Spooky season does not need a costume or a plan. A browser and a dark room will do. We went through the directory and the arcade and pulled out everything with a ghost, a skeleton or a hallway that goes on a bit too long.
The list starts silly and gets creepier the further you scroll, so stop wherever you like. Everything here is free and runs in your browser.
Start with something silly
Spooky Bones is a floppy skeleton that follows your mouse around. Its feet stay planted and the rest of it wobbles. There is nothing to win. It is just very funny to watch.
Pumpkin Patch has a million pumpkins under one Halloween moon. Claim one, carve a face into it and leave it glowing for the next stranger who wanders past. It is the only pumpkin you will carve this year without getting seeds on the floor.
If you would rather dress someone up, Dress Code: Human gives you a skeleton, a party that starts in two minutes and a dress code that says human. Frankenstyle! has you dig up outfits for a monster, and Pumpkin Café puts you behind the counter on Halloween night, making coffee for vampires, mummies and ghosts.
Halloween games in the bored arcade
A few games in our own arcade fit the season. Haunted house inspector gives you one reportedly haunted house a day. Read the clues and decide what is going on: a real ghost, the plumbing, cursed wallpaper or just a bad landlord. Everyone gets the same house, so you can argue about the wallpaper afterwards.
Daily dungeon door is another daily one. Read the odds on each door, then go deeper or walk out with what you have. Potion label panic puts you at an apothecary counter, labelling cursed potions before the customers riot.
For something louder, Crypt rush is a retro first-person shooter through five crypts full of skeletons. Find the keys, open the locked doors and save the rocket launcher for the brutes.
More spooky browser games
Moida Mansion is a tiny haunted house game made to look like an old 80s handheld with three buttons. Search the rooms, rescue your club and stay away from the moida. It is by the maker of Papers, Please, and it is just as hard to put down.
In The Summoning you are the necromancer for once: raise skeletons and hold your lawn against waves of humans. YORG.io is a base builder where you set up mines and turrets by day and survive the zombies at night. Brains Will Roll is the gentle one: clear the blocks so a zombie brain rolls where it needs to go.
Ghost stories for after dark
Some nights you just want to read something that makes you check the hallway. Castle of Spirits has been collecting reader ghost stories since 1997, and Your Ghost Stories has thousands of first-person hauntings from ordinary people. Most of them are small and believable, which is exactly why they work.
Nightscribe is a library of indie creepypasta with a shuffle button, and many of the stories are narrated. If you would rather listen with the lights off, The NoSleep Podcast has years of horror stories with full-cast narration.
For the classics, PoeStories has all of Poe's tales, from The Tell-Tale Heart to The Black Cat, and The H.P. Lovecraft Archive has every story Lovecraft wrote, free to read. And if you have never read Emily Carroll's comics, start with His Face All Red. They use the scroll itself to make you flinch.
Places that feel wrong
Not everything creepy needs a monster. Online Backrooms lets you wander the yellow hallways yourself: humming lights, damp carpet and no exit. The Backrooms Wiki has the lore if you want to know where you just were, and Liminal Spaces Explorer shows you one empty mall or drained pool after another.
Ever Dream This Man? is about a face that thousands of strangers say they have seen in their dreams. Read the dossier, then try not to think about it at bedtime. Mystery Flesh Pit National Park is a fake tourist site for a park built inside a giant living creature, complete with brochures, maps and incident reports. It is brilliant and a little queasy.
And SCP Terminal lets you mash your keyboard and type out containment logs from a secret paranormal archive. You will look very busy.
A horror movie to end the night
The Internet Archive feature films collection has thousands of public domain movies, including plenty of old drive-in horror. Pick something in black and white, turn off the lights and press play. No account and no ads.
Bored.com is dressed up too
Every year from October 15 to November 2, our sleepy logo turns into a yawning pumpkin and a sleepy spider hangs from the top of the page. Poke it and see what happens. Do not worry, it comes back.
Want more? The horror vault has every creepy corner we have found so far, and liminal space collects the empty hallways. Know a spooky site we missed? Tell us. We will check it out, with the lights on.