There’s nothing quite like being a child and telling ghost stories or in former Red Level principal Johny Odom’s case – listening to his grandmother tell the stories.

Odom this week released hair-raising stories from his childhood in a “horror-filled book, ‘Chilling Tales: Beneath the Chinaberry Tree.’

“I had the neatest old grandmother in the world,” he said. “When we would go spend the weekend, Granny would sit around and tell us all sorts of folklore and mysterious tales.”

Odom and his cousins spent many summers with his grandmother, he said.

A vivid part of his childhood, Odom said he wanted to write down his grandmother’s tales so they could be passed along.

“There are some neat little stories in there,” he said. “It’s pretty cool.”

He said the book is 116 pages long.

“I’ve been piecing it together for years,” he said. “But I didn’t really have the time I needed to put it together. So, I decided when I retired I would finish it, and I did. I sent it off to a publisher and they liked it.”

Chilling Tales is being published by Tate Publishing and Enterprises.

It is for sale through tatepublishing.com, barnesandnoble.com and amazon.com.