Underrated ‘spooky’ stories to thrill you this Halloween

Earlier this month an amateur historian discovered a long-lost short ghost story by Bram Stoker, the celebrated author of the gothic horror classic Dracula. This seems like a fitting discovery for the month of October, which is of course a season of spooks and scares culminating in Halloween on the 31^st.

So, inspired by this new ghostly literary discovery, we asked some of our experts to recommend underrated haunting reads to get you in the festive spirit, this Halloween.

The Eyes by Edith Wharton recommended by Professor Dan Moore, Head of School, English, Drama and Creative Studies

Dan says: “The Eyes is a classic psychological ghost story from the brilliant American writer of the early 20th Century, Edith Wharton. The menace in the story builds as more about the lead character’s past is revealed. The story is in some part a homage to Henry James’ ghost stories, and the lead character is – for my money – based on James himself. Wharton has some other brilliant ghost stories – if you like late Victorian gothic, they are a real must!”

‘Cassandra Again’ in Salt Slow by Julia Armfield, recommended by Dr Dorothy Butchard, Lecturer in Contemporary Literature & Digital Cultures

Dorthy says: “A woman's girlfriend returns from the dead, six months after her funeral. I love how the story plays with ideas of haunting from fiction and pop culture: this ghost doesn't fit at all with the narrator's expectations.”

A quote from Salt Slow: "I was worried that the sun would start coming up and that she would still be there. I wanted to know whether the mourning book had any etiquette notes on visitations from the recently deceased but it seemed insensitive to check it in front of her. For all her insistence that her presence didn't constitute a haunting, there seemed a strange intent behind her aimlessness... I found myself wishing she'd come back as a vampire or a werewolf, something with fangs and a destructive will. As it was, the onus seemed to be on me to make something of the visit."

The Awntyrs (Adventures) of Arthur, recommended by Dr Emily Wingfield, Senior Lecturer in English Literature

Emily says: “During a stay at Carlisle, in this richly evocative late fourteenth-century poem, King Arthur sets out with his knights and Queen Guinevere to hunt in Inglewood Forest. While the King hunts, Sir Gawain keeps Guinevere company at the edge of Tarn Wathelene (a local lake). As noon approaches, the sky turns as dark as midnight and a storm approaches. Gawain and Guinevere are soon approached by a hideous apparition, who glides towards them howling and wailing ('Yauland and yomerand' in the original Middle English). A gruesome portrait of the ghost follows: a toad bites into the skull of the mud-covered, snake-infested, and blackened bones of this naked body, and even the birds flee from it in terror.

“The ghost reveals itself to be the spirit of Guinevere's mother and laments how much her fortune has changed: formerly a beautiful, rich woman she is now wracked with pain in hell on account of the sins she committed in life. As a textual counterpart to contemporary cadaver tombs, she then offers herself as a warning to Guinevere, King Arthur's court - and to the poem's readers - of the need to act with kindness and charity towards other people, and their lands.”

You can access a modern English translation here.

Midlands canal ghost stories, recommended by Dr Jimmy Packham, Associate Professor in North American Literature

Jimmy says: “The Midlands has a rich and strange – though oddly neglected – gothic tradition all of its own, with much of it connected to the industrialisation that’s so central to the Midlands’ modern identity. I’d like to make a particular case for the ghost stories set along the canals of the West Midlands (the arteries of the industrial process) as among the most chilling and rewarding of this regional tradition.

“Perhaps the finest canal-set ghost story is Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Three Miles Up from 1951 (indeed, this might be one of the finest ghost stories about a canal full stop – competing only with Daphne Du Maurier’s Venetian nightmare, Don’t Look Now). Howard’s tale is set somewhere near Tamworth and Lichfield. A more conventional iteration of the ghost story can be, set in a fictionalised ‘North Midlands,’ is L.T.C. Rolt’s Bosworth Summit Pound (1948): if Rolt’s story lacks the uncanny and nightmarish logic of Howard’s tale, it provides us with a perhaps more obviously gruesome haunting.

“But it is not so much the ghosts that stick with us from these canal tales. Instead, it is the canals themselves that strike us as the most potent haunting thing here – derelict, overgrown with grasping plant-life, and saturated by damp fog and an eerie atmospherics. The unsettling implication from these stories is that once we have taken to the canals – once we make the short hop from towpath to narrowboat – it is very, very difficult to return to dry land. In the end, the tales aim to upend the ways in which we see and travel through the supposedly stable and landlocked Midlands...”

Are the Dead Dead? by Emma Frances Dawson, recommended by Dr Emily Vincent, Research Fellow

Emily says: “Are the Dead Dead? (1897) by lesser-known American author, Emma Frances Dawson, celebrates a fascination with nineteenth-century spiritualism, a movement which, in its later years, focused on scrutinising ghostly happenings through occult investigations known as ‘psychical research’.

“Dawson’s tale is especially compelling because it explores many different kinds of haunting: from the hypnotic power of music, mysterious figures returning from the past, and the investigations of a supposedly haunted house through an institutionalised ‘ghost club.’

“Dawson’s tale is also one of the fourteen stories featured in Emily Vincent’s British Library collection of séance narratives for the ‘Tales of the Weird’ series, Summoned to the Seance: Spirit Tales from Beyond the Veil, due out in December 2024.”

'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad', from Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M.R. James, and Beloved by Toni Morrison, recommended by Dr Chris Laoutaris, Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare.

Chris says: "When Parkins, a Professor of Ontography, discovers an ancient whistle on the site of a former Templar stronghold, he unleashes a menacing presence which he is unable to shake off. James weaves an uncanny world of shadows, indistinct forms and mercurial beings, rendered all the more unnerving by their obscurity. Perfect Halloween reading, what makes this story so eerie is its atmospheric evocation of the not-quite-human, which forces the reader's imagination into overdrive!

"For years the house on Bluestone Road has been haunted by Sethe's baby daughter, the child she killed. One day a strange woman appears on her doorstep. Her name is Beloved, the same word Sethe had engraved on her daughter's gravestone. Beloved's arrival is accompanied by memories of Sethe's former life as an enslaved woman on the plantation named Sweet Home. The stranger also brings with her an unleashing of dangerous and strangely parasitic forces which threaten to overwhelm Sethe and everyone she loves. But who is Beloved? Is she the ghost of her baby girl, now returned to seek revenge? A powerful novel about the ghosts of the past, and of the slave trade which claimed the lives - as the novel's poignant epigraph informs us - of 'Sixty Million and more'."

So, there you have it, a selection of suitably spooky stories for you to explore this Halloween!