Short Stories About Ghosts: 10 Classics Explained
Quick answer: Ten classic ghost stories, from The Signal-Man and The Canterville Ghost to Afterward and The Judge's House, summarised and compared, with the craft each teaches a writer.
The ghost story is the one form readers ask for by name. They want the old furniture, the country house, the warning, the figure at the tunnel mouth, and they want it done properly. The ten stories here are the ones that set the rules.
The collection opens with the warning ghosts, moves through the comic and the domestic, and ends in India with Tagore's palace of whispering stone. Each title links to a page that summarises the story and explains its ending.
The stories
The Signal-Man by Charles Dickens. A railway signalman in a deep cutting tells a visitor about a figure that appears at the tunnel mouth, one arm across its face, the other waving, before every accident. The visitor returns to find a crowd on the line.
The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde. An American family buys an English manor complete with a three-hundred-year-old ghost, and treats him with lubricating oil and stain remover. It is fifteen-year-old Virginia who finally asks him what he wants.
Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad by M. R. James. Professor Parkins, who does not believe in such things, blows an old whistle from a ruined church on the Suffolk coast. Something later sits up in the other bed of his hotel room and makes itself a face out of the linen.
A Haunted House by Virginia Woolf. A ghostly couple move through a house at night looking for the treasure they buried there, while the living couple sleep. The treasure turns out to be what the living have.
Afterward by Edith Wharton. The Boynes buy an old Dorset house whose ghost, they are told, you only recognise long afterward. A stranger calls one morning to see Ned, and Ned is not seen again.
The Phantom Rickshaw by Rudyard Kipling. In Simla an engaged man is followed through the streets by the rickshaw of the woman he jilted, who died of it. Everyone else sees only the empty road.
The Judge's House by Bram Stoker. A student rents an old hanging judge's house for quiet study and is troubled by a great rat that sits in the judge's chair. The alarm bell rope hangs conveniently in the room.
The Room in the Tower by E. F. Benson. A man dreams the same dream for fifteen years, of a house party and a hostess who assigns him the room in the tower. Then he is invited to a real house and hears the words spoken aloud.
A Ghost Story by Mark Twain. A lodger in an empty New York building is visited by the ghost of the Cardiff Giant, a petrified man on show in the museum across the street. The ghost has been haunting the wrong exhibit.
The Hungry Stones by Rabindranath Tagore. A cotton tax collector posted to a deserted Mughal palace on the Susta begins hearing footsteps and laughter at dusk, and a Persian girl who beckons. A madman outside shouts every morning that it is all false.
Reading them together
The collection argues that a ghost is a message that arrives at the wrong time. Dickens's spectre warns and cannot be understood; Wharton's is recognised only afterward; Benson's is announced fifteen years early in a dream. Wilde and Twain treat the same furniture as farce, and the joke in both is that the ghost is the one who needs help. Tagore's palace inverts the English model: the haunting is not a warning but a seduction.
Compare The Signal-Man with Afterward. Both build an entire story around a gesture or a sentence whose meaning is delivered too late to act on, and both leave the survivor to reconstruct it.
A ghost story that lands its ending on a delayed meaning like this tends to score well on Structure and Emotional Impact when it enters Writory's monthly short story contest.
If you want to write about ghosts
What writers can take from this
- Read The Signal-Man first; it is the template and still the best.
- Pair Oh, Whistle with The Judge's House for two academics who should have stayed at home.
- The Canterville Ghost and A Ghost Story are the comic pair, and both are also about how Americans and English see the past.
- Afterward asks to be read twice; on the second pass every visit to the house means something else.
- The Hungry Stones is the odd one, told inside a frame on a railway platform; notice how the frame ends.
Try it yourself
Write a ghost story in which the haunting is a warning the living misread, and the reader works out what it meant one paragraph before the character does.
Questions
What is the best classic ghost story?
The Signal-Man by Dickens and Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad by M. R. James are the two most often placed at the top. Afterward is the choice of readers who prefer the slow kind.
Which ghost stories are good for students?
The Signal-Man, The Canterville Ghost and The Judge's House are clear and much taught. A Haunted House is very short and useful for discussing point of view.
Which classic ghost story is the shortest?
A Haunted House by Virginia Woolf, at under a thousand words. A Ghost Story by Twain is also short.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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