Ghost stories, read aloud at bedtime.
Real ghost stories from folklore, history, and places you can still visit today. Retold as illustrated bedtime stories, because that felt like a reasonable thing to do with them.
Pick one. Get comfortable. Leave the light on.
Haunted Places
Real places. Real doors that open by themselves at three in the morning.
Haunted Places
The Tower of London's Grey Lady
Anne Boleyn was Queen of England for about a thousand days. Then her husband decided he needed a different wife and had her head cut off. They buried her under a chapel floor in a box meant for arrows, without a marker. She has been walking the Tower of London ever since. In 1864, a guard put a bayonet through her. It went right through. He fainted. He was court-martialed. Two other guards confirmed his story. The bayonet was fine. The guard was not.
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Haunted Places
The Green Lady of Fyvie Castle
A Scottish lord decided his wife was bad math. Sent her away. Married someone shinier. Six months later, his dead wife carved her name into his castle wall. Five stories up. On the outside. In the dark. She has been walking those halls ever since, and honestly? Good for her.
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Haunted Places
The Ghost Lights of Marfa
Lights show up in the desert outside Marfa, Texas. They float. They split apart. They change color. They have been doing this since before cars existed, which is a problem for the scientists who say they are car headlights. The state built a viewing platform. The viewing platform has a plaque. The plaque says nobody knows. The plaque is correct.
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Haunted Places
The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall
A woman locked in her rooms for years comes back after death to walk the hallways, which is frankly the most reasonable thing she could have done.
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Haunted Places
The Winchester Mystery House
A grieving widow built a house for thirty-six years straight because a medium told her to, and the house has stairs to nowhere, which is honestly the least strange part.
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Haunted Places
Borley Rectory
The most haunted house in England was investigated for decades, burned down on schedule, and then demolished, which is a fairly thorough way of ending the argument.
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Haunted Places
Poveglia Island
A small island in the Venice lagoon that has been a plague quarantine, a mass grave for a hundred thousand people, and a psychiatric hospital, and is now just sitting there, available, if you want it.
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Haunted Places
The Stanley Hotel
A grand mountain hotel where the piano plays itself, the housekeeper never quite left, and one very bad dream became one of the most famous novels in American horror.
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Haunted Places
Glamis Castle
Glamis Castle has a secret room, a hidden monster, a burned witch, a tongueless woman, and a small boy who sits by a door and won't tell anyone his name.
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Haunted Places
The Myrtles Plantation
The Myrtles Plantation in Louisiana has twelve ghosts, a haunted mirror, and a history that is significantly more complicated than the tour guides make it sound.
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Haunted Places
The Edinburgh Vaults
In 1788 they built a bridge with rooms underneath it for storage, and that was already a slightly unusual decision, but then things got considerably worse from there.
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Haunted Places
The Green Lady of Château de Brissac
The tallest château in France has 204 rooms and one ghost, which is a very reasonable ratio, although the ghost is unusually upsetting for a Loire Valley property.
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Haunted Places
The Screaming Skull of Bettiscombe
A skull has been sitting on a mantelpiece in Dorset for three hundred years because the one time someone threw it in a pond, it was back by morning, and frankly no one has wanted to test that again.
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Haunted Places
Aokigahara
There is a forest at the base of Mount Fuji that is genuinely, honestly beautiful, and also one of the strangest and saddest places on earth, and both of those things are true at the same time.
Read this one →Folklore Spirits
Some of them are thousands of years old. They have not become less unsettling with age.
Folklore Spirits
La Llorona
Right. So. Mexico. A long time ago, or yesterday, depending on who you ask. A woman drowns her children in a river because a man broke her in a way that does not un-break. Then she dies. Then she gets to the afterlife and someone asks where her kids are. She does not have a good answer. She has been walking every riverbank on the continent ever since, crying and looking. Here is the fun part: if you can hear her and she sounds far away, she is close. If the crying stops, she is right next to you. That is just how the physics works. I did not make the rules.
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Folklore Spirits
The Flying Dutchman
Okay so a Dutch sea captain in 1680 decides he is going to round the Cape of Good Hope in a storm. His crew says please don't. He nails the helmsman's hands to the wheel. Shoots the first mate. Then yells into the hurricane that he will sail this passage until Judgment Day if he has to. Something in the storm says: deal. He has been sailing ever since. Three hundred and fifty years. Same storm. Same passage. Same crew who never agreed to any of it. The crew part is honestly the worst part.
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Folklore Spirits
The Banshee of the O'Neill Clan
In Ireland, certain old families come with a bonus feature nobody asked for: a woman who shows up outside the house and starts crying when someone in the bloodline is about to die. She does not cause it. She just files the paperwork before the event. She has been doing this for over a thousand years and she has never once been wrong.
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Folklore Spirits
The Dullahan
A headless rider on a black horse who carries its own head and arrives precisely when someone is about to die: Ireland's most efficient supernatural system.
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Folklore Spirits
The Pontianak
She smells like flowers, she sounds close when she is far and far when she is close, and she is standing right behind you, which is fine, everything is completely fine.
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Folklore Spirits
The Draugr
Not a ghost, not a monster, just a dead Viking who is furious you walked past his hill and frankly has the upper body strength to do something about it.
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Folklore Spirits
The Churel
A woman who died badly comes back with her feet on backwards and very specific opinions about the men who had something to do with it.
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Folklore Spirits
The Duppy
In Caribbean tradition, everyone has two souls, one goes to heaven and one hangs around causing trouble, which is honestly more than fair given how difficult life was.
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Folklore Spirits
Phi Tai Hong: The Ghosts Who Died Wrong
In Thailand there are ghosts, and then there are ghosts who died badly, and those are a completely different problem.
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Folklore Spirits
The Strigoi
Romania had vampires before Bram Stoker, they were more complicated than his version, and in 2004 a village dealt with one the traditional way and then got arrested for it.
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Folklore Spirits
The White Lady of Hohenzollern
For five hundred years, a woman in white has appeared in Hohenzollern castles just before someone important dies, which is extremely considerate of her in a way that nobody in the family has ever appreciated.
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Folklore Spirits
La Mala Hora
In New Mexican folklore there is a spirit that lives at crossroads and takes the shape of whatever is most wrong, which is an extremely efficient design for a terrifying entity.
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Folklore Spirits
The Domovoi
A small old man lives behind your stove, braids your horse, and will absolutely strangle you in your sleep if you forget his porridge, which seems like a fair trade until it isn't.
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Folklore Spirits
The Toyol
In Southeast Asia, you can acquire a spirit that steals money for you, but it looks like a dead baby and you have to feed it candy, and getting rid of it involves sealing it in a jar at a crossroads, which is somehow the simplest part of the arrangement.
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Folklore Spirits
The Wendigo
A story about a creature made entirely of hunger, which is either a supernatural entity from Algonquian tradition or the most accurate description of greed ever committed to folklore, and possibly both.
Read this one →Campfire Classics
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Campfire Classics
The Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow
A schoolteacher with a neck like a periscope and zero danger instincts rides home alone through the creepiest valley in New York after a party where everyone was telling ghost stories. A headless man on a horse shows up. It goes badly. In the morning, there is a smashed pumpkin. Nobody has ever fully explained the pumpkin.
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Campfire Classics
The Vanishing Hitchhiker
A guy picks up a girl on a dark road. She gives him an address, sits in the back, and watches the trees like she has seen them before. When he pulls into the driveway, the seat is empty. The door never opened. The woman who answers the door is not surprised. Her daughter died on that road. Years ago. She does this every year.
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Campfire Classics
Bloody Mary
Three times in the dark, and something looks back: a complete history of a game that children invented and then immediately regretted.
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Campfire Classics
Resurrection Mary
A young woman in white has been hitchhiking the same stretch of Archer Avenue since the 1930s, which is either a ghost story or an extremely consistent commute.
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Campfire Classics
The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs
The phone has been ringing all evening and the police keep saying the same thing, which is that you should leave the house right now, which seems like an odd thing to say.
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Campfire Classics
Cropsey
Staten Island kids told each other about the monster in the tunnels, which was supposed to be a story to scare each other with, and then children started disappearing.
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Campfire Classics
The Hook Man
Two teenagers park at a lovers' lane, hear something scrape the car, and drive away fast, which turns out to have been the correct decision.
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Campfire Classics
The Ghost Ship Palatine
A ship full of German immigrants wrecked off Block Island in 1738, possibly with help from the islanders, and has been seen burning offshore every December since, which is either a haunting or a very consistent weather phenomenon that locals have chosen not to investigate.
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Campfire Classics
The Licked Hand
A story about a dog, a dripping sound, and the specific cruelty of discovering that the thing keeping you safe was never what you thought it was.
Read this one →Historical Hauntings
These ones come with dates and names. Real people who saw things they could not explain.
Historical Hauntings
The Bell Witch of Adams
A true story about a haunted farm in Tennessee where the ghost was, and I cannot stress this enough, an absolute psychopath.
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Historical Hauntings
The Yurei of Yotsuya
A samurai poisons his wife's face cream. Her face falls apart. She dies. Then she comes back, and her ruined face is the last thing he sees everywhere he looks for the rest of his short, terrible life. For two hundred years, actors have visited her shrine before performing this story. The ones who skip it tend to lose fingers.
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Historical Hauntings
The Greenbrier Ghost
A young woman dies, her ghost describes the murder to her mother in exhaustive detail, and a West Virginia court decides this is admissible evidence, which is the most West Virginia thing that has ever happened.
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Historical Hauntings
The Drummer of Tedworth
A magistrate confiscates a vagrant's drum and learns, over several extremely loud months, that some things are better left uncollected.
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Historical Hauntings
The Cock Lane Ghost
All of London came to a house in Smithfield to hear a ghost called Scratching Fanny, and nobody thought to check if the eleven-year-old girl in the bed was holding something.
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Historical Hauntings
The Enfield Poltergeist
For fourteen months, a council house in Enfield was haunted by furniture, marbles, and a dead man named Bill who had strong opinions about Janet's sleeping arrangements.
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Historical Hauntings
The Hammersmith Ghost
In 1804, a ghost terrorized Hammersmith, a man shot the ghost, the ghost turned out to be a plasterer in his work clothes, and then everyone had to figure out who was responsible for what.
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Historical Hauntings
The Ghost of Abraham Lincoln
Dozens of credible witnesses have seen Abraham Lincoln's ghost in the White House, which raises the question of what exactly he is waiting for.
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Historical Hauntings
The Phantom Barber of Pascagoula
In 1942, someone broke into houses in Pascagoula and cut people's hair while they slept, which is a crime that sounds made up until you realize it happened at least a dozen times and nobody ever fully explained it.
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Historical Hauntings
Spring Heeled Jack
For sixty years, something in a black cape leaped over walls, breathed fire at women, and was never caught, which is the kind of sentence that should have led to more official concern than it did.
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Historical Hauntings
The Chase Vault
A family vault in Barbados kept rearranging its own coffins, and the governor of the island personally showed up to find out why, which tells you something about how the governor's week was going.
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Historical Hauntings
The Eleanore Zugun Poltergeist
A twelve-year-old Romanian girl was followed by an invisible entity that bit her, scratched her, and pelted her with objects, and a startling number of serious adults traveled to multiple countries to watch this happen.
Read this one →The candle is lit.
We have all night.
Sweet dreams
The story continues.
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