Whether you’re a little-known or a super-famous author, chances are you’ve tried your hand at a ghost story. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a good example of the later, as is The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson. Pulitzer prize winner Edith Wharton has a collection of ghost stories, and Kipling’s The Phantom Rickshaw is a gem.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a timeless classic, and still scary though it’s a few hundred years old. Lesser-known ghost stories worth reading are the The Screaming Skull by Marion Crawford, and Present at a Hanging, written by critic and journalist Ambrose Bierce, who wrote regularly about ghosts and mysteries -- until he mysteriously disappeared himself in Mexico in 1913. Finally, for a scholarly exploration of ghosts and ghost stories, there’s The Book of Dreams and Ghosts by Andrew Lang.