Ghost stories

THE TELL-TALE HEART (1843)

The forerunner of the psychological thriller from the master of morbid imagination, Edgar Allan Poe.

THE BODY SNATCHER (1884)

Robert Louis Stevenson’s blood-curdling tale with a twist.

THE SIGNALMAN (1866)

Charles Dickens’s short story is creepy, clever and leaves you looking over your shoulder.

AT CRIGHTON ABBEY (1872)

Classic supernatural yarn from Mary Elizabeth Braddon with a doomed family and a crumbling, historic house at its core.

THE TURN OF THE SCREW (1898)

One of literature’s most gripping ghost stories; Henry James’s tale of psychological terror.

THE MONKEY’S PAW (1902)

Part of WW Jacobs’s The Lady of the Barge collection. A mummified monkey’s paw is said to grant three wishes, but with dire consequences for one elderly couple.

THE LISTENERS (1912)

When read out loud, Walter de la Mare’s lyrical and haunting poem will make your hair stand on end.

BEWITCHED (1925)

Edith Wharton has the reader doubting their own mind in this clever but grisly tale.

THE WOMAN IN BLACK (1982)

The ghostly screams of an accident long ago will haunt the reader’s imagination long after the last page of Susan Hill’s story.

THE WINTER GHOSTS (2010)

A young man, mourning his brother who died in the Great War, unearths a tragic, ancient mystery. Kate Mosse’s tale is supremely spooky.