spookyadj.

1854 Wide West (San Francisco) 16 July 1/5 After threading many dark passages, the guide, having unlocked all sorts of ‘spooky’ looking iron doors,..ushered us before the tomb.

1883 Harper's Mag. Nov. 929/1 'Tis a spooky place, that grave-yard.

1906 E. Dyson Fact'ry 'Ands xviii. 239 There was somethin' spooky 'n' soopernatural erbout er pertickler weird 'n' unaccountable erfluvium.

1929 T. Wolfe Look homeward, Angel xxvii. 378 Don't start that..spooky stuff! It makes my flesh crawl.

1948 Time 1 Nov. 90/2 Shakespeare's Macbeth is a turbulent melodrama, full of spooky claptrap.

1960 R. Dahl Kiss, Kiss 187 This..is really beginning to get interesting—a trifle spooky, too.

1977 J. F. Fixx Compl. Bk. Running viii. 104 I had the spooky feeling that I was dressed up in somebody else's body.

1980 G. Mitchell Whispering Knights ix. 98 ‘It's a spooky-looking place,’ said Capella nervously.

1966 Surfer 7 iv. 48 Morne Plage features a left breaking over a coral reef and tapering into a big black deep spooky pass a half a mile from the coast.

1970 Stud. in Eng. (Univ. Cape Town) 1 34 Waves, especially the bigger and more powerful ones, are often dangerous and frightening, and can sometimes be referred to as spooky... Spooky might indicate the difficult or the unpredictable, as in: ‘Things get a little spooky when you're faced with fifteen feet of soup.’