TOP 5 eerily haunting literary characters
We take a look at some of the characters that came back from the dead to not just haunt the folks in the books, but also give us sleepless nights
Linda Gray from Joyland: Eerie doesn’t even begin to define Stephen King’s masterpiece about a carny amusement park in North Carolina. The protagonist, Devin, learns that the Horror House is haunted by the ghost of young girl — Linda Gray — who was murdered by her boyfriend, who was never brought to justice. But she’s not quite ready to give up yet, eventually helping Devin, from beyond her carnival grave, to discover who her murderer was and solve the cold case.
Susie Salmon from The Lovely Bones: Behind most great horror stories is a lot of trauma, but it’s not often that they’re based on real experiences. Alice Sebold’s own violent college experience lends a particularly haunting aura to this tale of the unsolved murder of Susie Salmon that devastates everyone touched by the case. But what’s even more haunting is the way Sebold makes us ponder the afterlife and its implications in our lives through Susie’s apparition.
The governess in The Turn of the Screw: This book was what inspired the Nicole Kidman thriller The Others, and if there ever was a creepy haunting story, this has to be it. It left us not just wondering about ghosts and their ethereal existences, but also pondering our own realities. Are we really here? And how do we know if we’re not ghosts ourselves?
The spirits in The Amityville Horror: Jay Anson’s 1977 novel served as the screenplay for many of the creepy movies that were made between 1979 and 2013 on this widely circulated story. But the book is just as scary, if not scarier, because of the details that Anson collected from the Lutz family about the paranormal activity they witnessed. It just goes from one unnerving detail to the next, from “The Red Room” to Kathy seeing glowing red eyes staring back at her!
Count Dracula from Dracula: We couldn’t really have any haunted list without the Count from Transylvania himself. He’s practically immortal and pure evil, leading everyone to team up against him and try to rid the Earth of his presence for good. The story itself is full of dark drama, but it’s a literary classic that can still give you nightmares.