There’s nothing quite like a haunted house at Halloween. Those hoping to experience some paranormal activity this spooky season can head to real-life locations that are supposedly haunted, but for anyone who prefers their scares at a distance, there are plenty of ghost-filled books and movies to dive into. Here are eight of the best books about haunted houses—from genre-defining classics to modern gems with a twist.
- The Turn of the Screw (1898) // Henry James
- The Haunting of Hill House (1959) // Shirley Jackson
- The Shining (1977) // Stephen King
- The Elementals (1981) // Michael McDowell
- The Good House (2003) // Tananarive Due
- Kill Creek (2017) // Scott Thomas
- How to Sell a Haunted House (2023) // Grady Hendrix
- A House with Good Bones (2023) // T. Kingfisher
The Turn of the Screw (1898) // Henry James
In the late 1890s, writer Henry James was strapped for cash and reluctantly agreed to pen a serialized ghost story for Collier’s Weekly for £40 a month. The result, titled The Turn of the Screw, is told from the point of view of an unnamed woman who is hired as a governess for two young children and who becomes convinced that their house—a large country estate called Bly—is haunted.
James wasn’t initially a fan of his Gothic novella, describing it as “the most abject, down-on-all-fours pot-boiler, pure & simple, that a proud man brought low ever perpetrated.” But he soon came around to it and even admitted that he managed to scare himself. “I had to correct the proofs of my ghost story last night,” he told his friend and fellow writer Edmund Gosse, “and when I had finished them I was so frightened that I was afraid to go upstairs to bed!”
The Haunting of Hill House (1959) // Shirley Jackson
In Mike Flanagan’s Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, it’s the Crain family who are subjected to the spooks and spirits of the titular mansion, but in Shirley Jackson’s original novel, the characters are a group of strangers. Dr. John Montague is determined to prove that ghosts are real, so he invites people with past paranormal experiences to stay at the supposedly haunted Hill House for the summer in the hope of capturing evidence.
Jackson was researching real-life examples of such paranormal investigations for the book when she had her own scary experience. She woke up one morning to find that a note that read “DEAD DEAD” had been left in the center of her desk. It was written in her own handwriting, but she had absolutely no memory of it. Whether Jackson was possessed by a ghost or was simply sleepwalking, she went on to pen what is often considered to be the best haunted house story ever written.
The Shining (1977) // Stephen King
Although The Shining is technically set at a hotel, rather than a house, it’s such an iconic ghost story that it’s earned a place on this list. Jack Torrance is hired to be the winter caretaker for the Overlook Hotel, which is located in the Rocky Mountains and becomes inaccessible due to snow and ice. He moves into the grand building with his wife, Wendy, and their young son, Danny—who just so happens to have a supernatural ability that lets him see the hotel’s many dangerous spirits.
Stephen King based the Overlook on the real-life Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. In 1974, he and his wife, Tabitha, stayed at the hotel on the last night before it shut for the winter season. “Wandering through its corridors, I thought that it seemed the perfect—maybe the archetypical—setting for a ghost story,” he wrote on his website. That night he had a nightmare about the hotel being haunted and the next morning he had the basic outline of The Shining in his head.
The Elementals (1981) // Michael McDowell
The classic image of a haunted house is of a mist-shrouded building surrounded by bare trees on a dark fall night, but Michael McDowell placed his haunted house on a spit of sand under the blazing hot sun. McDowell is best remembered as the screenwriter of Beetlejuice (1988), but he also used his horror writing skills to pen novels—including The Elementals. The McCrays and Savages are related through marriage, and they spend each summer relaxing at their adjacent beach houses on Alabama’s coast. But there is also a third house on the beach—one that has been left to deteriorate and that might just be haunted by something sinister.
The Good House (2003) // Tananarive Due
The Good House isn’t a traditional haunted house story. Instead of poltergeists making things go bump in the night, the titular house is tied to an ancestral curse—one that is wreaking havoc all over the small town of Sacajawea, Washington. Main character Angela Toussaint inherits the Good House from her grandmother, but while living there, her teenage son, Corey, dies via suicide. The slow-burning and suspenseful story explores the events that led up to his death—with the real-life horrors of racism (the Toussaints are a few of the only Black people in town) and the supernatural horrors of a malevolent spirit both involved.
Kill Creek (2017) // Scott Thomas
Four horror authors are invited to the notoriously haunted Finch House on Halloween night to participate in a live-streamed interview. The spooky setting is meant to be a gimmicky publicity stunt, but once inside the house, they realize there might be some truth to the dark tales about the abandoned building.
The Finch House was inspired by an old dilapidated schoolhouse that sat just outside of Scott Thomas’s hometown. In a 2018 interview, he said that while growing up, he and his friends “would make up stories about the terrible things that happened there and dare each other to go inside at night.” Thomas then brought the creepy building to life years later in Kill Creek and even made the house feel like one of the story’s main characters.
How to Sell a Haunted House (2023) // Grady Hendrix
Grady Hendrix had wanted to write about a haunted house for a while, but he knew he needed a good answer to the vital question that is often asked about such stories: “Why don’t people leave?” He finally cracked it with How to Sell a Haunted House, which follows siblings Louise and Mark as they clash after their parents die in a car crash. Not only can they not agree on how best to clear out the house, but they also fight over the will—which keeps them trapped when spooky things start to happen. But How to Sell a Haunted House isn’t just a haunted house story; it’s also a haunted doll and puppet story. And even though the novel dives into the complex emotions of grief, it’s still laced with Hendrix’s trademark campy humor.
A House with Good Bones (2023) // T. Kingfisher
Sam Montgomery is on a break from work and is looking forward to an extended stay with her mom, but her brother has warned her that something seems off. When she arrives, she finally understands what he means: vultures are circling the property, the whole house has been redecorated, and her mom is being unusually jumpy and sensitive. Sam decides to get to the bottom of what’s going on and soon discovers that a mean-spirited specter is involved—but don’t expect this to be a classic haunting, because things get very weird.
T. Kingfisher—which is a pseudonym used by Ursula Vernon—won two awards for best horror novel for A House with Good Bones: the 2023 Dragon Award and the 2024 Locus Award.