Eight Ghost Stories in Which the Dead Won’t Go Quietly

“I do not believe in ghosts,” Edith Wharton once wrote, “but I am afraid of them.” Writers turn to ghost stories not just for chills and fear but also because they’re a powerful medium for reckoning with memory and history. Many classic ghost stories involve a forgotten trauma that’s resurfacing or a repressed disaster that’s returning. The ghost clings to things left undone and unsaid; it demands witness, accountability, or restitution. For much of America’s history, powerful forces have attempted to bury the country’s violent past—the stain of slavery, the Native American genocide, and so many other smaller acts of terror. The ghost-story genre allows those silenced voices a say. Toni Morrison’s Beloved remains the best-known example of this, but it is by no means the only great work built around a ghost.

Here is a collection of other fascinating stories about ghosts, in which characters are confronted by unresolved pain that erupts into the present in