I don’t believe in ghosts. Well, 95 percent of me doesn’t. But I do love a great ghost story, or rather, I love a great psychological ghost story, in which the emphasis is on the mental state of the victim rather than the actions of a ghost (a ghost that may not even be “real”). When you don’t know whether the apparition down the hall is a spirit or a figment of the heroine’s imagination, how can you not turn the page? Of course, some ghost stories are better than others. Here, IMO, are elements the best ones share:
1. There’s gotta be a ghost. Vampires, werewolves, ghouls, shapeshifters and other monsters are all very well, but
true ghost stories require spirits of the dead…or at least the strong possibility such spirits exist. You and I may scoff/chuckle/scream at the antics of fanged bloodsuckers and furry alpha males, but we all know we’re going to die and sometimes in the middle of the night comes that nagging question, What about that afterlife, anyway? Tales of the dead crossing over into this world offer intriguing possibilities.
2. Setting gets a starring role. In all great novels, to varying degrees, setting affects mood, theme and even plot. Ghost stories take this one step further. Setting becomes as crucial as the main characters. Think of the haunted house. Step inside its door and it’ll spar with you as much as the next antagonist. And while many ghost stories take place in old mansions, they certainly don’t have to. What matters is that the setting—a house, a small town or another confined, claustrophobia-inducing arena—is a force to be reckoned ith. The skilled writer makes this apparent gradually, detail after unnerving detail.
3. Suspense is key. Did you get that last point, gradually? The writer doesn’t scare us senseless on page one. He doles out details that, alone, could be argued away. That door that suddenly slammed shut? A breeze, perhaps. The noise in the middle of the night? Maybe a stray dog outside the window. But then rain seeps inside the wall and leaves a stain that looks like the face of that infant who died long-ago at birth…and as the story progresses the cumulative effect of all this stuff starts to give all the characters, and the reader, a growing sense of dread.
4. I want mystery. A ghost needs a good reason to be unsettled. Perhaps there was an injustice that went unpunished. We want to know what it is that bothers our spirit so. And while we may never be certain—in fact, I’d argue that a ghost story more than any other genre benefits from a sense of uncertainty in the conclusion—by the end of the book we better have at least some idea of the reason for all that haunting.
5. Give me some emotion. In good fiction, we identify with the protagonist, imagining ourselves to be in his shoes. In good ghost stories, we feel we’re inside the skin of that poor sod walking alone down that long, dark hall. In great psychological ghost stories, we feel trapped inside the mind of the main character—our heart races when we hear that bump in the night, we shiver with alarm at a cold
draft under the door, we gasp after a whiff of something that smells like rotting flesh. Like our heroine, we don’t know whether any of this is real or the product of imagination and we share her terror.
Examples of great psychological ghost stories? Three I recommend are The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, The Turn of the
Screw, by Henry James, and The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters.
If you have examples of well-written psychological ghost stories to recommend, please comment.
UPDATE: Read more on this topic: How do you write a great ghost story?
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