Goosebumps Author R.L. Stine Admits He Was 'Scared of Everything' Growing Up, Plus 19 More Facts About His Spooky Series

With Goosebumps , R.L. Stine gave a generation of kids a love of reading — and nightmares that conceivably lasted for years. The famously prolific author turned haunted masks, demonic dummies and supernatural cameras into terrifying cultural touchstones. Since its debut in 1992, the beloved series has sold more than 400 million books worldwide in 35 languages, securing its place as the second-best-selling literary franchise in history.

The success of Goosebumps has grown far beyond the page, evolving into a media empire that includes two television series, a video game, a run of comics and two feature films. It's an impressive legacy from the mind of one man, but Stine, 81, cherishes the more personal connections afforded to him by his work.

"What's most satisfying to me is the millions of kids who learned to read from Goosebumps and who learned to really enjoy reading," he told Today in 2022. "Now on Twitter and everywhere I hear people saying, 'I wouldn't be a librarian today if it wasn't for your books.' It's so gratifying. [I hear things like] 'I wouldn't be a writer today. I just had my first book published thanks to you' or 'Thanks for getting me through a difficult childhood.' That's the most satisfying thing. You never get tired of hearing that."

In honor of spooky season (let's be real, we get a few more weeks!), read on to learn more about this beloved book series that caused an untold number of nightmares.

And for more behind-the-scenes stories and little-known details about Goosebumps, check out the recent episode of the iHeartRadio podcast Too Much Information , hosted by former PEOPLE editors Jordan Runtagh and Alex Heigl.

Despite his reputation for frightening multiple generations of children, Stine insists 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 the Huffington Post in 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 would distribute these self-penned joke magazines — upwards of 100 of them, he would claim to GQ — around school, until his teachers got wind of it and demanded he stop.

Stine eventually enrolled at Ohio State University in Columbus, where he found an outlet for his comedic aspirations. "At that time, every college had a humor magazine," he told The Verge in 2015 . "Very few of them are left. They all pretty much died out in the '60s and were replaced by underground newspapers. Ohio State had this humor magazine called The Sundial, and I was the editor for three years. That's basically all I did in college ... I never went to class."

As the editor of the magazine, he was entitled to 22 percent of its profits, which he ultimately used to finance his move to New York City upon graduation in 1965. "I thought, at the time, if you wanted to be a writer, you had to live in New York," he added. "You had no choice."

Stine would go on to create the humor magazine Bananas, for which he wrote under the name "Jovial Bob Stine." Some of his titles from around this era include How to Be Funny, Miami Mice and 101 Kid Jokes. (He also wrote novelizations of movies like Ghostbusters II and Big Top Pee-wee under various aliases, as well as James Bond and Indiana Jones novels.) Bananas was published by Scholastic Press for 72 issues between 1975 and 1984. When Stine was eventually let go, he made ends meet by writing jokes for Bazooka Joe comics and bubblegum wrappers, along with coloring books for Rocky and Bullwinkle and Mighty Mouse cartoons.

Before running Bananas, Stine's first job as a writer in the Big Apple was making up interviews for a woman who ran six movie magazines out of a brownstone on 96th St. "I never saw her dressed," he told The Verge. "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. 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 continued to The Verge. "I had to cover bottlers' conventions." For this, he was paid the not-so-princely sum of $140 a week.

In a 2014 AV Club interview , Stine detailed the worst job he ever had: Writing for a dubious men's publication. "I think it was a sex-and-sadism kind of magazine because they would give me all kinds of photographs, and they were always photographs of women all tied up," he recalled. "They were very vile photographs and I would write short stories to go with the photographs ... I was kind of ashamed and I wasn't really proud of what I was writing, so I wouldn't sign my name, I'd sign the name of my high school principal instead."

By the end of the '60s, 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 s and news stories, and eventually running 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."

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 . (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 1995. During his time working for the burgeoning children's television network, Stine also served as the first editor of Nickelodeon Magazine.

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, 1986's Blind Date, hit number one 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.

Following his initial run of one-off teen horror books, he explained to the Huffington Post 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 would quip.) 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. "Then I realized it's because I had one at home."

Fear Street proved to be an enormous success. As of 2010, more than 80 million books from the series have been sold, and that number has grown significantly with the 2021 Netflix trilogy of the same name.

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 2022. "That's the kind of businessman I am."

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 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 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.

But 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 recalled to the Boston Globe. "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. (Number one? 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. "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. 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."

8. Many Goosebumps books have their origins in '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 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 admitted to the Huffington Post. "It Came from Beneath the Sea became a Goosebumps book called It Came from Beneath the Sink. That kind of thing." He's 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.

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.)

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

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." By his estimation 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, "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 Huffington Post . "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 has a number of guiding rules for the book series. For one, he told the Huffington Post 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, and he admits 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 . "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. No kids got injured. No children could be shown being killed. There were no weapons, save for the exception of the executioner's axe in A Night in Terror Tower. Jacobus said 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 had featured one of the title characters picking its nose. "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.' "

12. The MVP of the Goosebumps series is Stine's editor — and wife! — Jane. Also crucial to Stine's process: his wife Jane Waldhorn, who's been a collaborator since early in his professional life. "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."

To The Verge, he explained, "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 approves the chapter-by-chapter outlines that Stine drafts for each book. "She's a very tough editor," he adds. "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 remembers 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."

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."

When Stine wasn't busy writing Goosebumps or Fear Street books, he was busy responding to letters from his young fans. "It's time consuming and hard to write a letter," he explained to The Verge. "That's hard for kids, so they deserve an answer. Every kid gets an answer."

His favorite was one kid who wrote him a letter reading , simply, "Dear, R.L. Stine, I've read 40 of your books and I think they're really boring."

A Goosebumps television series premiered on Fox in 1995 and lasted for three years, but a proposed big-screen project in that same period sadly 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 2018. "We actually had a deal with Fox to do a movie, and Tim Burton who 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 would claim that Burton "got involved in some Superman project that also never happened" — likely Superman Lives, a feature reboot for the Man Of Steel that was going to star Nicolas Cage as the titular hero, which got as far as screen tests with Cage in costume before dying on the vine.

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 recalled to The Hollywood Reporter in 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.' "

17. Stine met fellow literary horror god 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 took a surprisingly long time for Stine to cross paths with Stephen King. ("He never leaves Maine," Stine jokingly told the Guardian 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 continued to EW in 2015 . "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."

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

"There's some bad ones," he admitted to The Hollywood Reporter. "Not all can be great. I looked at Go Eat Worms! recently and I was like, 'That's a horrible book.' It's just not good at all. There was another one that had a great evil dog on the cover called The Barking Ghost. That's a horrible book."

19. Stine wrote all those books with just one finger. (Or so he claims ...) In an interview with The Strand magazine , Stine said he's never learned how to type properly. "I'm totally left-handed, and I just started typing with my pointer finger, nothing else, just one finger, not even two. 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 2013 live event at The Bell House in Brooklyn. "Look," he said, displaying the disfigured digit proudly, "It's ruined. Totally bent."

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 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. 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."