying to get Goosebumps out of school libraries. That happened quite a bit in the early days before people really knew what it was. But a lot less than I thought.”

Many Goosebumps books have their origins in the ’50s horror movies and The Twilight Zone

Stine drew inspiration for his terrifying tales from the media of his youth, including the groundbreaking Tales From the Crypt comic book series, as well as The Twilight Zone — later calling writer-host Rod Serling “a hero of mine.” (A slightly less-obvious influence was British author P.G. Wodehouse, who penned the Jeeves and Wooster series, chronicling the misadventures of an airheaded aristocrat and his loyal valet.)

“A lot of the Goosebumps titles are from these ’50s horror movies my brother and I saw every week,” Stine told HuffPost. “It Came from Beneath the Sea became a Goosebumps book called It Came from Beneath the Sink. That kind of thing.”

Stine has also cited the 1945 movie Dead of Night, about a ventriloquist who has a dummy that comes to life, as being particularly formative on his signature character, Slappy. So was a chapter in the original Pinocchio in which the newly sentient puppet falls asleep with his feet on the stove and burns them off.

Some Goosebumps plots were borrowed from Stine’s family life

Not all of Stine’s plots have their roots in classic cinema. Other entries in the Goosebumps canon were drawn from moments he experienced with his family. Case in point? The Haunted Mask, in which a Halloween mask begins to take over a young girl’s personality. Stine was inspired to write the story after witnessing his young son struggle to remove a Frankenstein mask after trick-or-treating.

He also incorporated a memory from his own childhood, when he asked his parents to buy him a scary Halloween costume — and they came home with a duck outfit. (It would go on to become one of the most famous books in the series, and a personal favorite of Stine’s, as he recounted to Halloween Daily News in October 2021.)

This is perhaps the reason why this story was chosen to serve as the pilot episode of the Goosebumps TV series, which premiered 30 years ago on Oct. 27, 1995. It was watched by almost 8 million households in the U.S., and sold close to 3 million copies when it was released on VHS the following year.

Stine worked ridiculously fast when it came to writing Goosebumps books

Stine’s productivity is legendary. At one point, he was writing a Goosebumps and a Fear Street novel each month. As he told the Village Voice, “I never went out for lunch. I would do 20 pages a day.”

The author estimated that it took about three or four days to sketch out an outline for a new book — or up to two weeks, for a particularly tricky story.

In that outline, he told Scholastic in November 2024, “I [create] a cheat sheet of every character in the book — I write down the character name and a few characteristics, and that really helps me.”

By his own admission, many writers take the opposite approach.

“Most authors have an idea for a book, they write, they’re writing, later on they think of a title,” Stine told the HuffPost. “I have to start with a title. It leads me to the story. Kids always ask — everyone asks — ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ I wanna say, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ Because we all get ideas. Mine actually come from thinking of the title first.”

Stine had rules for Goosebumps books

Stine had several guiding rules for the book series. For one, he told HuffPost he’ll never set a book in New York City, as the suburbs are more relatable.

“It’s a superstition,” Stine said. “I’ve never done it. A lot of kids don’t know New York. They know a nice suburban backyard, but they don’t know New York City. It’s kind of elite in some ways, I think. I think it would make the stories more obscure for kids.”

Secondly, for Goosebumps, he said, “I have to make the kids know that what’s happening in the book couldn’t really happen. That it’s just a fantasy. And then when I write a Fear Street book or an adult book, I have to make people think it could happen. It’s kind of the opposite.”

But Stine didn’t have the formula worked out when he first began writing. However, he admitted that the first book in the Goosebumps series, Welcome to Dead House, was too scary.

“I didn’t have the right combination yet — it doesn’t have the humor,” he told TIME in June 2022. “But by the second book, Stay Out of the Basement, I got it. I just figured I don’t really want to scare these kids. So anytime a scene gets really intense, I throw in something funny. And of course there’s a punchline at the end of every chapter.”

Naturally, there were some constraints for the cover illustrations by Tim Jacobus. Blood was green, not red. Kids weren’t depicted getting injured or killed. There were no weapons, save for the exception of the executioner’s axe in A Night in Terror Tower.

Jacobus told Aiga in April 2022 that he only ever had to make one significant change to a painting at the publisher’s request: On the cover of Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes, Jacobus featured one of the title characters picking its nose.

The illustrator added, “At the last minute, somebody said, ‘I don’t want to hear any blowback from teachers or moms or parents. Let’s just change it.’ “

The MVP of the Goosebumps series is Stine’s editor — and wife! — Jane

Stine’s wife, Jane Waldhorn — who’s been a collaborator since early in his professional life — was also crucial to his process.

“I’d been in New York for two years when I met her, at a party in Brooklyn that I didn’t want to go to,” he recalled to the Village Voice. “It was raining and I thought, ‘How am I gonna get back from Brooklyn?’ When we got married, I was 25 and Jane was 22 years old. I don’t know what the hell she was doing.”

He continued, “We were both at Scholastic for many years. She was actually my boss for four years there. That was not great. I got lousy raises. She’d be embarrassed to give me a really good raise since we were married. So I got very bad raises.”

Jane approved the chapter-by-chapter outlines that Stine drafted for each book.

“She’s a very tough editor,” he added. “She’s really smart and she’s just too good, too good an editor. You don’t want an editor that good. I don’t get away with anything. I always say she’s like a hockey goalie. Nothing gets past her.”

He still remembered getting one outline back from her with some notes.

“Up at the top were two words. It said, ‘Psychotic ramblings.’ That was it. Psychotic ramblings,” Stine said.

Stine’s young son set up a lucrative side business, thanks to the success of Goosebumps

Just as Stine kept busy distributing his self-penned joke books at school as a kid, his young son Matthew also had a side hustle going with his classmates. Amusingly, it was based on his father’s bestsellers.

“I think my son used to sell parts in Goosebumps for $10,” Stine told the AV Club. “He would come home and say, ‘Dad, you have to put James in the next one,’ or, ‘Dad, you have to put Will in.’ And of course I always did it.”

Stine made sure to answer every fan letter personally

When Stine wasn’t busy writing Goosebumps or Fear Street books, he was preoccupied with responding to letters from his young fans.

“It’s time-consuming and hard to write a letter,” he told The Verge. “That’s hard for kids, so they deserve an answer. Every kid gets an answer.”

According to the Chicago Tribune, his favorite was one kid who wrote him a simple letter that read: “Dear R.L. Stine, I’ve read 40 of your books and I think they’re really boring.”

Tim Burton almost produced a Goosebumps movie

A Goosebumps TV series premiered on Fox in 1995 and lasted for three years, though a proposed big-screen project around that same time never materialized.

“We had a movie deal to do a Goosebumps movie … like at the height of Goosebumps, back in ’94, ’95, around there,” Stine told CinemaBlend in December 2018. “We actually had a deal with Fox to do a movie, and Tim Burton was going to be the producer. We had a big meeting, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’ll be great. Tim Burton and Goosebumps. It’ll be great.’ We had a nice meeting with him, and we had a great time, and we talked about what we should do, and then nothing happened.”

Stine added that Burton “got involved in some Superman project that also never happened” — likely Superman Lives, a feature reboot for the Man of Steel that Nicolas Cage was tapped to star in as the titular caped hero. However, it only got as far as screen tests with Cage in costume before dying on the vine.

Stine had a funny cameo in the 2015 Goosebumps movie adaptation

Goosebumps finally came to the big screen in 2015, with Jack Black playing a fictionalized version of Stine. In an amusing twist, the real-life Stine was asked to make a cameo, saying a quick “hi” to his movie self. (Appropriately, his character is named “Mr. Black.”) Unfortunately, the scene proved unexpectedly grueling for the author.

“On the first movie, I have a five-second cameo where Jack Black goes by and I say, ‘Hello, Mr. Stine,’ ” he told The Hollywood Reporter in December 2018. “They shot my one line 25 times. It wasn’t my fault; it was other things that went on, but 25 times! I [jokingly] told Jack, ‘I can’t work like this.’ ”

Stine met fellow literary horror author Stephen King — and King had some playful criticism

Given their status as two of the most renowned (and successful) horror authors in the history of the genre, it surprisingly took a long time for Stine to cross paths with Stephen King. (“He never leaves Maine,” Stine jokingly told the Guardian in July 2021 by way of explanation.)

The pair finally met face-to-face at the Edgar Awards in April 2015.

“We had a nice talk,” Stine continued. “I said to him: ‘Steve, do you know that a magazine once called me a literary training bra for you?’ And he said: ‘Yes, I know.’ ”

The meeting was friendly enough, but King apparently had some constructive (and probably playful) notes for Stine.

“He [jokingly] accused me of using every amusement park theme any writer could ever use,” Stine later told Entertainment Weekly in September 2015 of their first encounter. “He accused me of using them all up, and he’s probably right. [Laughs] I know I’ve done every Halloween story you could possibly do.”

Even Stine isn’t a fan of all his books 

Stine probably appreciated King’s candor, as even he doesn’t love every entry in the Goosebumps series.

“They can’t all be great. There’s an early one called Go Eat Worms! — it’s a terrible book,” he told PEOPLE in May 2025.

Stine said he wrote all the books with just one finger

Stine revealed that he never learned how to type properly, telling Strand Magazine, “I’m totally left-handed, and I just started typing with my pointer finger, nothing else, just one finger, not even two.”

He added, “And I’ve now written 300 books on this finger … My typing finger is totally bent, totally curved, from all these books.”

Stine has repeated the anecdote many times over the years, including at a November 2013 live event at The Bell House in Brooklyn, N.Y.

“Look,” he said, displaying the disfigured digit proudly, per NPR, “It’s ruined. Totally bent.”

Stine said he was a “very fearful kid” growing up 

There’s a very high likelihood that Stine would not have read his own books as a young boy.

“I was scared of everything!” he told The Hollywood Reporter in July 2022. “Seriously, I was a very fearful kid. I think this is one reason why, early on, I stayed in my room typing out stories. I was very shy and very fearful.”

Stine continued, “I’d be riding my bike at night, and when I was bringing it back, I always thought someone was lurking in the garage. I always knew something was in there, so I’d toss my bike in and run into the house! It was not a good way to be a kid, being fearful. But it helped me later on. I can remember that feeling of panic and use it.”

Constantly writing scary books may have helped him conquer his fear, as Stine shared that he doesn’t get scared anymore.

“I watched this horror movie, It Follows. It just made me laugh; they [movies] all do,” Stine told Mental Floss in October 2015, adding, “I think horror is funny. That’s the combination kids like: Books that are funny and scary at the same time, but not too scary.”