Ghosts in... books!!!

Good morning and a wonderful weekend ahead ladies, gents and colorful children!!!

Halloween is over... Christmas is near and the weather is getting colder! As a bookworm, proud and strong, I'd say that this is the puuurfect weather for reading!!! hehehe

Ghosts are always popular. Their plane of existance is present in all religions, beliefs in all civilizations since the dawn of humans. The need of man to believe into something beyond death, to have a continuity after this life and the need to feel that someone is protecting us and our beloved won't leave us forever, plus the millions of sightings have led mankind to a huge amount of literature and research about ghosts, whether malevolent or good spirits.

Let's see more about the phenomenon and what's happening when it comes to literature ;)

The definition of "Ghost"

"the spirit of a dead person, sometimes represented as a pale, almost transparent image of that person that some people believe appears to people who are alive" ( Cambridge Dictionary)

"Throughout history, the idea that a person's soul or spirit can remain visible after her death has been common. Some of us long to see the ghost of a loved relative, while others are terrified of the very idea. From this main idea, the word ghost has also come to mean the hint or shade of something: "The ghost of a smile remained on her lips." The Old English root is gast, "spirit," and also "breath."" (vocabulary.com)

Now let's see a list of books we suggest on ghosts! Ghost stories that will terrify you, melt your heart of even give amazing information on the matter! So many different genres to choose from, depending on what's your style really is.

1) Ghost story (Peter Straub) - 1979

Ghost Story is a horror novel by American writer Peter Straub. It was published on January 1, 1979, by Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, and adapted as a 1981 horror film, minus the fifth protagonist, Lewis Benedikt. It was a watershed in Straub's career, becoming a national bestseller and cementing his reputation.

The novel opens with a man named Donald Wanderley traveling with a young girl whom he has apparently kidnapped. Eventually, Donald and the girl arrive in Panama City, Florida, at which point the novel jumps back in time to the events of the previous winter.

Living in the small upstate New York town of Milburn (a fictional location which is indicated to be in Broome County east of Binghamton) are four elderly men who are members of a clique called the Chowder Society: John Jaffrey, a doctor; Lewis Benedikt, a retired entrepreneur; Sears James, an attorney; and Ricky Hawthorne, an attorney and James' partner. For the past 50 years these best friends have gathered together and told each other stories and have been great companions. However, their group once consisted of five members. One year earlier Jaffrey had thrown a party at his house in honor of a visiting actress, and their fifth member, Edward Wanderley, had died in an upstairs bedroom during the festivities. There was a look of absolute horror on his face, as if he had been frightened to death.

Peter Francis Straub (born March 2, 1943) is an American novelist and poet. He has written numerous horror and supernatural fiction novels, including Julia and Ghost Story, as well as The Talisman, which he co-wrote with Stephen King. Straub has received such literary honors as the Bram Stoker Award, World Fantasy Award, and International Horror Guild Award.

Straub was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of Gordon Anthony Straub and Elvena (Nilsestuen) Straub. At the age of seven, Straub was struck by a car, sustaining serious injuries. He was hospitalized for several months, and temporarily used a wheelchair after being released until he had re-learned how to walk. Straub has said that the accident made him prematurely aware of his own mortality.

Straub read voraciously from an early age, but his literary interests did not please his parents; his father hoped that he would grow up to be a professional athlete, while his mother wanted him to be a Lutheran minister. He attended Milwaukee Country Day School on a scholarship, and, during his time there, began writing.

Straub earned an honors B.A. in English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1965, and an MA at Columbia University a year later. He briefly taught English at Milwaukee Country Day, then moved to Dublin, Ireland, in 1969 to work on a Ph.D., and to start writing professionally.

2) The woman in black ( Susan Hill) - 1983

The Woman in Black is a 1983 gothic horror novel written by Susan Hill. The plot concerns a mysterious spectre that haunts a small English town. A television film based on the story, also called The Woman in Black, was produced in 1989, with a screenplay by Nigel Kneale. In 2012, another film adaption was released, starring Daniel Radcliffe.

The book has also been adapted into a stage play by Stephen Mallatratt. It is the second longest-running play in the history of the West End, after The Mousetrap.

The novel is narrated by Arthur Kipps, the young lawyer who formerly worked for Mr. Bentley. One Christmas Eve he is at home with his second wife Esmé and four stepchildren, who are sharing ghost stories. When he is asked to tell a story, he becomes irritated and leaves the room, and decides to write his horrific experiences several years in the past in the hopes that doing so will exorcise them from his memory.

Many years earlier, whilst still a junior solicitor for Bentley, Kipps is summoned to Crythin Gifford, a small market town on the north east coast of England, to attend the funeral of Mrs. Alice Drablow and settle her estate. Kipps is reluctant to leave his fiancée, Stella, but eager to get away from the dreary London fog. The late Mrs. Drablow was an elderly and reclusive widow who lived alone in the desolate and secluded Eel Marsh House.

The house is situated on Nine Lives Causeway. At high tide, it is completely cut off from the mainland, surrounded only by marshes and sea frets. Kipps soon realises that there is more to Alice Drablow than he originally thought. At the funeral, he sees a woman dressed in black and with a pale face and dark eyes, whom a group of children are silently watching. While sorting through Mrs. Drablow's papers at Eel Marsh House over the course of several days, he endures an increasingly terrifying sequence of unexplained noises, chilling events and appearances by the Woman in Black. In one of these instances, he hears the sound of a horse and carriage in distress, closely followed by the screams of a young child and his maid, coming from the direction of the marshes...

Dame Susan Hill, (born 5 February 1942) is an English author of fiction and non-fiction works. Her novels include The Woman in Black, The Mist in the Mirror, and I'm the King of the Castle, for which she received the Somerset Maugham Award in 1971.

She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2012 Birthday Honours and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2020 Birthday Honours, both for services to literature.

Hill was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. Her home town was later referred to in her novel A Change for the Better (1969) and in some short stories like Cockles and Mussels.

She attended Scarborough Convent School, where she became interested in theatre and literature. Her family left Scarborough in 1958 and moved to Coventry where her father worked in car and aircraft factories. Hill states that she attended a girls' grammar school, Barr's Hill. Her fellow pupils included Jennifer Page, the first Chief Executive of the Millennium Dome. At Barrs Hill, she took A levels in English, French, History, and Latin, proceeding to an English degree at King's College London. By this time, she had already written her first novel, The Enclosure, which was published by Hutchinson in her first year at the university.

Her next novel Gentleman and Ladies was published in 1968 and was runner-up for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. This was followed in quick succession by A Change for the Better, I'm the King of the Castle, The Albatross and other stories, Strange Meeting, The Bird of Night, A Bit of Singing and Dancing and In the Springtime of the Year, all written and published between 1968 and 1974.

3) The legend of Sleepy Hollow (Washington Irving) - 1819

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a gothic story by American author Washington Irving, contained in his collection of 34 essays and short stories titled The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Written while Irving was living abroad in Birmingham, England, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was first published in 1819. Along with Irving's companion piece Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is among the earliest examples of American fiction with enduring popularity, especially during Halloween because of a character known as the Headless Horseman believed to be a Hessian soldier who was decapitated by a cannonball in battle. In 1949, the second film adaptation was produced by Walt Disney as one of two segments in the package filmThe Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad.

The story is set in 1790 in the countryside around the Dutch settlement of Tarry Town (historical Tarrytown, New York), in a secluded glen known as Sleepy Hollow. Sleepy Hollow is renowned for its ghosts and the haunting atmosphere that pervades the imaginations of its inhabitants and visitors. Some residents say this town was bewitched during the early days of the Dutch settlement, while others claim that the mysterious atmosphere was caused by an old Native American chief, the "wizard of his tribe ... before the country was discovered by Master Hendrik Hudson." Residents of the town are seemingly subjected to various supernatural and mysterious occurrences. They are subjected to trance like visions and frequented by strange sights, music, and voices "in the air." The inhabitants of Sleepy Hollow are fascinated by the "local tales, haunted spots, and twilight superstitions" on account of the mysterious occurrences and haunting atmosphere. The most infamous spectre in the Hollow, and the "commander-in-chief of all the powers of the air," is the Headless Horseman. He is supposedly the ghost of a Hessian trooper whose head had been shot off by a stray cannonball during "some nameless battle" of the Revolution, and who "rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head".

Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859) was an American short-story writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century. He is best known for his short stories "Rip Van Winkle" (1819) and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820), both of which appear in his collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His historical works include biographies of Oliver Goldsmith, Muhammad and George Washington, as well as several histories of 15th-century Spain that deal with subjects such as Alhambra, Christopher Columbus and the Moors. Irving served as American ambassador to Spain in the 1840s.

Born and raised in Manhattan to a merchant family, Irving made his literary debut in 1802 with a series of observational letters to the Morning Chronicle, written under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle. He temporarily moved to England for the family business in 1815 where he achieved fame with the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., serialized from 1819–20. He continued to publish regularly throughout his life, and he completed a five-volume biography of George Washington just eight months before his death at age 76 in Tarrytown, New York.

Irving was one of the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, and he encouraged other American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. He was also admired by some British writers, including Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley, Francis Jeffrey and Walter Scott. He advocated for writing as a legitimate profession and argued for stronger laws to protect American writers from copyright infringement.

4) The Canterville Ghost ( Oscar Wilde) - 1887

"The Canterville Ghost" is a humorous short story by Oscar Wilde. It was the first of Wilde's stories to be published, appearing in two parts in The Court and Society Review, 23 February and 2 March 1887.

The story is about an American family who moved to a castle haunted by the ghost of a dead English nobleman, who killed his wife and was then walled in and starved to death by his wife's brothers. It has been adapted for the stage and screen.

The American Minister to the Court of St James's, Hiram B. Otis, and his family move into Canterville Chase, an English country house, despite warnings from Lord Canterville that the house is haunted. Mr Otis says that he will take the furniture as well as the ghost at valuation. The Otis family includes Mr and Mrs Otis, their eldest son Washington, their daughter Virginia, and the Otis twins. At first, none of the Otis family believes in ghosts, but shortly after they move in, none of them can deny the presence of Sir Simon de Canterville. Mrs Otis notices a mysterious bloodstain on the floor, and comments that "She does not at all care for bloodstains in the living room": Mrs Umney, the housekeeper, tells her that the bloodstain is evidence of the ghost and cannot be removed. However, Washington Otis, the eldest son, suggests that the stain will be removed with Pinkerton's Champion Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent. When the ghost makes his first appearance, Mr Otis promptly gets out of bed and pragmatically offers the ghost Tammany Rising Sun Lubricator to oil his chains. Angrily the ghost throws the bottle and runs into the corridor. The Otis twins throw pillows on him and the ghost flees.

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46.

As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on the new "English Renaissance in Art" and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The opportunity to construct aesthetic details precisely, and combine them with larger social themes, drew Wilde to write drama. He wrote Salome (1891) in French while in Paris but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Unperturbed, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.

5) The little stranger (Sarah Waters) - 2009

The Little Stranger is a 2009 gothic novel written by Sarah Waters. It is a ghost story set in a dilapidated mansion in Warwickshire, England in the 1940s. Departing from her earlier themes of lesbian and gay fiction, Waters' fifth novel features a male narrator, a country doctor who makes friends with an old gentry family of declining fortunes who own a very old estate that is crumbling around them. The stress of reconciling the state of their finances with the familial responsibility of keeping the estate coincides with perplexing events which may or may not be of supernatural origin, culminating in tragedy.

Reviewers note that the themes in The Little Stranger are alternately reflections of evil and struggle related to upper class hierarchy misconfiguration in post war Britain. Waters stated that she did not set out to write a ghost story, but began her writing with an exploration of the rise of socialism in the United Kingdom and how the fading gentry dealt with losing their legacies. A mix of influences is evident to reviewers: Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Wilkie Collins, and Edgar Allan Poe. The novel was mostly well received by critics as Waters' strengths are exhibited in setting of mood and pacing of the story. It is Waters' third novel to be short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

Faraday, a country doctor with humble beginnings, is called to Hundreds Hall, an 18th-century estate that has survived far beyond its former glory. He treats a young maid who dislikes the large, draughty emptiness of the house, but strikes a friendship with Caroline Ayres, the unmarried daughter of the family, her brother Roderick, who continues to heal physically and mentally from his experiences as a pilot in World War II, and their mother, the lady of the estate. He begins treating Roderick's lingering badly-healed wounds and becomes a family friend, knowing them well enough to realise they are in dire financial straits and unable to keep the house in any comfortable condition without selling their lands or objects in the house.

In an attempt to cheer up the family and possibly match Caroline to a potential husband, they throw a party for a few family friends when disaster strikes. A couple brings their young child who is mauled by Caroline's ancient and previously gentle Labrador retriever. Roderick begins to behave moodily and drink heavily. Faraday believes the strain of managing the estate is at fault. Roderick, however, divulges that something appeared in his room the night the dog attacked the girl. He says that it was first in his room trying to harm him, and that he must keep the unseen force focused on him so as not to direct its attention to his sister or mother. Spots begin appearing on his walls looking like burns, and, after Caroline awakes in the middle of the night to find his room on fire, Roderick is committed to a mental hospital.

Sarah Ann Waters (born 21 July 1966) is a Welsh novelist. She is best known for her novels set in Victorian society and featuring lesbian protagonists, such as Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith.

Sarah Waters was born in Neyland, Pembrokeshire, Wales in 1966. She later moved to Middlesbrough when she was eight years old.

She grew up in a family that included her father Ron, mother Mary, and a "much older" sister. Her mother was a housewife and her father an engineer who worked on oil refineries. She describes her family as "pretty idyllic, very safe and nurturing". Her father, "a fantastically creative person", encouraged her to build and invent.

Waters said, "When I picture myself as a child, I see myself constructing something, out of plasticine or papier-mâché or Meccano; I used to enjoy writing poems and stories, too." She wrote stories and poems that she describes as "dreadful gothic pastiches", but had not planned her career. Despite her obvious enjoyment of writing, she did not feel any special calling or preference for becoming a novelist in her youth.

Waters was a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, joining as a result of her boyfriend at the time. Politically, she has always identified as a leftist.

I'll leave it here for today, since it's a lot of reading already, especially if you choose to acquire and read one of these titles. We'd be more than happy to hear your own ghost stories, whether real or fictional!

Enjoy your reading... alone.. or with your ..ghosts! ;)