Last week, we traveled a terrifying timeline of ghost tropes that extends back at least four thousand years to ancient Mesopotamia, where the goddess Irkalla employed the spirits of the dead as eternal servants in her House of Dust. While ghosts have haunted literature throughout our history – in Greek legends and letters between Romans, in biblical parables and Renaissance passion plays – the death-obsessed Victorians elevated the ghost tale into a genre all its own.
During the mid-19th century, malaria, pneumonia, and cholera (as well as typhus, tuberculosis, and typhoid fever) ran roughshod through the populations of burgeoning European and American cities. Between August and November of 1862 in Wilmington, North Carolina alone, at least 654 people died of yellow fever. Tack onto that deaths from childbirth, which took the lives of 1 in 100 mothers, and the death toll of the Civil War, which is estimated at about 620,000 dead, and it’s easy to empathize with Victorian society’s deep preoccupation with death and the afterlife.
The Spiritualist movement was on the rise, promoting the belief that the living could communicate with the dead through mediums and séances, and so was psychology. By the late 19th century, curiosity about the human mind, the nature of the human soul, and the complexity of human emotions were spurring advances in this new field, which, in turn, reshaped how writers approached supernatural tales, shifting the focus from external phantasmagorical* forces to the internal psychological experiences of characters. As a result of these changes as well as the rapid technological progress made throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, a whole new slew of ghost tropes crept into the modern era, poisoning everything from childhood to telephones with malevolent terrors.
*In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the growing popularity of séances led to the debut of phantasmagoria, frightening theatrical productions that employed prototypes of modern film projectors called “magic lanterns” to cast images of skeletons, witches, and ghosts onto walls and, sometimes, smoke, creating eerie, moving scenes. Today, the term “phantasmagorical” (from the Greek phántasma + agorá, or ghost assembly) describes anything surreal or dreamlike, particularly when it evokes an otherworldly atmosphere. The featured image of this post is an engraving that shows the world famous phantasmagoria of the Belgian physicist and stage magician Etienne Gaspard Robertson.
And, now, back to your regularly scheduled ghost tropes…
A Head Full of Ghosts
In Henry James’ classic novel The Turn of the Screw, it’s unclear whether the sadistic specters of Miss Jessell and Peter Quint represent an actual haunting or whether they’re merely figments in the imagination of the unnamed governess to young Flora and Miles Bly. This ambiguity is central to the unreliable narrator trope, which was popularized by the rise of psychology in the 19th century. Henry James’ own brother William was a pioneering psychologist whose work on consciousness and the subconscious directly influenced Henry’s writing, making The Turn of the Screw an early entry into the modern psychological horror genre.
William James explored how perception, memory, and mental processes could distort a person’s sense of reality, a problem also explored by his brother in The Turn of the Screw. In the passage below, the governess hopes a vision of the ghostly Miss Jessell might also be seen by her friend and Bly manor servant Mrs. Grose. The reader’s anxiety mounts in proportion to the uncertainty surrounding the narrator’s mental state:
… the hideous plain presence stood undimmed and undaunted. It had already lasted a minute, and it lasted while I continued, seizing my colleague, quite thrusting her at it and presenting her to it, to insist with my pointing hand. “You don’t see her exactly as we see? — you mean to say you don’t now — now? She’s as big as a blazing fire! Only look, dearest woman, look — !” She looked, even as I did, and gave me, with her deep groan of negation, repulsion, compassion — the mixture with her pity of her relief at her exemption — a sense, touching to me even then, that she would have backed me up if she could.
The unreliable narrator has since become a key element in many horror stories, heightening tension by playing on the disturbing fear of coming undone as a result of a mental meltdown. This plot line takes advantage of a deep-rooted anxiety that our own perception of reality might be dangerously flawed. From Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House to contemporary works like A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay, this trope continues to blur the line between the supernatural and the psychological.
For another Victorian era tale of terror with an unreliable narrator as well as a scathing critique of the day’s dubious mental health cures, try Charlotte Gilman Perkins’ “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
It’s Child’s Play
We also have the Victorians to thank for one of the most viscerally sinister ghost story tropes: creepy kids. In The Turn of the Screw, it’s so difficult to imagine the two cherubs Miles and Flora affiliated with evil that even the narrator questions whether her mental state rather than her darling charges or their grim companions could be the source of the supposed haunting.
Victorians idealized childhood innocence, so audiences of the time found the concept of corrupted children especially terrifying. In stories like The Turn of the Screw, the purity of youth is perverted, leaving adults to wonder about the true nature of the mysterious inner worlds of children:
Flora continued to fix me with her small mask of reprobation, and even at that minute I prayed God to forgive me for seeming to see that, as she stood there holding tight to our friend’s dress, her incomparable childish beauty had suddenly failed, had quite vanished. I’ve said it already — she was literally, she was hideously, hard; she had turned common and almost ugly.
Today, our view of childhood is more complex. It’s no longer the haven it once was, but that doesn’t change our primal response to seeing a child in danger. If the child is the source of the danger, the emotional tension is even more intense as most adults are hardwired with an instinct to protect the young, or at least to do no harm to them. This paradox — where we feel both fear of and fear for the child — adds moral conflict to the supernatural terror of a ghost story.
For two of my all-time favorite entries in the creepy kids canon, try Mario Bava’s film Kill, Baby… Kill!, which I swear is much better than the title would suggest, and Nothing but the Night, a 1973 Christopher Lee flick that pairs well with The Wicker Man, which is creepy kid adjacent. All three are on Tubi for free right now. You’re welcome.
Twice-Told Terror
One of the wiliest ways to establish credibility and suspense in a ghost story is through the twice-told terror trope, where a narrator recounts a story they’ve heard from “someone they know.” You may have heard a “real ghost story” situated in the same way. My friend Natalie terrifies her nieces and nephews with a (totally fake) recounting of my (totally fake) personal experience with a black-eyed child (which absolutely did not happen). But telling those poor, gullible kids it happened to someone she personally knows, someone they’ve heard her talk about before in non-ghostly contexts, makes the story feel more real. And, obviously, I’m more than happy to go along with her wicked plot.
In The Turn of the Screw, James creates a similar scenario in the prologue, in which a group of people gathered around a fire listen as a member of the party prepares to share an authentic (but not really) manuscript detailing the governess’s true (but not really), harrowing account of ghostly encounters. M.R. James employed a similar technique in many of his tales, which are presented as second-hand accounts of strange events, immersing the reader in a familiar, even friendly, storytelling style. In “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” for example, the personable narrator recounts, in a most conversational style, the eerie experience of an antiquarian scholar who finds an ancient whistle that summons a malevolent ghost. The narrator’s affable voice and intimate tone anchors the yarn in reality, making the horror feel closer and more credible.
In modern times, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (which I have been unable to finish because it so unsettles me) turns the twice-told terror trope into a Rube Goldberg machine of macabre horror. The novel features multiple layers of narration, with stories nested within stories, each one refracted through different perspectives. The central narrative — a documentary film about a house with impossible, shifting dimensions — is filtered through various interpreters, from an editor to the protagonist Johnny Truant. This layering of narratives creates a kaleidoscopic effect, grounding the terrifying events in a web of subjective experiences that force the reader to question the nature of truth and reality.
Uncanny Valley of the Dolls
My own earliest fear was stoked by an episode of In Search Of, specifically The Amityville Horror episode, where a doll with glowing red eyes rocked in a child’s chair whenever the lights were turned off. That made dolls a big NOPE for me, and I’m relieved to know that I’m not the first person to feel that way. Haunted dolls (and clowns and puppets, etc.) have been tropes since way back. Again, we can turn to our old friend M.R. James for an example with his twice-told terror “The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance,” which begins:
The letters which I now publish were sent to me recently by a person who knows me to be interested in ghost stories. There is no doubt about their authenticity. The paper on which they are written, the ink, and the whole external aspect put their date beyond the reach of question.
In the epistolary story that follows, a Punch and Judy puppet show takes on an alarming aspect when the puppets become disturbingly human. As the narrator notes, “Punch was still Punch, it is true, but, like the others, was in some sense a live creature, and both moved themselves at their own will.” Ew.
The Edwardian author F. Marion Crawford similarly explored the uncanny valley in “The Doll’s Ghost.” In the story, a child’s beloved doll is broken, and when it’s taken to a doll hospital for repairs, strange occurrences begin to take place. The doll’s haunting presence plays in the space of childish nightmares — its near-human appearance and the way it seemingly moves of its own accord tap into the deeply disquieting notion of dolls coming to life.
If you want to never sleep again, watch the 1978 psychological horror Magic, which stars Anthony Hopkins as a schizophrenic ventriloquist who falls under the control of his devilish dummy Fatts. It inspired the 1988 supernatural doll horror Child’s Play, but the trailer for Magic was arguably more frightening than either. It was so traumatic to us 70s kids that there’s a documentary about it on Shudder called Primal Screen.
Ghost in the Machine
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, rapidly evolving technologies paralleled shifting ideas about the paranormal, creating fertile ground for a new trope to emerge: the ghost in the machine. Early technological spectacles like the phantasmagoria theater and lifelike mechanical marionettes called automatons foreshadowed the way telephones and film projectors (and, later, computers and robots) would expand human communication and imagination. Thomas Edison is famously associated with an attempt to create a “spirit phone” to communicate with the dead in the 1920s, and in the mid-20th century, weird writer Robert Aickman’s story “Your Tiny Hand is Frozen” used a regular, everyday telephone as a chilling conduit for ghostly contact.
In Aickman’s tale, a man receives troubling phone calls from an unknown woman, and the conversations lead to a blurred boundary between the living and the dead. The telephone, typically a symbol of modern communication, becomes a tool for supernatural intrusion, illustrating how evolving technologies — originally meant to connect people — could just as easily open doors to spectral forces. This story suggests how the ordinary can become haunted, mirroring earlier anxieties about technology’s ability to bridge not just geographic distance, but the divide between life and death.
Some of my favorite recent docudrama podcasts like Video Palace and Archive 81 show how the ghost in the machine trope continues to evolve, adapting to new technologies and exploring the tension between the human and the virtual. By making everyday devices — recorders, videos, computers, etc. — the focal points of supernatural terror, these stories tap into modern fears about how technology connects us to unseen, uncontrollable forces.
Now, you try.
You’ve got five time-tested ghost story tropes at your tiny, frozen fingertips, so let’s play around with them. Below, you’ll find a prompt for each trope to get you started on a ghost story of your own. I hope one of them possesses you with the motivation to finish up your 1,300-word ghost story for the EPIC Carteret Winter Hauntings contest!
Write a story in which the protagonist may be haunted – but they may be the victim of their own vulnerable mental state.
Write a story about a group of children at a tech-free, barrier island summer camp who begin behaving strangely.
Recall a ghost story someone told you once upon a time and embellish it to add your own flair.
Write a story about a haunted Barbie doll and how she turns someone’s Dream Home into a nightmare.
Write a story about a killer computer.
You remain the spookiest person I know, thanks for sharing your expertise.
Thanks, sis!