10 Stories with Ghosts to Haunt Your Summer
I love ghost stories. Humans have been telling each other stories about ghosts and the haunted environs they inhabit pretty much as long as there have been humans, and of all the fundamental story types that make up the horror genre as we know it, stories with ghosts have always been the most dynamic. Which is not to say that authors aren’t constantly inventing new exciting takes on vampires, for instance, or on demon possession or evil cults. But ghosts always strike me as that much more exciting in part because a ghost is seldom ever just a ghost.
I’ve had the chance to play around with this idea before for Book Riot, and the more I read, the more true it seems. Some ghosts are memories (as my fellow Crimson Peak fans can attest). Some ghosts are the embodiment of love or hate or anger unabating. Sometimes ghosts are the secrets we thought we buried for good, or the trauma in our pasts we can’t face. Sometimes we are haunted by the very world around us that we feel helpless to change, or the things in our past we can’t let go of.
One last question for you to keep in mind as you peruse this list of stories with ghosts: We generally think of ghosts in the literal sense, as human spirits lingering after death. And usually, they are. But if the ghosts are more than spirits, or caused by something other than death, does that make the haunting any less real?
Classic Hauntings and Stories with Ghosts
Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw
This novella is the dark perfection of every ghost story you ever shared with friends sitting in a darkened room, hoping your flashlight wouldn’t fail. It’s so full of rot, and mold, and gore – a harrowing, weird, delightfully horrifying ghost story. When a group of friends descends upon an abandoned, reputedly haunted Heian-era mansion for a wedding, things quickly go sideways when a scary story told in a dark room resurrects the vengeful spirit of the house. My favorite part was definitely Khaw’s descriptions of the house as just seething with rot, as though the whole thing were a decomposing corpse in its own right. If you love watching groups of people crumble as external terrors expose and put pressure on the cracks between them, you’re going to love Nothing But Blackened Teeth. Dysfunction, dysfunction everywhere.
My Darling Dreadful Thing by Johanna van Veen
Speaking of Crimson Peak…buckle up my Gothic enthusiasts, because van Veen’s My Darling Dreadful Thing is, let’s just say, A Lot (complimentary). Seances, wealth, dark secrets, a crumbling ancestral estate, ghosts (of course), sickness, decay, desecration of the dead, and so much more. I do just want to provide a content warning for references to off-page incest. This is high Gothic we are dealing with, and incest is not uncommon in that genre, but it should also be properly labeled so readers can opt-out if they wish! My Darling Dreadful Thing is about a young woman named Roos who has a ghostly companion called Ruth, and together they have been making their money off of (faking) seances for the wealthy. That is until the day wealthy young widow Agnes Knoop walks through their door, and ultimately asks Roos to come live with her at her dead husband’s eerie, dying estate. What follows is a slow descent into darkness that ends with a death, and the question: was it simply murder? Or are the ghosts that haunt Roos and Agnes dangerously real?
The Spite House Johnny Compton
The Spite House is probably one of the most accomplished haunted house books of the last decade. It’s a study in suspense, horror, and the tangible weight of a haunting, with malicious spirits lingering around every awkward corner of the frighteningly constructed Masson House. In fact, the uncomfortable angles and unsettling layout of the house itself are as much a point of the haunting as the hate-filled ghosts that inhabit it. But with the owners offering an extravagant payout to anyone willing to live in the house, be its caretaker, and provide proof of its paranormal nature, Eric Ross doesn’t really have a choice but to take the job. His wife is gone, he’s got his two daughters to care for, and no future without the Masson money. It’s just a haunted house, right? Maybe if there really are ghosts in Masson House, they can help him understand things about his own past that have been haunting him for far too long. Answers, and easy money. But Eric could never have predicted just how deep the evil in Masson house runs, or what this job may cost him in the end.
Stories With Ghosts in Remote Places
From Below by Darcy Coates
I need more people to read this particular ghost story, and then come talk to me about it. Because this glorious marriage of Ghost Ship and Titanic is the deep sea diving horror that I never knew I needed, and I have been FIXATED ever since I finished reading. From Below is an intensely claustrophobic book about a group of divers who are the first to visit the newly discovered shipwreck of the SS Arcadia, which went missing without a trace 60 years ago. It should have been straightforward: explore the wreck, get some footage, make a documentary, cash in on the tragedy. But the Arcadia has been sitting at the bottom of a deep, cold ocean basin for a very long time, and no one really knows just what secrets she keeps or why the ship vanished the way that it did—or what ghosts may yet linger in the dark, still waters that now fill her cabins and holds.
Dead Silence by S. A. Barnes
Where do I START with Dead Silence? This book terrified me. I had to put it down at one point because I was reading and there was too much empty space around me. For real, I couldn’t even look at a dark, open doorway. Dead Silence is about an ill-fated attempt by an about-to-be-unemployed ship’s crew, staffing a small vessel tasked with repairing communications beacons. Their last beacon, way at the edge of the system, picks up a distress signal coming from outside the network, somewhere beyond the edge of “civilized” space, that belongs to the Aurora, a luxury space liner that vanished into thin air on its maiden voyage, never to be seen again. Barnes is giving you Titanic, she’s giving you Event Horizon, she’s giving you Ghost Ship; for real, this book will make your skin crawl. But don’t be too sure you know what’s going on – the ghosts haunting the Aurora and tormenting our crew of protagonists may not be quite what they first appear!
All the White Spaces by Ally Wilkes
Are we getting the feeling that Jessica likes books about doomed ships? Well, friends, I am a simple creature. But there’s nothing simple about Ally Wilkes’ All the White Spaces, and the ship going down is just the beginning of the haunted nightmare that awaits Jonathan Morgan after he stows away on an Antarctic-bound ship, escaping his family and the life in which they wished to trap him. The captain of the ship is his hero, a giant among men who cut his teeth on adventure, and who Jonathan would follow anywhere. Even into disaster. When a fire strikes the ship, the crew has no choice but to flee across the pack ice to the Antarctic mainland in search of a secure place to overwinter, only to find an abandoned expedition camp full of nightmares and the ghosts the crew themselves have brought with them to this cold and empty place. But these aren’t ghosts in the traditional sense. I love what Wilkes does here, how the very vastness of the white, frozen world around the stranded crew seems to turn against them, stirring up the ghosts of their pasts to haunt them. It’s brilliant, and harrowing, and I can’t wait to read it again.
Not Your Usual Stories With Ghosts
The Haunting of Velkwood by Gwendolyn Kiste
If you’re looking for a book that’s really doing something new and exciting with the ghost story, you need to put The Haunting of Velkwood on your list. It’s about an inexplicable disaster that swallowed a whole small-town neighborhood and has since been the subject of internet speculation, tabloid documentaries, and conspiracy theories. But the fact is that no one really knows why it happened, where the strange curtain that now veils The Velkwood Vicinity from sight actually came from, or how it is that an entire neighborhood of people suddenly turned into ghosts one night. There are only three survivors of the Vicinity who, for some reason, can pass through the veil and, until now, Talitha Velkwood has had no interest in her unusual gift. She doesn’t know any more than anyone else about how it was that she and her two friends escaped the tragedy that took the lives of her mother and little sister, and she doesn’t want to know. Then a new researcher comes around, offering Tabitha enough money to finally escape her past, but only if she agrees to finally enter the Vicinity again and confront the past she left behind.
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
On the surface, Mexican Gothic seems like a familiar setup for a Gothic Ghost Story: Noemí gets a panicked letter from her recently married cousin, Catalina, claiming that her husband’s isolated ancestral home, High Place, is haunted and she’s in danger. Noemí goes to the rescue and soon finds herself mired in darkness and secrets and, yes, a few ghosts too. But Mexican Gothic takes a sharp, biological twist that leaves you wondering: what is a ghost, really? Because in its moldering, rotting heart, High Place is, in fact, a haunted house. But the spirits that roam its walls are more than they first appear. Steeped in rot and romance, from its beautiful but forbidding landscapes to its failing aristocratic family, Mexican Gothic is the epitome of what a ghost story should be. It’s one of my favorite examples of “when is a ghost not just a ghost”.
Crossroads by Laurel Hightower
Speaking of grief and the ghosts it makes: Laurel Hightower’s Crossroads is all about what it means to face the unspeakable horrors of grief, the loss of a child, and the desperation to see a loved one again no matter the cost. Chris’ son Trey dies in a tragic car crash and takes her whole world with him, until the day a drop of her blood falls on her son’s roadside memorial and changes everything. That night Chris sees her son’s ghost outside her window – or so she believes. But is it really her son? Or does something far more sinister lurk behind the face of the child she lost? And how deeply will Chris entangle herself with these dark forces if it means seeing Trey alive again?
Linghun by Ai Jiang
Neighborhood full of ghosts? How about a whole TOWN full of ghosts. That’s part of the premise of Ai Jiang’s excellent modern ghost story, Linghun, and believe me, if you like stories with ghosts, this is one you want to read. There are a lot of books where the ghosts are tied to this world by the grief of their loved ones, and even somewhere the ghosts ARE that grief made manifest, and not actually the spirit of a loved one at all. But Linghun takes the conversation about how we create ghosts with grief and turns it completely on its head in the best way. It’s set in a town in Canada called HOME, where spirits go to live after death and where the living move in hopes of being haunted, so that they never have to say goodbye to their loved ones. Wenqi’s parents insist on moving there after her brother dies, in hopes of keeping his spirit with them. For once it’s not the ghosts who haunt the living, it’s the living haunting them.
Looking for even more stories with ghosts? Book Riot has you covered! From ghosts that help solve mysteries to the best ghost story books to keep you up all night, to the best (haunted) books about ghosts, and an excellent examination of why we are so fascinated by haunted houses in fiction.
