Gather Around for Terrifying Ghost Stories

Author Colin Dickey's Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, takes readers to some of the country's most haunted venues. Here he tells us how he got hooked on a good ghost story, and shares some of his favorite spine-tingling tales.

I was nine or ten years old, I think, at summer camp, the first time a ghost story really scared the beejezus out of me. We were about to go to sleep, camping out under the stars without tents, and we had begged our counselor for a ghost story.

"We're not allowed to tell ghost stories," he told us. "But we are allowed to tell true stories."

And then he proceeded to terrify us.

I've tried to tell that story a few times since, and no one is much impressed by it; it's pretty hokey, and whenever I confess how scared I was of it the first time I heard it, my friends usually give me a pitying look. But, then, none of them was nine years old under the stars that night; that story made the dome of black sky above us seem so vast, so empty and scary—and also frighteningly close.

The ghost stories I love are those that open up the world into that terrifying, vast and vertiginous space—a place both unsettling and wondrous. In some cases, that opening happens in the realm of psychology: when you momentarily glimpse how strange and unknowable the human mind can be. Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, for example, or Daphne du Maurier's Don't Look Now.

And then there are those ghost stories in which that opening happens physically: When a space you think you know opens up dramatically—literally, in the case of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves with its ever-expanding suburban house—as well as more subtle forms, as with Wilkie Collins' classic The Haunted Hotel. Or take Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, which is either a travel memoir masquerading as a ghost story or a ghost story masquerading as a travel memoir—either way, it's about a distant, unknowable world brought near and strange.

Of course ghost stories are often as not about the past, too, and a good ghost will bring back a buried history you've thought was long settled and forgotten—as with Hari Kunzru's recent White Tears. Kunzru takes something as seemingly innocuous as record collecting, the haunting quality of an old blues 78, making that haunting quality literal as those voices from the past emerge into the present and press down upon the novel's hapless protagonists.

Every so often you find a novel that intersects all of these themes—something like Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. It's not a ghost story in the traditional sense, perhaps, but Silko's story of a Laguna-Pueblo vet struggling with PTSD after World War II deals with how the past and its dark secrets can haunt both the human mind and the land itself. It's got all the ingredients of a great ghost story: A tale that enlarges your understanding of the world even as it makes it strange.

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See the complete coverage of Horror Week including:
Top 50 Favorite Horror Novels on Goodreads
The Campy, Bizarre World of Paperback Horror
Supernatural Tales and Spooky Folklore