As the nights draw in and Halloween approaches, you might be looking to settle in next to the fire and scare yourself silly with a good book. If so, you’re in luck.
Over the last 150 years or so, authors have enthralled and terrified us with stories of haunted houses, ghostly apparitions, and the weight of our imaginations.
Keep reading for your rundown of seven of the best stories featuring spectres, hauntings, and the power of the unspoken and the unseen.
1. The Signalman by Charles Dickens (1866)
Charles Dickens’s most famous and enduring ghost story might be A Christmas Carol, but he wrote plenty more spooky tales besides. The most beloved is arguably the 1866 tale, The Signalman.
Part of the Mugby Junction collection, it’s a first-person narrative, possibly based on the Clayton Tunnel crash of five years earlier, as well as his own escape from a derailment just 12 months prior.
Our narrator meets an agitated signalman who, though reluctant to recount the tale, explains that an apparition is haunting him. Each time the ghostly figure appears at the entrance to his tunnel, the vision precedes an accident.
Though initially sceptical, on his third visit to the signalman, a shocking incident forces the narrator to think again.
2. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (1898)
As its title suggests, Henry James’ gothic mystery novella ratchets up the tension with each turn of the screw.
A young governess takes on the role of caring for two orphaned children at their uncle’s country house in Bly, Essex.
The governess soon witnesses strangers passing through the grounds, seemingly unseen by the rest of the household. As she begins to suspect that the children see them too, the governess must confront the possibility that the figures are that of her predecessor Miss Jessel, and her lover Peter Quint, both long dead.
3. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (1938)
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
So begins, Du Maurier’s gothic masterpiece, Rebecca, which has never been out of print since its initial publication in 1938.
When our narrator impetuously marries the wealthy widower, Maxim de Winter, she soon finds herself moving into his Cornish mansion, on the idyllic Manderley estate.
But housekeeper Mrs Danvers is less than pleased to welcome a new lady of the house. What’s more, the whole estate seems haunted by the ghost of Maxim’s first wife, the captivating and unparalleled Rebecca of the novel’s title.
4. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)
The action of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House takes place in an unnamed location, within a house surrounded by hills.
Dr Montague, a paranormal investigator, rents Hill House for the summer and invites several guests to join him in his search for evidence of ghostly activity. Only two guests accept, who soon find themselves sharing the house with Dr Montague and the estate’s young heir, Luke. The housekeepers, though present during the day, refuse to spend their nights in the house.
With a history of suicides and violent deaths, the house’s history soon threatens to become its present as strange noises, apparitions, and ghostly writings begin to haunt the group. What is real and what is imagined, and who can be trusted?
5. The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (1983)
Susan Hill’s 1983 bestseller has been made into a series of films and a stage play, but the book remains the best entry and is a classic and undeniably chilling tale.
Arthur Kipps (played by Daniel Radcliffe in the film version) is a junior solicitor forced to visit Eel Marsh House, the former abode of Mrs Alice Drablow.
Surrounded by fog, at the end of a desolate causeway, the house is mysterious enough, even before Kipps witnesses a figure dressed in black.
Worse still, while the local residents all seem aware of the presence of this ghostly woman, no one is willing to talk about her, or her opaque purpose.
6. The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley (2015)
Hurley’s debut gothic horror was a Sunday Times bestseller, winner of the 2015 Costa First Novel award, and the British Book Awards Book of the Year for 2016.
Described as both “haunted and haunting”, it is a novel of implications and the unsaid, which leaves blank spaces that beg to be filled.
A family makes an annual pilgrimage to a barren coastline, called the Loney. As the tide recedes, two young sons, left to their own devices, begin to explore the spit of land and the desolate house at its end.
Years later, still haunted by memories, the Loney begins to reveal its secrets, beginning with the body of a young child.
7. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017)
George Saunders is a professor of creative writing at Syracuse University and the author of five critically acclaimed short story collections and works of non-fiction.
In 2017, he released Lincoln in the Bardo, his first novel, which promptly won that year’s Booker Prize.
The novel concerns Abraham Lincoln’s grief at the death of his son, Willie, aged just 11. It’s an exploration of grief and what it means to be alive, told through the conversations of the Oak Hill Cemetery ghosts that inhabit the Bardo – a liminal space between life and rebirth.
Funny, terrifying, and haunting, it will stay with you long after you put it down.
