Ghosts
Write hauntings in which the living do most of the haunting.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about ghosts: haunting imagery, craft techniques, mistakes to avoid, plus exercises, prompts and a quiz in this free guide by Writory.
What this theme is
A ghost poem is rarely about a figure in a white sheet. It is about persistence: the way a person, a house or a former self refuses to leave once the facts say it should be gone. The dead father still occupies his chair at dinner. The old flat still owns a corner of your dreams. Poetry is unusually good at this because a poem can hold two times at once, the present tense of the room and the past tense of whoever used to fill it.
The theme also carries an honest question underneath the shiver: what has the speaker failed to put down? Guilt, grief, an unfinished argument, a language no longer spoken at home. When you write a ghost, you are usually writing an obligation. The best ghost poems know this, and they let the haunting reveal the living character more than the dead one.
Why poets return to it
Poets reach for ghosts because grief needs a shape, and a ghost gives the unsayable somewhere to stand. A poem can let the dead speak one more sentence, or let the living finally say the sentence they swallowed at the funeral. Readers rarely forget a good ghost poem, because everyone is haunted by something, even if it is only a phone number they still know by heart.
Where it comes from
Thomas Hardy wrote some of the finest ghost poems in English after his wife Emma died in 1912, poems in which her voice seems to call to him across a field and he cannot tell the woman from the wind. Emily Dickinson observed that one need not be a chamber to be haunted, locating the ghost inside the skull rather than the corridor. The old ballad tradition did it earlier still: in songs like The Unquiet Grave, the dead lover speaks from the soil and asks the mourner to let them sleep.
Japanese Noh drama built an entire theatre on the same insight, staging spirits who return not to frighten anyone but to retell the injustice or love that keeps them circling. Across traditions the pattern holds: the ghost exists because a story was left unfinished.
The elements that carry it
- Thresholds, doorways, staircases and windows, the architecture of crossing over, give a haunting its geography.
- Cold air, a draught, a light left on: small physical wrongnesses persuade the reader before anything supernatural is claimed.
- Objects that keep a dead person's habits, a coat on its hook, a mug never moved, make absence visible.
- Mirrors and photographs let two times share one frame, which is what every ghost poem is secretly doing.
- Sound matters: a repeated phrase can return like footsteps, and a sudden silence can be louder than any moan.
Techniques that work
- Keep the ghost offstage and show only its effects, the dented pillow, the radio retuned, so the reader's imagination does the frightening.
- Write in the present tense; hauntings live in the perpetual now, and the grammar can enact that refusal to become past.
- Address the dead directly. Apostrophe, speaking to someone who cannot answer, is the ghost poem's native voice.
- Use a refrain that alters slightly each time it returns, so the repetition itself feels haunted.
- Preserve ambiguity to the last line: if the reader can never quite decide between ghost and memory, the poem stays alive in both readings.
Mistakes to avoid
- Gothic set dressing: chains, midnight graveyards, howling wind. Fix it by haunting a laundrette, a group chat or a Tuesday kitchen instead.
- Explaining the ghost. The moment a poem diagnoses its haunting, the temperature rises and the mystery dies; cut the explanation and keep the evidence.
- Making the ghost only frightening. Most hauntings are made of love with nowhere to go; let sorrow share the room with fear.
- Piling up spooky adjectives. Delete eerie, chilling and sinister, then show the living person checking the lock twice.
An exercise
List five objects that belonged to someone gone from your life, by death, distance or estrangement. Write a poem in which exactly one of those objects quietly misbehaves, and resist the urge to explain why.
A challenge
For seven days, write a short poem haunted by a different thing each day: a house, a song, a language, a road, a former friend, a version of yourself, a smell. Notice which haunting frightened you and which one hurt.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem in which a ghost returns to finish one mundane chore, watering a plant, paying a debt, ironing a shirt, and the living person pretends not to notice.
Before you submit
- The ghost is never fully explained or fully shown.
- At least one ordinary object carries the weight of the absence.
- The poem holds two feelings at once, fear and tenderness, or grief and relief.
- Any repetition changes slightly on each return instead of merely echoing.
- The ending leaves a door open rather than closing the case.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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