Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Macbeth are filled with ghosts (and witches); Moaning Myrtle haunts the toilets at Harry Potter’s Hogwarts; and Dickens’s A Christmas Carol boasts not only the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, but a repentant Jacob Marley, rattling chains. And there are many more. Read at night, by flashlight, with a batch of glow-in-the-dark ghost cupcakes (yes! see below) by your side.
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FAMOUS GHOSTS
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From LiveScience, check out this list of Famous Ghosts. |
| Wikipedia’s List of Ghosts categorizes ghosts by country and classifies them under either Literature or Pop Culture. | |
| Does the ghost of Abraham Lincoln still walk the White House? Check out The Lingering Legend of Abraham Lincoln’s Ghost. | |
| One of the oldest ghost stories dates to Pliny the Elder in the 1st century CE. Learn more at History of Ghost Stories. |
GHOST STORIES FOR YOUNG READERS
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Ammi Joan Paquette’s Ghost in the House (Candlewick, 2013) is a cumulative counting book of Halloween characters in a haunted house, starting with an adorable and nervous little blue ghost. For ages 3-6. |
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By John Bemelmans Marciano (grandson of original Madeline author Ludwig Bemelmans), Madeline and the Old House in Paris (Viking Juvenile Books, 2013) features mean-spirited orphanage inspector Lord Cucuface, who has taken an antique telescope from the attic of the old house in Paris. This has upset the resident 18th-century ghost, who has been waiting for hundreds of years to view the comet that caused his death. Madeline and friend Pepito save the day. For ages 3-6. |
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In Eve Bunting’s rhyming picture book In the Haunted House (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994), two pairs of sneakered feet – blue (big) and red (small) – tiptoe through a house crammed with ghosts, witches, and ghouls. (At the end, the red-sneakered person is ready to try it all over again.) For ages 3-6. |
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In Jacqueline Ogburn’s The Bake Shop Ghost (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), Miss Cora Lee Merriweather, proprieter of the bake shop who once baked the best cakes in town, has come back as an ill-tempered ghost and now is a thorn in the side of the new owner, Annie Washington. Cora promises to leave Annie alone if Annie will make her a cake as good as one that she might have baked herself. Creative Annie finally succeeds, but it takes some effort and understanding. A cake recipe is included. For ages 4-8. |
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The title character of Kay Winters’s The Teeny Tiny Ghost (HarperCollins, 1999) is doing his best to be scarier, attending school to learn about Halloween, booing, spooky stories, and haunting – but he’s just not much good at being frightful. Then a frightening RAP on the door compels him to defend his (adorable) teeny tiny cats. For ages 4-8. |
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Alvin Schwartz’s Ghosts! (HarperCollins, 1993) is a collection of seven short “Ghostly Tales from Folklore” for beginning readers. For ages 4-8. |
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By Bill Martin, Jr., and John Archambault, The Ghost-Eye Tree (Square Fish, 1988) is a story-poem about a little boy and his older sister, sent out at night to fetch a bucket of milk, which involves passing the the truly creepy Ghost-Eye tree (“feared by all/the great and small”). The little boy wears his special hat, which makes him feel safer, even though his sister tells him it makes him look stupid. An owl panics them; he loses the hat; and his sister bravely goes back to retrieve it. A wonderfully illustrated account of being scared of the dark. For ages 4-8. |
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In Judith Viorst’s My Mama Says There Aren’t Any Zombies, Ghosts, Vampires, Creatures, Demons, Monsters, Fiends, Goblins, or Things (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 1987), Nick has his doubts: after all, he knows for a fact that Mama sometimes makes mistakes. For ages 5-8. |
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By Mary Higgins Clark, Ghost Ship (Simon & Schuster, 2007) is the picture-book story of young Thomas who, on a visit to his grandmother’s house on Cape Cod, finds a belt buckle buried in the sand which conjures up the ghost of Silas, a cabin boy who lived 300 years ago. Silas tells Thomas the exciting tale of how he and his friends saved Captain Hallett’s ship from mooncussers – thieves who used lanterns to lure ships too close to shore so that they could steal the cargo from the wrecks. With gorgeous illustrations by Wendell Minor. For ages 5-9. |
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John Muth’s exquisitely illustrated Zen Ghosts (Scholastic Press, 2010) melds an American Halloween, a wisdom-dispensing, koan-speaking Zen panda named Stillwater, and a Japanese ghost story. For ages 5-9. |
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Alvin Schwartz’s In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories (HarperCollins, 1985) – an I Can Read! Book – is a collection of seven short stories featuring toothy monsters, graveyards, and ghosts. Creepy, but not too creepy. For ages 6-8. |