Ghost Fiction

Scarlet Sanderson isn't a paranormal being per se, but she's no stranger to things that go bump in the night. She's had the ability to see and speak with ghosts since she was eight years old. Whether it's a gift or a curse is still up for debate. She moved to the picturesque town of Beechwood Harbor to open a flower shop and start a new life after years of being a nomad. What she didn't expect to find was a town filled with witches, vampires, shape-shifters, and ghosts. So, so many ghosts.

Life is good for Katie Coyle. She's delighted with her new position as a professor of Irish literature and history and enchanted by the old cottage on the cliff overlooking a beach that she now calls home. But she can't shake the feeling that something - or someone - else calls the cottage home and that in the night, echoes of an anguished voice calling for help haunt the beach below.

Crowford, a sleepy coastal town in England, might seem like an oasis of calm and tranquillity. Having finally decided to leave the hustle of London, Daisy and Richard Johnson buy two houses on Nelson Street. One house is perfect and ready to move into while the other is a fire-ravaged wreck that needs a lot of work. They figure they have plenty of time to work on the damaged house while Daisy recovers from a traumatic event. Soon, they discover that the two houses share a common link to the past. Something awful once happened on Nelson Street, something that shook the town to its core.

Listeners can chill to this dramatic unabridged production of 6 short stories from the consummate master of horror, Stephen King. Culled from his best-selling book Night Shift, it brings the demonic stories fully to life - and the terror even closer to home.

Episode Thirteen takes them to every ghost hunter's holy grail: the Paranormal Research Foundation. This brooding, derelict mansion holds secrets and clues about bizarre experiments that took place there in the 1970s. It's also famously haunted, and the team hopes their scientific techniques and high tech gear will prove it. But as the house begins to reveal itself to them, proof of an afterlife might not be everything Matt dreamed of.

I live in a world of waifs and shadows. "Live" might be an overstatement. I scrounge and scramble and survive in an atmosphere made thick and gray by the ashes of the Fallen. And sometimes I dream of sunlight. My parents were taken, even though they followed all the rules. Never scavenge at night. Never talk to Shadows. Don't fight the Sweepers. Run. Run. Run. And then I meet "him".

Whether weaving family life and history into dark fiction or writing speculative Afrofuturism, American Book Award winner and Essence best-selling author Tananarive Due’s work is both riveting and enlightening. In her debut collection of short fiction, Due takes us to Gracetown, a small Florida town that has both literal and figurative ghost; into future scenarios that seem all too real; and provides empathetic portraits of those whose lives are touched by otherness. Featuring an award-winning novella and 15 stories, Ghost Summer: Stories is sure to haunt and delight.

It felt like only minutes had passed when I woke up with a start. I glanced over at the digital clock I had placed on the nightstand; it read 3:19 a.m. I had been fast asleep for hours - what had woken me up? I raised my head to look around the room, and my heart leaped into my throat. There, standing at the foot of my bed, was a figure, looming in the darkness.

With two weddings on Beach Drive, Danielle's plan to temporarily close Marlow House Bed and Breakfast is put on hold. Not everyone showing up on Marlow House's doorstep is a welcome wedding guest. Nor is everyone from the living world.

Sir Derek Jacobi reads a collection of tales from the master of ghost stories, M. R. James, whose stories have for many years inspired the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas TV adaptations. M. R. James was described as "a man who, in company with Sheridan le Fanu, is the best ghost-story writer England has ever produced".

Late one moonlit night, Walter Hartright encounters a solitary and terrified woman dressed all in white. He saves her from capture by her pursuers and determines to solve the mystery of her distress and terror. Inspired by an actual criminal case, this gripping tale of murder, intrigue, madness and mistaken identity has never been out of print since its publication and brought Collins great fame and success.

Where Alison Kerby's ex-husband goes, trouble follows. This time, unfortunately, he's brought that trouble right to her doorstep. On the run from a business deal gone bad, Steven, aka "the Swine", owes some scary people a staggering sum of money. No need to panic, though. He has a plan: sell Alison's Jersey Shore guesthouse to pay them off. Before Alison has a chance to read Steven the riot act, he disappears - after a mysterious man trailing him ends up full of bullet holes.

The time is our own time. The place, Sri Lanka, the island nation off the southern tip of India, a country formerly known as Ceylon, which is steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition - and forced into the late 20th century by the ravages of civil war and the consequences of a country divided against itself. Into this maelstrom steps a woman, Anil Tissera, born in Sri Lanka, educated in the West, a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human-rights group to work with officials to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island.

Hannah Evans startles awake, covered in gore, in a place she doesn't know. Captured and restrained in the hands of strangers, she struggles frantically to remember who she is. And then she sees the needle she was injected with...and the bodies. Before long, she's thrust into a desperate struggle to survive. Navigating a crumbled landscape, fighting for her breath and her humanity, Hannah clings to the shallow hope that her family is still alive.

When Ralph and Abby Lamb move in with Ralph’s mother, Laura, Abby hopes it’s just what she and her mother-in-law need to finally connect. After a traumatic childhood, Abby is desperate for a mother figure, especially now that she and Ralph are trying to become parents themselves. Abby just has so much love to give—to Ralph, to Laura, and to Mrs. Bondy, her favorite resident at the long-term care home where she works. But Laura isn’t interested in bonding with her daughter-in-law. She’s venomous and cruel, especially to Abby, and life with her is hellish.

It's the end of Gaunt's Ghosts! No, really, the Tanith First has been disbanded, and Gaunt has been sent elsewhere. What will it take to draw them back together? How about a stonking big Chaos attack? The Tanith First are no more. Moved into another regiment under a charismatic new commander, the loyalties of the former Ghosts are put to the test when Colonel-Commissar Gaunt, long believed dead, returns. As the enemy overrun the Imperial forces, Gaunt must fight not only to be reunited with his Ghosts, but to stop all their lives being thrown away in an unwinnable war.

The Ghost Finders are investigating a haunting at the long-abandoned Haybarn Theater, which is being renovated. But work has been thrown off-schedule by the some peculiar and unnatural activities. And after the potentially world-altering recent events of their previous assignment, the team thinks that a haunted theater (aren't they all?) will be a walk in the park.

In this delightfully chilling collection, the iconic Jeanette Winterson turns her fearless gaze to the realm of ghosts, interspersing her own encounters with the supernatural alongside hair-raising fictions. Lifting the veil between the living and the dead, Winterson spirits us away to a haunted estate that ensnares a nomadic young couple in its own dark past, a staged immersive ghost tour gone awry, a West Village seance that threatens the bounds between AI and reality, and a vacation home in the metaverse where a widow visits an improved version of her deceased husband.

As the daughter of spiritualists, Mara's childhood was filled with séances and scam mediums. Now she's ready to start over with her fiancé, Neil, far away from the superstitions she's learned to loathe, but her past isn't willing to let her go so easily. And neither is Blackwood House. When Mara and Neil purchased the derelict property, they were warned that ever since the murder of its original owner, things had changed. Strange shadows stalk the halls. Doors creak open by themselves. Voices whisper in the night. And watchful eyes follow her every move.

Assembled and edited by Julian Hawthorne and first published in 1907, the Old Time English volume of The Lock and Key Library features ten classic mysteries and ghost stories by Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Thomas de Quincey, Charles Robert Maturin, Laurence Sterne, and William Makepeace Thackeray. This volume of The Lock and Key Library is sure to haunt and charm fans of ghost and detective mysteries alike.