Gooey Gus the Slime Monster, a purple monster with a melted face and a horrifyingly creepy voice. At one point, it appears to talk to the viewers! He is the most remembered example of this on the show, to the point where him and the story featuring him is a commonly repressed memory for many who were traumatized by this as children.
Appropriately enough, the doll was designed by Tom Savini.
The high pitched screaming of the girls sure as hell didn't help either.
Rob and Double-T's daughter Lisa trapped in underground tunnels. And Rob lost his Ghostwriter team pen so he can only convey messages with the stones found in the tunnel.
The arc with the toxic waste. Gabby was the youngest member of the team at the time and seeing her so listless...
Alex gets the code name wrong while infiltrating a team of thieves in the first story arc. This results in a chase inside a warehouse. If any of the team members got caught ...
And before that, Gabby having her backpack stolen after Alex ditches her on their walk to school; it's quite lucky all the thief was interested in was the backpack because if he had wanted to, he could have really hurt her.
The first episode, where the characters don't understand what Ghostwriter is or how he works, attempting to answer him by speaking, the visuals of him writing more and more desperately combined with the music can make him seem quite spooky.
The London arc, when Jamal is nabbed by the crooks. Let me repeat that; he is captured by crooks who are planning on kidnapping a toddler to blackmail his mother while in a foreign country. It's a shiver-worthy sequence of events.
The kidnapping plot. The toddler of the mother (a well-known author) gets kidnapped at one of her book readings in Brooklyn by a mook whose leaders are operating from a foreign country (UK) across the Atlantic. And the mook is only stopped at the last minute on his way out; who knows what they would've done with the child?
A trilogy of books featuring the team at a summer camp got pretty dark pretty fast with the first book featuring art projects made by the kids being massacred, the second book having various sabotages occur on a bike trip (including someone having their brakes cut and only being able to stop by crashing) and the third book opening with Hector having gone missing during a game of capture the flag and being Alone with the Psycho, who constantly demands to know where "it" is, with Hector being obviously terrified throughout the whole ordeal.
One of the books features a scam involving fake bills being forced on the elderly in Hector's neighborhood and the crook of the mystery kidnapping Hector and abandoning him in a warehouse. Yes; Ghostwriter got a message to the rest of the team and the new girl based on a contest winner found and untied him but if they hadn't...
The book "Blackout!" is pretty freaky; some bank robbers inflict a Big Blackout on the city and not only is the team split up but Gabby and Tina end up in a hostage situation halfway across the city from anyone else.
Word of God eventually revealed Ghostwriter's ultimate identity in 2010 — he was an escaped slave (possibly even Jamal's ancestor Ezra) who had taught himself to read and was teaching other slaves to read, up until slave catchers learned of what he was doing, and they and their dogs killed him. Somehow, his ghost ended up inside a book for 125 years until Jamal freed him in the pilot.note And again for a number of years after he time traveled to 1933
And what are some of the first words he writes? Asking if "the children" are all right; said children were likely killed by the dogs as well.
When the show was running on PBS, it was sponsored by Sega, who bookended the show with some freaky ad bumpers.
