The Doctor Who Experience is utterly terrifying. Running through corridors and being surrounded by Daleks is the stuff of childhood nightmares and suddenly it’s real!

As a big wuss with an overactive imagination, I’ve spent a lifetime watching Doctor Who with my eyes closed. At the Doctor Who Experience, there’s nowhere to hide and I thought it was very scary, although everyone else loved it, especially the kids.

The experience has three TARDIS sets, two modern ones which you’re allowed to walk in, and one from the 80s which is just the coolest thing ever. After the adventure with the Doctor, you can see an exhibition of costumes, props and aliens from the show.

I’ve never seen so many Daleks in one place, it was as if someone had opened a Genesis Ark in West London. If you love Doctor Who, you need to see this.

Tickets from £17.05 for adults and £13.55 for children (the experience is aimed at children aged 7-12). Family tickets from £12.55 per person. Find out more at www.doctorwhoexperience.com

The Woman in Black is currently celebrating its 21st year in London’s West End; the rather dingy building and dangerously intimate Fortune Theatre has become its home. The performance combines theatrical illusion and trickery with a disturbing narrative, scaring even the coolest of hearts.

Ghost Stories was written only recently and is more contemporary in every way. The production feels more like an experiment in fear, presenting archetypal myths and using clever technology to make them come alive. As you take your seat, there is no light or programme sellers to welcome you in, instead the dimly lit Duke of Yorks Theatre is haunted with a soundtrack of drips and rumbles and eerie screeches. There is no interval, which builds up tension and you are warned: if you leave the theatre during the performance you will be unable to return.

What both shows have in common is a real talent for inducing terror through all the senses. Employing mostly sound and sight, but also touch and smell as scare tactics.  As for taste, I know I left both theatres with the taste of fear in my mouth.

More spooky shows to see in London:

• Phantom of the Opera: a masked man haunts the Paris Opera House in this well-loved musical
• Wicked: the tale of the Wicked Witch of the West
• Deathtrap: this onstage thriller plots the ideal murder and cuts close to the bone
• Alice Cooper: the grandaddy of shock rock comes to London’s Roundhouse for Halloween
• Terror 2010: Death and Resurrection: four scary short plays

Halloween is only a week away, so book your tickets to London’s scariest shows now!

It was a dark and stormy night. I pulled my shawl tighter for warmth and headed for London’s Black Dog Books, a haunted bookshop, not knowing what horrors I would find at the end of my journey.

Hidden behind Cargo in an old railway arch is the Black Rat Projects gallery where a ghostly pop-up bookshop has appeared. It might look like a spectre, but it’s a real shop where you can buy your Christmas presents from a carefully selected choice of second-hand books and fanzines. The haunted bookshop was inspired by reports of Victorian book dealer FJ Williams who haunts the East End.

There were eerie things happening in the shop. I heard a disembodied girl’s voice, the lights were flickering and a copy of children’s book The Gruffalo leapt off the shelf at me, propelled by some inexplicable force! Even the shop’s pot plant was quivering with fear.

The bookshop is surrounded by contemporary art, including a sculpture with a talking telephone head sitting outside the shop, swearing and cursing. The sculpture is a comment on rich city boys who buy art because they can afford it but don’t really appreciate it.

Artists participating in the exhibition include Swoon, Burning Candy, Giles Walker, Brian Adam Douglas and Lucas Price.

The bookshop and gallery are free to visit and are open Monday to Saturday from 10am to 6pm, until the end of January. www.blackratpress.co.uk