There was an old woman all skin and bone...

This is one of the older songs that go around:

There was an old woman all skin and bone
oooooo
She lived down by the old graveyard
ooooooo

(repeat ooh after every line)

One night she thought she'd take a walk
she walked down by the old graveyard
she saw the bones all layin' around
she went to the closet to get a broom
she opened the door and BOO!

This particular version is the one recorded by Raffi - it used to scare the living daylights out of a friend of mine (who taught me about half of the songs and chants on this site). I always thought (when I was old enough to be a smart aleck) that this must have been one poorly maintained graveyard, but the song goes WAY back to at least the early 1800s, when I guess seeing actual bones in the graveyard wasn't terribly uncommon, especially in low-income areas. In Bleak House a character catches a dread disease just by standing too close to one of them.

This version was collected by Iona Opie in the 50s in England, but she noted that published versions go back to something like 1810:
There was a woman all skin and bone
who lived in a cottage all her own
ooooooooooo

She thought she'd go to church one day
to hear the parson preach and pray (oooo)

When she got to the wooden stile
she thought she'd sit and rest a while (ooooo)

When she reached the old church door
a ghastly ghost lay on the floor (ooooo)

The grubs crawled in, the grubs crawled out
of its ears, nose, eyes and mouth (oooooo)

Oh you ghastly ghost, she said
will I be like you when I am dead (YES!)

See also: "don't you ever laugh when the hearse goes by." The line about grubs crawling in and out (it's usually worms) goes back to 1796. Note that the ghost in that version i really more of a zombie.

Both these versions are softly-sung songs that end in shouts, very similar to the spoken storyThe Golden Arm and its variants. A nursery rhyme version that was still in circulation in England in the 1950s, and which my generation learned from Alvin Schwartz's Easy Reader In a Dark Dark Room, went:

A woman in a church yard sat
very short and very fat
she saw three corpses carried in
very tall and very thin
the woman to the corpses said
"Will I be like you when I am dead?"
The corpses to the woman said
"you will be like us when you are dead"
THe woman to the corpses said
(scream)

I'm surprised there aren't more parodies of this than there are - we made up silly versisons of it just to keep ourselves from being scared. In fact, it may have been the first parody I ever wrote:

There was an old woman who drank old milk

eeeewwwwwww

She put it in the microwave

eeeeewwwwwww

It got more absurd and disgusting from there, but I don't remember any more. Oh, how I wish I did!.

Also , Opie collected the story "In a Dark Dark Room," verbatim to the one in Schwartz's book, from about 9 different schools:

In a dark dark wood there was a dark dark house
in the dark dark house, there was a dark dark room
in the dark dark room, there was a dark dark cupboard
in the dark dark cupboard, there was a dark dark shelf
on the dark dark shelf, there was a dark dark box
in the dark dark box THERE WAS A GHOST!