Scooby-Doo and the Haunted Doghouse

Scooby-Doo and the Haunted Doghouse by Jean Lewis, illustrated by Richard Lowe, 1975, 1983.

Scooby-Doo’s friends are building a new doghouse for him! They can’t decide what color to paint it, so they make half of it red and half of it blue. Scooby loves his new doghouse, at first, but then, something spooky happens!

One night, Scooby comes running into the house, scared. While Scooby cringes under the covers of Shaggy’s bed, Shaggy gets a flashlight and goes outside to see what scared Scooby.

When Shaggy looks in the doghouse, he sees a glowing pair of eyes, and then, something white runs past him with a shriek! Scooby and Shaggy both stay inside for the rest of the night, and in the morning, they tell their friends that they think the doghouse is haunted.

Their friends are sure that there must be some other explanation for what happened, but who or what was in Scooby’s doghouse?

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

Scooby-Doo was my favorite cartoon when I was a kid, especially Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, and I’m still nostalgic about it! The mystery in the story is very simple, but suitable for young children with nothing truly scary about it. Even kids might guess what the solution is before the characters realize what’s in the doghouse.

Now that I think about it, it seems out of character for Scooby-Doo to have a doghouse because I don’t think he had one in the original cartoon series. I remember that he had a fancy one in one of the later spin-off series, but in the original series, he just always slept inside with his human friends. Of course, one of the hallmarks of the Scooby-Doo series is that there isn’t really a strict canon. Details about the characters and the Mystery Machine can change from episode to episode to suit the story without any real explanation because it’s a just-for-fun series.

One of the things that I liked about this book was that it reminded me of all the other books I read as a kid that were based on popular cartoon characters. I think most of the cartoon series from my childhood in the 1980s and 1990s also had related books. On the back of this book, there are pictures of other books in this series, based on other Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, including other Scooby-Doo picture book mysteries.