Famous Ghost Stories: 10 Classics Worth Reading

1. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow — Washington Irving (1820)

A superstitious schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane, courts a wealthy farmer’s daughter in a Dutch settlement in New York and runs afoul of the local legend of a Headless Horseman. Irving’s tale is as much comedy as horror, but its midnight ride through the woods remains one of the most famous chase scenes in American literature, and its ambiguity, ghost or prank, is still debated.

2. A Christmas Carol — Charles Dickens (1843)

The miser Ebenezer Scrooge is visited on Christmas Eve by the ghost of his dead partner, Jacob Marley, and then by three spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. It is a story of redemption, but its ghosts are genuinely unsettling, especially Marley dragging his chains, and it helped make the Christmas ghost story a tradition. For more in that spirit, see our scary Christmas stories.

3. The Signal-Man — Charles Dickens (1866)

A traveler befriends a railway signalman who works alone at the mouth of a tunnel and is haunted by a figure that appears before every disaster on the line. Written the year after Dickens himself survived a serious railway accident, it is short, bleak and perfectly constructed, and many readers consider it the finest ghost story he wrote.

4. The Canterville Ghost — Oscar Wilde (1887)

An American family buys an English country house complete with a centuries-old ghost, then refuses to be frightened by him, cleaning his bloodstain and offering him lubricant for his rattling chains. Wilde turns the haunted-house story upside down for comedy, yet the ending is surprisingly tender. It is a good choice for readers who want a ghost story that is more charming than chilling.

5. The Turn of the Screw — Henry James (1898)

A young governess takes charge of two children at a remote English estate and begins to see figures she believes are the ghosts of two former servants. Are the children in danger, or is the governess unraveling? James never settles the question, and that deliberate ambiguity has made this novella one of the most discussed ghost stories ever written.

6. The Monkey’s Paw — W.W. Jacobs (1902)

A visiting soldier gives an ordinary family a shriveled monkey’s paw that is said to grant three wishes, with terrible consequences. Strictly speaking it is a tale of the supernatural rather than a haunting, but its final scene, a knocking at the door in the middle of the night, is one of the most famous moments in horror fiction, and its lesson about wishes has been borrowed countless times.

7. “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” — M.R. James (1904)

A skeptical professor on a seaside golfing holiday finds an old whistle buried in the ruins of a church and blows it. That night, the empty bed in his room seems less empty. M.R. James, a Cambridge scholar, wrote many of his stories to read aloud to friends at Christmas, and his restrained, scholarly style shaped English ghost fiction for the next century.

8. Afterward — Edith Wharton (1910)

An American couple buy an old house in England and are told it has a ghost, but that you never know you have seen it until long afterward. Wharton builds dread slowly from a single, quiet idea, and the story’s real subject is what a marriage does not say. It is a fine example of the subtle psychological ghost story.

9. The Haunting of Hill House — Shirley Jackson (1959)

A scholar invites a small group to stay in a notorious mansion to study its hauntings, among them a lonely young woman named Eleanor who feels the house is calling to her. Jackson’s novel is often named among the greatest haunted-house stories ever written, admired for making the house itself, and Eleanor’s mind, the center of the horror.

10. The Woman in Black — Susan Hill (1983)

A young solicitor travels to a remote marsh house to settle a dead client’s affairs and keeps glimpsing a wasted woman dressed in black. Hill deliberately wrote it as a traditional English ghost story, with fog, a causeway cut off by the tide and a terrible secret. It later became one of London’s longest-running stage plays and a 2012 film.

Famous Ghost Stories From History and Legend

Some of the most famous ghost stories are not books at all but legends attached to real places. The Flying Dutchman, a phantom ship said to be doomed to sail forever, has been part of sailors’ folklore since at least the eighteenth century. The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall in Norfolk became famous after a photograph said to show her on the staircase was published in Country Life magazine in 1936. Many castles and old houses across Britain and Europe have similar stories. For legends of a more modern kind, see our scary urban legends, retold.

What the Classics Teach About Ghost Stories

Almost every story on this list relies on restraint. The ghost is glimpsed rather than described, the explanation is withheld, and the real subject is often the living: guilt in Dickens, loneliness in Shirley Jackson, unspoken things in Edith Wharton. That is why these stories still frighten readers more than a century later. If you want to try the same techniques yourself, read our guide on how to write a horror story, or see them at work in a modern ghost story set in a locked church.

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