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in Kent, her childhood home and the setting of her first encounter with the king who would later sentence her to death. Other stories are about more anonymous ghosts—regular people who lived in the not-too-distant past and had believably scary things happen to them. And don’t discount the shock value of a good old urban legend—supposedly real stories of supposedly real people who had scary things happen to them: the woman who died of spider bites after a spider nested in her hair; the man who picked up a hitchhiker only to discover that she was a ghost haunting the highway where she had been killed in a car wreck 40 years before; the girl who died when her shrink-to-fit jeans shrunk so much while she wore them that she was crushed by their constricting force.

Whichever kind of story you choose to tell, here are some tips for making up good ones, and telling them right.

ELEMENTS OF A GHOST STORY

Mix and match these common elements to make your own ghost story.

Common characters Common ghost features Common ghost motivations Common settings Common situations

A young girl

An old woman

A camper

A person driving alone

Two friends who think they’re braver than they are

A person from your city’s past

A distant relative

A hitchhiker Able to be sensed by animals and children

Haunting the place where they died

Appearing at night and vanishing by dawn

Playful or prankish—playing music or moving things to scare people Ghost needs to find an object or person they left behind

Ghost needs to warn the main character about something

Ghost needs to deliver a comforting message to the main character

Ghost is out for revenge Your house

An abandoned mine

A graveyard

The woods

Your local scary place (cranky neighbor’s house, the old creek, etc.)

A long, empty hallway

A castle

Any isolated, spooky place Going out alone at night

Being alone in a spooky place

Getting trapped in a haunted house overnight

Picking up a hitchhiker

Disregarding a ghost’s warning or a local legend

Triggering events that summon a ghost

Don’t forget to use spooky ghost story words, like graveyard, curse, legend, bone-chilling, creepy, ominous, deadly, mysterious, eerie, grisly, gruesome, blood-curdling…anything that adds to the scary mood.

Using realistic details can make your story even spookier—having the main character be a girl who used to go to your school years ago, or having the story take place in your town, or down the street from your house, lends the tale an air of believability that draws your listeners in. Sometimes it’s helpful to have a friend in on the story—so that when you end your story with something like, “The girl was never found” (said in a somber, dramatic voice, of course), your friend can scream out, “I’m here!!!!” and make everyone else shriek.

TELLING IT RIGHT

Make sure you prepare—practice ahead of time, and coordinate with a friend if you’re going to be using a buddy for maximum scaring. When you tell your story, speak slowly, in a serious voice, and look at everyone you’re speaking to. Make sure to take your audience into consideration: if there are little sisters or younger girls there, you might want to save the super-scary stuff for after they’re asleep. And even if your crowd is a bit older, seriously scary stories can make for some sleepless nights. It’s fun to make yourself a little scared, but if a listener finds your tale too frightening, it’s also okay to turn on the light and remind everyone that it’s just a story.

Some famous ghost stories in classic literature:

Edgar Allen Poe’s

The Tell Tale Heart (1843)

Washington Irving’s

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820)

W.W. Jacobs’

The Monkey’s Paw (1902)

Charles Dickens’

A Christmas Carol (1843)

Oscar Wilde’s

The Canterville Ghost (1887)

Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1602)

OR IS IT??????

In this passage from Act I, Scene V, of the play Hamlet, we witness one of the spookiest scenes in all of Shakespeare: Hamlet is confronted by the ghost of his father, the former King of Denmark, who tries to tell Hamlet that he was murdered by his own brother.