essay ghost story

• PRO Courses Guides New Tech Help Pro Expert Videos About wikiHow Pro Upgrade Sign In
• EDIT Edit this Article
• EXPLORE Tech Help Pro About Us Random Article Quizzes Request a New Article Community Dashboard This Or That Game Popular Categories Arts and Entertainment Artwork Books Movies Computers and Electronics Computers Phone Skills Technology Hacks Health Men's Health Mental Health Women's Health Relationships Dating Love Relationship Issues Hobbies and Crafts Crafts Drawing Games Education & Communication Communication Skills Personal Development Studying Personal Care and Style Fashion Hair Care Personal Hygiene Youth Personal Care School Stuff Dating All Categories Arts and Entertainment Finance and Business Home and Garden Relationship Quizzes Cars & Other Vehicles Food and Entertaining Personal Care and Style Sports and Fitness Computers and Electronics Health Pets and Animals Travel Education & Communication Hobbies and Crafts Philosophy and Religion Work World Family Life Holidays and Traditions Relationships Youth
• Browse Articles
• Learn Something New
• Quizzes Hot
• This Or That Game
• Train Your Brain
• Explore More
• Support wikiHow
• About wikiHow
• Log in / Sign up
• Education and Communications
• Writing Genres

How to Write a Ghost Story

Last Updated: June 2, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Grant Faulkner, MA . Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story, a literary magazine. Grant has published two books on writing and has been published in The New York Times and Writer’s Digest. He co-hosts Write-minded, a weekly podcast on writing and publishing, and has a M.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.  This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 223,023 times.

Many people enjoy a good ghost story and writing your own can be just as enjoyable. Ghost stories generally follow the patterns of other fictional work, focusing on a character and their encounters with a challenging force or event. However, ghost stories have a close focus on evoking feelings of terror and dread, building them up into a horrifying climax. Learning some of the ideas and techniques behind good ghost stories can help you create your own terrifying tales.

Developing Your Plot

• Think about which situations meeting a ghost would be most terrifying.
• Imagine the details of the ghost and how it haunts you, noting what scares you the most.
• Try watching your favorite horror films or reading other ghost stories to get inspired.

• What locations do you find disturbing or discomforting?
• Your setting should have a feeling of isolation, cutting the main characters off from help.

• Stasis. This is the introduction to your story and it demonstrates the normal life of your characters.
• Trigger. This event is something that pushes your character out of their normal life.
• Quest. This is where your character is given a goal or something they must do.
• Surprise. This will take up the middle section of your story and will be the events along the way towards your heroes goal.
• Critical choice. Your protagonist will need to make a hard choice that demonstrates their character.
• Climax. This is the moment your story was building up to and the most dramatic moment of the story.
• Reversal. This should be the consequence to your character's critical choice or the main challenge.
• Resolution. This point is where your characters return to everyday life but are changed from the ordeal.

• Write your outline in a chronological ordering of events.
• Don't leave any gaps in the narrative for your outline.
• Try to think about each scene and examine how they work together.
• If writing an entire ghost story seems overwhelming at first, try writing a 100-word ghost story to warm up. You get 100 words to write something truly creepy and unsettling. It takes less time, and you won't have to worry as much about outlining and pacing.

• Don't rush to reveal the confrontation or climax of your ghost story.
• Building the tension of the story slowly can make the climax even more intense.

Developing Your Characters

• Try to think of why your character is in the situation they are.
• Imagine how your character would react to the events in your story.
• Try to get a clear mental picture of what your character looks like.

• Your ghost will need a reason or motive for existing and doing what they do.
• Ghosts come in different forms, being more or less physical or having different powers.

• Foils usually have different personalities than the main characters in order to highlight the individual characteristics.
• Your supporting characters should also have their own unique qualities and personalities.
• Ask yourself what relationships these characters might have with the main characters of your ghost story.

Writing Your Ghost Story

• ”The ghost appeared and I was frightened” is an example of telling the reader what's happening.
• ”The ghost appeared and my stomach tightened up in knots. I could feel my face break out in a sweat and my heart trying to leap out from my chest.” is an example of showing the reader what's happening.

• For example, “The ghost was ten feet tall and exactly as wide as the door that it came through.” is probably too direct.
• Try saying something like “The ghost was enormous, making the room suddenly feel claustrophobic and tight.”

Create stories that will light up the reader's imagination. "Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s."

• Consider ending your story in a single sentence.
• Offering too much explanation at the end of your ghost story can lessen the impact of your ending.

Community Q&A

• Think about what scares you the most and let those fears inspire your ghost story. Thanks Helpful 3 Not Helpful 0
• Have a clear understanding of what and who your characters are. Thanks Helpful 3 Not Helpful 0
• Setting is an important part of your ghost story that can either enhance or detract from the feelings of terror you are trying to evoke. Thanks Helpful 4 Not Helpful 1

Tips from our Readers

• You don't have to write about a human ghost. Try writing about a ghost animal or some other supernatural being.

Things You'll Need

• Pen or pencil

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://www.writersdigest.com/there-are-no-rules/the-horror-genre-on-writing-horror-and-avoiding-cliches
• ↑ https://www.writers-online.co.uk/how-to-write/how-to-write-a-ghost-story/
• ↑ https://www.dailywritingtips.com/how-to-structure-a-story-the-eight-point-arc/
• ↑ https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/7-steps-to-creating-a-flexible-outline-for-any-story
• ↑ https://atomlearning.com/blog/6-ways-to-build-suspense-and-tension-in-writing
• ↑ https://mythcreants.com/blog/three-ways-you-can-use-description-to-mess-with-your-readers/

About This Article

To write a ghost story, start by thinking about what you find scary about ghosts. Additionally, since atmosphere plays a large part in ghost stories, imagine the creepiest location you can think of for the setting. Next, work on your story’s arc, which includes the introduction, the climactic moment, and the resolution. As you draft your story, think about what you want to show your reader and what you want to leave up to their imagination, since readers will automatically fill in details with their own mind. To learn how to finish your ghost story, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

• Send fan mail to authors

Reader Success Stories

Wendy Marvell

Sep 17, 2017

Did this article help you?

Athulya Mohanan

Nov 21, 2017

Travoy Nodracx Nation

Jul 5, 2017

Alisha Winget

Aug 6, 2018

Vishal Garg

Dec 6, 2017

Featured Articles

Trending Articles

Watch Articles

• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy
• Do Not Sell or Share My Info
• Not Selling Info

wikiHow Tech Help Pro:

Develop the tech skills you need for work and life

25+ Ghost Story Prompts

Need a scary ghost story to tell over the campfire? Today we bring over 25 ghost story prompts to inspire you to write your own paranormal short story or novel.

A ghost story is a type of horror story that emphasises the theme of the supernatural, apparitions, and otherworldly ghost-like creatures. Generally revolving around death, hauntings or the afterlife. This genre often has an uncanny air about it, producing feelings of fear, dread, and the unfamiliar. A ghost story is one of the oldest forms of literature and can be found in all cultures.

If you’re looking for some new ideas for your next ghost story, these 25+ paranormal story prompts are perfect for writers of all levels. You might also find this ghost name generator useful.

The spookiest time of year is here, and that means it’s time for ghost stories! Whether you’re writing a ghost story for Halloween , a seasonal short story , or even a standalone novel, these ghost story prompts are a great place to start:

• A young woman moves into an old house and finds herself in a terrifying situation with her new roommate, a ghost. The only way to escape is to get out of the house alive.
• A man is haunted by his past and must face the demons that come back to haunt him.
• A group of college students decide to spend their summer vacation in a cabin in the woods. But what starts as a fun vacation turns deadly when they realize that the woods aren’t quite as safe as they thought.
• Use this story starter for a ghost story: The first time I saw it, I was only six. It was night and I was playing in my granddad’s garden when I heard this weird sound coming from the forest. I followed the sound and found myself in the middle of a circle of tall trees. It was so dark that I could barely see my hands in front of me. Suddenly, something grabbed my leg.
• A woman is haunted by the ghosts of her ancestors, but she must learn to accept her fate and embrace the spirits before they are all gone forever.
• An orphaned boy is taken in by a family of ghosts after his parents die in a fire. They teach him how to use his supernatural abilities to help people in need. But soon the boy starts using these powers for evil.
• A group of teenagers visit their favourite haunted house during the Halloween season, but they never make it home again.
• A couple gets married on Halloween night and discovers that their marriage is cursed. They must solve the mystery of the ghost bride to break the curse.
• A boy finds a box of his grandfather’s old slides in the attic, and when he goes back to school, he starts seeing his grandfather’s ghost everywhere.
• A man hears strange sounds coming from his attic, and he’s determined to find out what they are. He sneaks up to the attic to investigate, but when he does, he stumbles upon something much more frightening than he could have imagined.
• An abandoned mansion on a lonely island is rumoured to be haunted by the ghost of a pirate who was hung for his crimes. A group of friends decide to spend the night in the mansion, and they quickly learn that there’s more than one kind of ghost in the house.
• A family moves back into their old family home where their son died years ago. The father becomes obsessed with finding out who killed his son. He believes he knows who the murderer is but no one will believe him.
• A man is tormented by a ghostly hitchhiker. He is forced to take them on a road trip until they reach their final destination…a mysterious abandoned town.
• A family moves into an old Victorian home, where the previous owner mysteriously disappeared after getting locked in one of the rooms. Now the family is trapped inside by a malevolent entity.
• A man is on his way home from work when he is attacked by a group of ghosts. He manages to escape, but now he has a few more problems than he started with.
• Use this story starter for a ghost story: I woke up in the middle of the night, and I felt a cold hand touching my face. I tried to scream, but my voice wouldn’t come out. Then, I felt a sharp pain in my neck.
• My father told me about his experience while we were driving home. He said he saw a dead girl walking towards him just after I was born, but when he got closer, she disappeared. He thought if was imagining things at the time.
• My father used to scare me at night. One time he came into my bedroom and woke me up, telling me to come downstairs. He took me to the living room, and there he told me that a ghost had put a curse on me.
• It was the most beautiful cemetery ever. People would come from far away just to walk through the grounds. There was a rumour about a ghost that roamed the graveyard at night.
• A teenage girl is forced to spend her summer with her grandmother who believes she can communicate with ghosts.
• A young woman moves into an apartment next door to an old house where she hears a woman screaming and sees a little girl standing in the window.
• A woman hears a baby crying in her house, but she can’t find it. She keeps hearing it crying in another room, so she goes to check on it. When she opens the door, there is no baby there. But then, the door slams shut and locks itself.
• A girl is staying at her grandmother’s house with her family for the night. She is sleeping in her grandmother’s bed, but she can’t get comfortable. Every time she falls asleep, she wakes up to see her dead grandmother sitting on the edge of her bed.
• A woman is walking down a deserted road when she sees a figure standing in front of her. It turns out to be an old man in a top hat, holding a cane. He says to her, “Hello, young lady. My name is John Marley. I am a spirit from the other side.”
• One night, a mother wakes up to hear her son crying in their room. When she goes into his room, he is not there. She looks everywhere for him and calls out his name. The only answer she gets is a terrible scream that echoes throughout the house.
• In a small village, there lived a woman who was very lonely. Her husband had passed away and she was left all alone with her two sons. The boys were grown and had families of their own. The woman was so lonely that she began talking to herself. “I’m all alone,” she said to no one in particular. “I’m all alone.” And then she hears a voice.
• There was once a man who lived by the beach. He loved the sound of the waves crashing against the shore. One day, he decided to go for a walk on the beach and ended up drowning. When he died, he came back as a ghost. Every night, he would come back to the place where he drowned, and stand there.
• There was once a little girl who loved to play hide and seek. One day, while playing, she got separated from her family. She found a tree stump and went behind it, but when she peeked around the edge, she saw that no one was there. The stump began to move, and suddenly the girl felt herself being lifted off the ground and into the air. As she looked at the tree stump, she noticed that it had eyes. The eyes were staring right at her. Then, before she could scream, the tree stump opened its mouth.

For more spooky ideas, check out this list of over 110 horror story ideas .

How do you write a ghost story?

The basic structure of a ghost story includes an opening sequence that presents the reader with a situation that seems normal but is actually supernatural in nature. The protagonist then encounters the ghost and experiences events that are often strange and frightening, leading up to a climax where the ghost is defeated or disappears. Writing a ghost story is the same as writing a horror story . Before you start writing you need a good ghost story plot idea, like the list above. Both ghost stories and horror stories have a set of characters, a spooky setting, an opening, a middle part and a dramatic ending. 

What is the shortest ghost story?

The shortest ghost story is just two sentences long. It was written by Frederic Brown in 1948. The story reads: “The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door …” Just by reading these two sentences, we can imagine a scary situation. There are two key themes used here, the fear of loneliness and the surprise element at the end. Both these are important themes in ghost stories.

What makes a ghost story scary?

Ghost stories are typically scary as they focus on death and going into the unknown. But the key to a scary ghost story is fear. It is important to make the reader feel uneasy or frightened. Here are some key elements of a good ghost story:

• An encounter with a ghost or spirit
• A supernatural force that can be both good and evil
• Sense of dread
• The feeling of being watched or followed
• Feeling helpless
• Being lonely or lost

Just like all stories, a ghost story must include these basic elements of a story : Characters, Setting, Plot, Conflict and Resolution.

How do you finish a ghost story?

Most ghost stories end with the haunting being explained away as something natural. This explanation can be a spiritual one (the ghost was a real person who died), or it can be a psychological one (the ghost was a product of the protagonist’s mind). The ghost story can also end with no explanation at all. Some ghost stories don’t even bother to give an explanation for the haunting, but let the reader figure it out themselves.

Did you find this list of over 25 ghost story prompts useful? Let us know in the comments below! 

Marty the wizard is the master of Imagine Forest. When he's not reading a ton of books or writing some of his own tales, he loves to be surrounded by the magical creatures that live in Imagine Forest. While living in his tree house he has devoted his time to helping children around the world with their writing skills and creativity.

Related Posts

Comments loading...

• Craft and Criticism
• Fiction and Poetry
• News and Culture
• Lit Hub Radio
• Reading Lists

• Literary Criticism
• Craft and Advice
• In Conversation
• On Translation
• Short Story
• From the Novel
• Bookstores and Libraries
• Film and TV
• Art and Photography
• Freeman’s
• The Virtual Book Channel
• Behind the Mic
• Beyond the Page
• The Cosmic Library
• The Critic and Her Publics
• Emergence Magazine
• Fiction/Non/Fiction
• First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
• The History of Literature
• I’m a Writer But
• Lit Century
• Tor Presents: Voyage Into Genre
• Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast
• Write-minded
• The Best of the Decade
• Best Reviewed Books
• BookMarks Daily Giveaway
• The Daily Thrill
• CrimeReads Daily Giveaway

What Makes a Ghost Story Effective?

Good ghost stories rest solidly within the purview of real life.

In the summer of my 36th year I made a daring change in my life and moved to a farming community in the Hudson Valley. I rented a 200-year-old Dutch stone house, all but empty except for the necessities. During the week days I was by myself and at night, I started to have a strange sort of dream experience. When I was on the edge of sleep, I found I could rise from the bed and float down the stairs and through the house, encountering figures who also lived there.

I never knew if they were going to be friendly or unfriendly. Sometimes one would slowly turn around and appear to notice me, but usually not. It became clear that these night figures did not exist on my terms. During some of my float-downs, the house and its environs were in a more primitive state. Once I came upon men working to build something, and one of them gave me a threatening scowl.

The other thing that happened during that time was that a friend had a late miscarriage for the seventh time. While she was in the hospital, a nurse mistakenly laid a new baby in her arms and said, “Here is your little boy.” Soon after, I wrote the story “Dream Children,” which combined my friend’s horrific experience with the story of a woman’s deep country life interrupted on weekends by the arrival of her husband with houseguests and city gossip. The woman clings fast to the weekday visits of a phantom boy who seems to be the same age as the one thrust into her arms that one time. She buttresses the validity of these night visits by reading about people like herself who can commute between worlds. From scholars, mystics, theologians, and novelists, she comes to accept that dream and reality aren’t competitors but reciprocal sources of consciousness.

Her discovery marked the beginning of my search for the kind of ghost story I myself could accept. Throughout my fiction, characters meet their ghosts, confronting them on the stairs, conversing with them while driving alone, discovering late in life that a powerful person’s spirit inhabits them. But not until Flora (2013) does a ghost keep audible company with her granddaughter throughout the entire novel. The late grandmother’s imperious comments and advice continue to guide ten-year-old Helen, influencing the child’s choices and actions.

In my new novel, Grief Cottage , 11-year-old Marcus never hears the ghost-boy, but sees him twice. Marcus sets out to court the lost soul trapped inside the ruined cottage, though he is not sure whether the ghost-boy is friendly or follows some sinister agenda of its own.

What are the hallmarks of a successful ghost story? The masterful ones are almost always founded in psychology. The ghost’s arrival usually coincides with a mental crisis in the protagonist’s life and the ghost usually affects a change in the person who has experienced the supernatural.

In Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner,” an American returns to New York after 33 years and wonders if he has made a mistake in living abroad so long. He’s determined to meet the man he would have become if he had stayed at home. When he at last corners the specter of what he might have become, the sight is so hideous that he faints. When he is found at daybreak by Alice Staverton, the devoted friend from his youth, it finally dawns on him what this woman means to him. Of the glaring, disfigured ghost Brydon tells her, “He has a million a year. But he doesn’t have you.”

In A.M. Burrage’s lesser-known masterpiece, “Playmates,” communing with ghosts also changes the character for the better. A misanthropic bachelor who treasures his solitude takes on the care of a joyless young girl who begins to play with “imaginary friends” when they move to an old country house. While the ghost-children are a comfort to the girl in her time of loneliness, the local Vicar believes the girl would develop a gift that might eventually harm her if she continued to see and converse with “wretched souls.” The bachelor makes arrangements to send the girl off to school, but when she leaves, he begins to feel shy little presences in the empty house. “Don’t be afraid,” he whispers to the ghosts, “I’m only a very lonely man. Be near me after Monica is gone.”

But in James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” an insecure young governess, is undone by her experience, causing the death of one of her charges by her hysterical insistence on the presence of the ghosts. In Chekhov’s “The Black Monk” too, an exhausted young scholar, (“Andrey Korvin, MA”) is bewitched by a monk in black robes who floats across the landscape to soft-talk him into what he must do next. The murmurings of the black monk destroys the happiness of the loving family Kovrin has married into, and finally destroys Korvin. (“The monk floated past and stopped in the middle of the room. ‘Why didn’t you trust me?’ he asked reproachfully, looking affectionately at Kovrin. ‘if you had trusted me when I told you that you were a genius, you wouldn’t have spent these two years so miserably, so unprofitably.’”

A really effective ghost story rests solidly within the purview of the stuff of real life, the grounding details of everyday routines. Henry James, who liked to speak of “the terrors of the cheerful country home,” said that a good ghost story must be “connected at a hundred points with the common objects of life.” In the stories cited above there are houses and furniture and routines and a specific milieu.

Connoisseurs of ghost stories maintain that the supremely satisfying ones leave a window open for the possibility of an as-yet unknown reality. Walking home after his meeting with the Vicar in “Playmates,” the bachelor realizes he looks no longer into the face of a blank and featureless wall but through a curtain beyond which there lie further manifestations of life. (“His footfalls on the ground beat out the words: ‘There is no death. There is no death.’”)

Since my “float-downs” four decades ago in the 200 year old house, I have never again seen people in another dimension. Like my character in “Dream Children,” I read the books she read in order to understand what was happening to her, and I came to the same conclusion: “dream and reality aren’t competitors but reciprocal sources of consciousness,” and, “I understood that when the mystics tell us that the mind is a place, they don’t mean it as a metaphor.”

So, do I believe in ghosts? I believe in the experience Brydon had in “The Jolly Corner,” and I believe Monica learned to play from the little girls who answered her need, and I believe the governess saw the ghosts of the former servants. And I believe I did see those people, in all their particulars, going about their business in the history of that old house. In an unusually receptive state of consciousness, brought on by deep country silence and the shock of my daring break from a safer life, I was somehow able to journey from my bed and float around the outskirts of their world.

While I was writing  Grief Cottage , I studied the James stories closely to see what language he chose to describe the actual confrontations with the ghosts. I copied down passages: The governess thinks when she sees the man on the tower: “What arrested me on the spot was the sense that my imagination had turned real . . . ” And when Brydon in “The Jolly Corner” crosses into the territory of his ghost, “he tasted a sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity.”

Something in my personal development must have set me up to seek a concept of personality that includes other dimensions of being. I expect, I hope, that characters in my books will continue to confront their ghosts and bring me back their findings. When Marcus as an adult finally tells a close friend about the ghost-boy in the ruined cottage, the friend says: “It’s like he needed you and you needed him and there was some kind of collapse in time . . . it’s got something to do with how time interacts with spirit, only you’re going to have to figure it out . . . “

• Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Gail Godwin

Previous article, next article, support lit hub..

Join our community of readers.

to the Lithub Daily

Popular posts.

Follow us on Twitter

The Worst Ever First Day on the Job

• RSS - Posts

Literary Hub

Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature

Sign Up For Our Newsletters

How to Pitch Lit Hub

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

Support Lit Hub - Become A Member

Become a Lit Hub Supporting Member : Because Books Matter

For the past decade, Literary Hub has brought you the best of the book world for free—no paywall. But our future relies on you. In return for a donation, you’ll get an ad-free reading experience , exclusive editors’ picks, book giveaways, and our coveted Joan Didion Lit Hub tote bag . Most importantly, you’ll keep independent book coverage alive and thriving on the internet.

Become a member for as low as $5/month

Essay on Ghost

Students are often asked to write an essay on Ghost in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Ghost

What is a ghost.

A ghost is thought to be the spirit of a person who has passed away. Many people believe ghosts exist because they have felt or seen something they can’t explain. Stories about ghosts are popular, especially around campfires and during Halloween.

Why People Believe in Ghosts

Some individuals think in ghosts because of personal experiences or stories told by others. They might feel a ghost’s presence through cold air, strange noises, or moving objects when no one is there.

Ghosts in Culture

Ghosts appear in many books, movies, and TV shows. They are often shown as scary, but some stories present them as friendly or sad. These tales make us curious and sometimes frightened about the unknown.

250 Words Essay on Ghost

What are ghosts.

Ghosts are thought to be the spirits of people who have passed away. Many people believe that these spirits can sometimes stay on Earth instead of moving on to another place. The idea of ghosts has been around for a very long time and is part of many stories and myths.

Some people believe in ghosts because they think they have seen or felt them. Others hear tales from friends or family and start to think there might be truth to the stories. Often, when we cannot explain strange sounds or sights, some think it might be a ghost.

Ghosts in Stories

Ghosts are very popular in books, movies, and television shows. They are often shown as being able to walk through walls and make things move without touching them. In stories, they can be friendly, like Casper, or scary, to give people a thrill.

Are Ghosts Real?

There is no proof that ghosts are real. Scientists have not found any evidence to show that the spirit of a person can stay on Earth after they die. Yet, many people still like to think that ghosts could be real because it is exciting and mysterious.

Ghosts are a fascinating subject that captures our imagination. Whether they are real or not, they will likely continue to be a part of stories and discussions for a long time. Ghosts remind us of the unknown and make us curious about what happens after someone dies.

500 Words Essay on Ghost

Ghosts are often talked about as spirits or souls of people who have passed away. Many stories, movies, and books tell us about these beings that can’t be seen with the naked eye. Some people believe that ghosts are real and that they can come back from the afterlife to visit the living. Others think that ghosts are just made-up stories to explain things that scare us or that we don’t understand.

There are many reasons why someone might believe in ghosts. For some, it’s a way to feel connected to loved ones who have died. They find comfort in thinking that those they miss might still be around in some form. Others might have had an experience that they can’t explain any other way than to say it was a ghost. This could be hearing strange sounds, seeing objects move on their own, or feeling like someone is there when no one can be seen.

Ghosts in History and Culture

Ghosts have been part of stories for a very long time. In history, every culture has its own tales of spirits and hauntings. For example, in ancient times, the Romans believed in household spirits called “Lares” that protected their homes. In many Asian cultures, there are festivals where people honor the spirits of their ancestors. Even today, ghost stories are popular around campfires and during Halloween when people enjoy being scared in a fun way.

Are Ghosts Scary?

Ghosts are often shown as scary in movies and stories. They might make strange noises, move things, or even appear as frightening figures. This can make people feel scared, especially in the dark or when they’re alone. But not all ghost stories are meant to be scary. Some are about friendly ghosts who help the living or teach them an important lesson.

Science and Ghosts

Science is about studying the world through experiments and evidence. When it comes to ghosts, scientists have a hard time because there’s no clear evidence that they exist. Most scientists say that what people think are ghosts could be explained by other things, like tricks of the light, sounds from unknown sources, or even how our brains work when we’re frightened or expecting to see something strange.

Personal Beliefs

Whether ghosts are real or not depends on what you believe. Some people are sure they’ve seen or felt a ghost, while others are just as sure that ghosts are not real. It’s okay to believe either way. What’s important is to respect other people’s beliefs, even if they’re different from your own.

Ghosts are a fascinating topic that can lead to many different ideas and discussions. They are a part of our stories and cultures, and whether they are real or not, they continue to capture our imagination. Remember, it’s fine to be curious about ghosts, but it’s also good to think critically and consider all the possible explanations for the mysterious things that happen around us.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on Gig Economy
• Essay on Giving And Sharing
• Essay on Giving Back To The Community

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

You may opt out or contact us anytime.

Zócalo Podcasts

I Am Haunted by My Mother’s Ghost Story

She told us to help us understand her, but what does she want us to know.

By Oscar Villalon | October 29, 2015

The story comes unbidden. Unbidden? I mean to say that I never set out to tell it. Still, I’ve told it many times. There’s usually drinking involved, low lighting; it’s always toward the end of an evening. And so, the story unfurls. Not always, because I’ve seen its effect. I’ve lived with the story for so long—37 years, give or take a year—that I know what it can do to a listener upon hearing it, even though I feel nothing when relating it. I could just as easily be telling the plot of an old Twilight Zone episode. But the story chills people. The guests go quiet. Things get still.

The story isn’t mine. It belongs to my late mother. She was a teenager, living with her family in La Puente, when one night she heard a gentle rapping on her bedroom door. The door opened and her aunt, who was living with them, let her know in a whisper that she was getting up to make breakfast and what would she like to eat? Then she left the room. My mother went rigid with fright, because her aunt had only days before left for a trip to Yucatán. She was trying to make sense of what she had seen when she heard sobbing. It was her older sister, who shared the bedroom with her, crying in the twin bed next to hers. One of them asked the other (my mother couldn’t be sure who spoke), Did you see that? , and the answer was a crashing wave of grief, wailing that woke up my grandfather, who ran to their bedroom to find his daughters repeating over and over, She’s dead, she’s dead. Mi tía está muerta!

There’s more to the story. After my grandfather chides his daughters for being ridiculous, for believing in what they think they saw, just a short time later there’s a phone call, well before the sun has come up. Cut to my grandfather, hurriedly getting ready to leave the house, dragooning my mother—who, at 16, had just earned her California driver’s license—to take him from La Puente to LAX, amid early morning traffic, so he could fly to Yucatán where his sister had been killed in a grisly car accident. Not till many years later did it occur to me that for my mother, an inexperienced driver, having to trek all the way to LAX may have been as terrifying as what she’d seen that night. But when your mother is first telling you her ghost story in your for-whatever-reason darkened apartment, at night, and you couldn’t have been older than eight, that sort of detail can escape you.

There’s more. Soon, the home in La Puente is haunted, or at least the hallway leading to the bedrooms is. First they hear pacing, a padding of “feet” in that hallway behind them as they sit in the living room trying to watch My Three Sons . Then it’s the hallway saturated in perfume, the aunt’s perfume, an unbearable reek. Finally, their priest is consulted and he believes what they tell him, and he agrees to perform an exorcism. He sprinkles the holy water, he recites from the Bible, and he tells the ghost, You don’t belong here anymore. You’re dead. You need to leave. There’s no longer any need for you here. And she goes. No more haunting. The end.

After the sighing, after the blinking, an occasional head shake, someone will ask, When did your mother tell you that story? Of course, when I told this story as a boy, and then as a teen, nobody (or at least no one that I can remember) ever asked that, but I would volunteer that I had heard it when I was a kid, as a way of saying, If you think you’re freaked out, imagine how freaked out I was when I first heard it! It was bragging, like saying I’d ridden on this coaster a bunch of times, so no big deal. But then I’d tell this story in my 20s, 30s, and now 40s. And when revealing the age I first heard it, there’s no comment but certainly an unspoken question: Why would your mother tell you this? Why would she bequeath me her haunting?

I don’t know, and I’ll never know. Over the years, though, I’ve tried to guess. If my memory isn’t completely betraying me, my mother seemed pensive that night. I dare say she seemed sad. I don’t remember my father being in our apartment, though he may well have been shut away in their bedroom. But he certainly wasn’t in that dark living room, the only light coming from our porch light when, sitting on one end of our sofa, she told us about what had once happened to her. I think she forgot we were there, me and my younger brother and baby sister. Maybe she was telling, aloud to herself, this incredible thing from her life, as if to reassure herself her existence wasn’t what it seemed. She had seen a ghost at 16, was married at 19, and had three children by the time she was 26. Her life was circumscribed by taking care of us, taking care of the house, and working a job. But this amazing thing had happened.

Then sometimes I think she knew we were listening, but didn’t mean to terrify us. She just wanted us to know our mother had seen things. That she had been a girl who once drove her bereft father on a busy freeway because her mother and older sister didn’t drive, drove him all the way out to LAX, where she’d never driven to before, palms sweating on the steering wheel, then drove all the way back to La Puente by herself, with probably not so much as a Thomas Brothers in the car to help her if she got lost, and did this and more—had lived with a ghost. That this is the story she meant to tell but couldn’t articulate. That she was brave. That she confronted mystery. This is what she couldn’t say—didn’t know how to say—but only that she had seen the newly dead at her bedroom door, and what does it mean, children? what does it mean?

    *An earlier version incorrectly referred to Villalon’s mother as having three children by the age of 24. She was 26 at that time.

Send A Letter To the Editors

Please tell us your thoughts. Include your name and daytime phone number, and a link to the article you’re responding to. We may edit your letter for length and clarity and publish it on our site.

(Optional) Attach an image to your letter. Jpeg, PNG or GIF accepted, 1MB maximum.

By continuing to use our website, you agree to our privacy and cookie policy . Zócalo wants to hear from you. Please take our survey !-->

Get More Zócalo

No paywall. No ads. No partisan hacks. Ideas journalism with a head and a heart.

Advertisement

Supported by

The Ghost Story Persists in American Literature. Why?

• Share full article

By Parul Sehgal

• Oct. 22, 2018

In 1960, the literary critic Leslie Fiedler delivered a eulogy for the ghost story in his classic study “Love and Death in the American Novel.” “An obsolescent subgenre,” he declared, with conspicuous relish; a “naïve” little form , as outmoded as its cheap effects, the table-tapping and flickering candlelight. Ghost stories belong to — brace yourself for maximum Fiedlerian venom — “ middlebrow craftsmen, ” who will peddle them to a rapidly dwindling audience and into an extinction that can’t come soon enough.

Not since Herman Melville’s publishers argued for less whale and more maidens in “Moby-Dick” (“young, perhaps voluptuous,” they dared to dream) has a literary judgment been so impressively off the mark.

Literature — the top-shelf, award-winning stuff — is positively ectoplasmic these days, crawling with hauntings, haints and wraiths of every stripe and disposition. These ghosts can be nosy and lubricious, as in George Saunders’s “Lincoln in the Bardo,” which followed a group of spectral busybodies in purgatory, observing the arrival of Abraham Lincoln’s newly deceased young son. They can be confused by their fates, as in Martin Riker’s new novel, “Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return,” in which a man is unsettled to discover that his essence has migrated into the body of the man who killed him. Spirits crop up in fiction about migration (Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “The Refugees”; Wayétu Moore’s “She Would Be King” ) and complicate what might have been straightforward portraits of relationships (Ben Dolnick’s “The Ghost Notebooks,” Laura van den Berg’s “The Third Hotel,” Lauren Groff’s “Florida,” Helen Sedgwick’s “The Comet Seekers”). They terrify, instruct and enchant — sometimes all in the same book (Carmen Maria Machado’s short story collection, “Her Body and Other Parties,” features a veritable taxonomy of the type).

M.R. James, the Edwardian master of the ghost story, once listed the crucial features of the form, including distant screams, no sex and “a modicum of blood, shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded.” But the ghost story has always floated free of such strictures. The protagonist of James’s era — the scholar in his dim library — was supplanted in our imaginations by curious young women roaming gloomy manors and innocently unleashing hell. Think “The Turn of the Screw,” “The Haunting of Hill House” or any number of Edith Wharton’s classics of the genre. Stories came lavishly garnished with sex and gore.

The ghost story shape-shifts because ghosts themselves are so protean — they emanate from specific cultural fears and fantasies. They emerge from their time, which is why Jacobeans saw ghosts wearing pale shrouds and Victorians saw them draped in black bombazine. It’s tempting to regard these apparitions as dark mirrors — Tell me what you fear and I’ll tell you who you are. I’m reminded of the governess in “The Turn of the Screw,” who arrives at her new posting and is delighted to discover that her room has two full-length mirrors, an unimaginable luxury and a clever bit of narrative forecasting; she will soon encounter mirrors of a different sort in the form of two ghosts (or are they?) haunting her young charges.

However, ghost stories are never just reflections. They are social critiques camouflaged with cobwebs; the past clamoring for redress. The writer Philip Ball has described traditional ghosts as social conservatives who enforce norms — the visitors to Ebenezer Scrooge, for example, or the ghost of Hamlet’s father, who protests the horror of his murder as well as the offense of it: “Murder most foul, as in the best it is; / But this most foul, strange, and unnatural.”

In the modern ghost story, especially the American kind, something different occurs. Ghosts protest norms — slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration — the norms that killed them. Among the slew of new books, you will find such ghosts in Jesmyn Ward’s “Sing, Unburied, Sing,” Hari Kunzru’s “White Tears,” Natashia Deón’s “Grace,” Angela Flournoy’s “The Turner House,” Brit Bennett’s “The Mothers.” These novels are impossible to generalize; they are as various as the spirits who inhabit them: the blues musician avenging himself on the white hipsters who stole his music in “White Tears,” the ghost of a young boy killed in Mississippi’s Parchman Farm prison in “Sing, Unburied, Sing.” But the spirits all speak with an authority older than any norm or nation. In “Grace,” an enslaved woman on the run is shot by bounty hunters but hovers on earth. She will not leave her child; she will try to trump death.

These ghosts are of America’s making. And in testifying to their deaths at the hands of police, poverty and racist violence, they lead us back to the nation’s foundational crimes of chattel slavery and genocide — as well as its energetic amnesia. The historian Thomas Laqueur has noted that unlike in Germany or South Africa, with their prevalence of monuments, museums and plaques to national crimes, there is “no remotely comparable memorial culture in the United States to the legacy of slavery.”

If the crimes of America’s origin are routinely whitewashed in public life, they remain central to its literature, in which the nation has been depicted not only as haunted but cursed, from Hawthorne on. His novel “The House of the Seven Gables” tells the story of the unhappy Pyncheons, who live under an ancestral hex for cheating a family out of their home. The notion of a curse flows through the work of Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy. It’s the central strand in Faulkner, as J. M. Coetzee described it: “The theft of land from the Indians or the rape of slave women comes back in unforeseen form, generations later, to haunt the oppressor.”

“Sing, Unburied, Sing” emerges from this lineage. “I like to think I know what death is,” says Jojo, the young protagonist. “I like to think that it’s something I could look at straight.” It turns out his path to manhood depends on it, on learning to acknowledge the dead and the persistence of the past — opening his eyes to a landscape bloated with the phantoms of Hurricane Katrina, the living ghosts rotting in prison.

But in a few of these books America becomes the ghost; America is shown to terrorize and consume. “America that green ghost, been after me for at least a couple hundred/years somehow once convinced me to do its dirty work for it sharp in a/warm bath,” the Native American poet Tommy Pico writes in his collection “Nature Poem.” “You don’t seem too haunted, but you haunted,” repeats a line in Terrance Hayes’s “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.”

In Hari Kunzru’s “White Tears,” whiteness itself is seen as radioactive, fraught with danger. Seth and Carter, partners in a New York-based recording company, are obsessed with black blues musicians, the more elusive and “authentic” the better — they want the “ghosts at the edges of American consciousness.” They cannibalize black art and awaken a frightening ghost when they forge a record. But it’s clear that there is something unsteady, almost vaporous about the men themselves: Seth with his nagging feeling of hollowness, and frenetic Carter with his blond dreadlocks and mysteriously acquired family wealth — their taste their only identity. “I pass through the world, but I leave no trace,” Seth says, echoing a line in Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad,” set decades earlier, in the American South. Cora, Whitehead’s heroine, escapes a brutal plantation in Georgia and takes temporary shelter in an attic in North Carolina. Through a hole in the wall, she observes white people in town, roaming in the twilight. “No wonder the whites wandered the park in the growing darkness,” she thinks. “They were ghosts themselves, caught between two worlds: the reality of their crimes, and the hereafter denied them for those crimes.”

Far from obsolescent, how hardy the ghost story proves as a vessel for collective terror and guilt, for the unspeakable. It alters to fit our fears. It understands us — how strenuously we run from the past, but always expect it to catch up with us. We wait for the reckoning, with dread and longing.

When the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears on stage, Horatio’s words to him are beautifully ambiguous: “Stay, illusion!” he commands. He might mean, Come no farther, ghost. He might mean, Remain a phantasm . He might even be speaking to himself, biding his illusions to wait a minute more, intimating that the ghost’s revelations will remake his world.

“Stay, illusion!” Horatio commands. And in the stage directions, the ghost opens his arms.

Parul Sehgal is a book critic for The Times.

Follow New York Times Books on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram , s ign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar . And listen to us on the Book Review podcast .

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

John S. Jacobs was a fugitive, an abolitionist — and the brother of the canonical author Harriet Jacobs. Now, his own fierce autobiography has re-emerged .

Don DeLillo’s fascination with terrorism, cults and mass culture’s weirder turns has given his work a prophetic air. Here are his essential books .

Jenny Erpenbeck’s “ Kairos ,” a novel about a torrid love affair in the final years of East Germany, won the International Booker Prize , the renowned award for fiction translated into English.

Kevin Kwan, the author of “Crazy Rich Asians,” left Singapore’s opulent, status-obsessed, upper crust when he was 11. He’s still writing about it .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

The Greatest Ghost Stories Ever Written

October 29, 2016 by Sean Wilson

In time for Halloween, Sean Wilson takes a look at some of the most delightfully ghoulish and flesh-creeping stories ever put to paper.

The Turn of the Screw

Author Henry James described his own sensational chiller as a ‘pot-boiler’ but it’s clearly so much more than that. A deeply unnerving tale of a young governess who suspects her wards are under the influence of malign spirits, it’s a creepy classic that muddies the waters between spine-tingling spook story and frightening psychological drama, exerting a massive influence over every subsequent entry in the genre. In 1961 it received a timeless adaptation The Innocents , directed by Jack Clayton, scripted by Truman Capote and starring Deborah Kerr.

The Woman in Black

Not just a mainstay of English literature courses but one of the most genuinely frightening stories ever written, Susan Hill’s hair-raising tale of supernatural menace is infinitely superior to its long-running stage spin-off, 1989 TV movie and 2012 Daniel Radcliffe hit. The key is its subtlety: in relaying the cautionary tale of the Woman in Black, Hill leaves gore at the door and builds a deliciously Gothic atmosphere in the manner of master M.R. James that builds to a forbidding, bleak ending that leaves the reader poleaxed. Never has the sound of a rocking chair been scarier.

The Empty House

Sometimes the scariest stories are the most simple. The name of Algernon Blackwood may not immediately spring to the lips of horror fans but he was one of the most revolutionary ghost story writers the genre has ever seen. His trippy piece of ‘weird fiction’ known as ‘The Willows’ is perhaps his most famous work but even scarier is this slice of raw, distilled terror in which two people decide to spend a night in an unassuming house said to be haunted. Blackwood’s ability to escalate the sense of terror through his acute description of sound and atmosphere is genuinely masterful.

The Rats in the Walls

More a proponent of trend-setting ‘weird fiction’ than ghost stories in their own right, Lovecraft was nevertheless a massive admirer of supernatural contemporary M.R. James, and in between his own Cthulhu mythos he turned out some deliciously eerie stories playing around with possibly supernatural happenings. This disturbing story of a man who makes a terrifying discovery within his crumbling English ancestral pile is one of Lovecraft’s most understated yet genuinely bone-chilling offerings, building to a shrieking climax that, in the writer’s typical style, rips apart the very fabric of reality and consciousness itself.

The Shining

Never one for economy, Stephen King’s typically sprawling supernatural tome is the story of an alcoholic caretaker at the remote Overlook Hotel, and the malevolent spirits that pose a threat to him and his family. Far more literal-minded and explicit than Stanley Kubrick’s ambiguous 1980 movie adaptation (which King himself hated), the book builds a steady sense of dread (bar some silly interludes like topiary animals coming to life) and, like any great ghost story, is centrally grounded in a genuine sense of compassion for its characters, namely central figure Jack Torrance whose background is explored in much greater detail than in the film.

What constitutes a ghost, exactly? Is it a spectre or the echo of a long-distant memory? It’s a question posed by the opening of Guillermo del Toro’s fantastic Spanish Civil War chiller The Devil’s Backbone , but a century before writer E.F. Benson was already playing around with conventions in this deeply poignant and beautiful work. The story of a successful, ageing merchant haunted by happy childhood memories who makes the decision to purchase the Cornish property where he grew up, it could well be the most moving ghost story ever written.

The Haunting of Hill House

“ Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more…” One of the most famously frightening opening passages in literature inaugurates one of its greatest ghost stories, courtesy of genre master Shirley Jackson. The author’s ability to imbue the aforementioned Hill House with malevolent personality is unsurpassed but it’s the psychological slipperiness that lingers in the mind: are ghosts to blame, or is it all in the mind of spinster Eleanor? Forget the dreadful 1999 movie remake; Robert Wise’s seminal 1963 does superb justice to its source.

The Signalman

Not just one of the great literary practitioners of the 19th century, Charles Dickens was also a populist trendsetter in the realm of the ghost story. His timeless 1843 tale A Christmas Carol famously mixes a wintry atmosphere of supernatural intrigue with a stirring story of redemption but his 1866 short story The Signalman offers no such sentimental respite. The final work completed by Dickens in his lifetime (inspired by his own involvement in the Staplehurst rail crash), this chilling story of a spectral locomotive that seemingly acts as a harbinger of doom helped paved the way for the menacing likes of M.R. James, and was masterfully adapted by Andrew Davies in 1976, staring Denholm Elliott.

Man-Size in Marble

Best known for her beloved The Railway Children , Nesbit also proved she could turn her hand to a creepy yarn when necessary. This overlooked horror story is quite something, a deeply unnerving account of a young newlywed couple terrorised by an apparently innocuous marble figure found within a church. It’s a fine example of an author taking a frankly ludicrous concept and investing the reader in it absolutely, steadily building a sense of threat until the tragic end game.

Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad

Arguably the greatest ghost story writer in the history of the medium, M.R. James was extraordinarily adept at honing a sense of the uncanny in his tales, ones that helped cement ghosts as malevolent and terrifying forces of evil. A master in establishing seemingly minor details and plot points that gain added menace with every passing page, James delivered his crowning glory with this dread-inducing story of an academic and an ancient whistle that summons up dark forces. Jonathan Miller’s windswept 1968 adaptation starring Michael Hordern distills the terror of James’ work brilliantly, the crisp black and white photography perfectly reflecting the precision of the author’s writing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYjtxHHjZ00

The House by the Churchyard

Along with Charles Dickens, Irish writer Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was another pioneer of the populist horror story, composing not only one of the earliest vampire novellas (the unforgettable Carmilla ) but also some of the first ghost stories, too. His first, The Ghost and the Bonesetter , was published in 1838 but his sprawling 1863 mystery The House by the Churchyard is his greatest accomplishment. Not consistently scary and intentionally digressive throughout, the novel nevertheless contains within it the deeply scary ‘An Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand’, an offshoot of the main narrative that has even been published separately.

Better known as an expert in dissecting the classic system and social mores with heavyweight novels like The House of Mirth , Wharton was also one of the greatest-ever writers of spooky tales. The Eyes takes the classic story-within-a-story conceit so deliciously apt for ghostly chillers, recounting two separate occasions when handsome central character Culwin was tormented by a pair of monstrous red eyes peering out from beneath his bed. Rippling with Wharton’s usual undercurrents of sexuality and identity, it’s one of the most sophisticated horror stories ever penned.

A Warning to the Curious

M.R. James’ later life was deeply shaken by the emotional after-shock of World War I, a conflict that robbed his beloved Cambridge University of many of its bright young minds. Consequently his penultimate ghost story, found in his fourth and final collection A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories , is one of his starkest, bleakest and most unashamedly frightening, the story of an archaeologist who digs up a cursed Anglo-Saxon crown and brings down the wrath of supernatural evil. Lawrence Gordon Clark’s eerie 1972 Ghost Stories for Christmas adaptation remains one of the finest James adaptations ever put to screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoVu_BRCSS0

Sean Wilson is a film reviewer, soundtrack enthusiast and avid tea drinker. If all three can be combined at the same time, all is good with the world.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban at 20: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Essential Demonic Horror Movies To Send Shivers Down Your Spine

Three Recent and Wildly Overrated Sequels

Underrated 2000s Cult Classics You Have to See

The Essential New French Extremity Movies

Cobra: Sylvester Stallone and Cannon Films Do Dirty Harry

The Gruesome Brilliance of 1980s Italian Horror

The Most Incredibly Annoying Movie Characters

All This Has Happened Before: Remembering Battlestar Galactica

The Most Overlooked Horror Movies of the 1990s

• Comic Books
• Video Games
• Toys & Collectibles
• Articles and Opinions
• About Flickering Myth
• Write for Flickering Myth
• Advertise on Flickering Myth
• Terms of Use
• Privacy Policy