Telling Ghost Stories

SO: YOU’VE PITCHED YOUR TENT, set up your campfire, and toasted your s’mores. Or maybe you’ve made a sleep-over fort at your best friend’s house, played Truth or Dare and Bloody Mary, and gotten out the flashlights and sleeping bags. What next? Two words: Ghost stories.

Everybody loves a scary story, especially late at night around a flickering campfire, or in the dark of an unfamiliar living room with a small flashlight illuminating your face. And you may have noticed, if you’ve been on a few camp-outs or sleepovers, that many of these stories have similar themes: a ghost out for revenge or literally haunted by grief; a lonely road or abandoned house; an element of shock or surprise; and just enough true-life details to make it all seem believable in the dead of night.

Some stories involve real people and places—and supposedly real sightings—like the ghost of Queen Anne Boleyn, second wife of King Henry VIII, who is said to haunt both the Tower of London, where she was imprisoned and beheaded in 1536, and the Hever Castle in Kent, her childhood home and the setting of her first encounter with the king who would later sentence her to death. Other stories are about more anonymous ghosts—regular people who lived in the not-too-distant past and had believably scary things happen to them. And don’t discount the shock value of a good old urban legend—supposedly real stories of supposedly real people who had scary things happen to them: the woman who died of spider bites after a spider nested in her hair; the man who picked up a hitchhiker only to discover that she was a ghost haunting the highway where she had been killed in a car wreck 40 years before; the girl who died when her shrink-to-fit jeans shrunk so much while she wore them that she was crushed by their constricting force.

Whichever kind of story you choose to tell, here are some tips for making up good ones, and telling them right.

ELEMENTS OF A GHOST STORY

Mix and match these common elements to make your own ghost story.

Common characters	Common ghost features	Common ghost motivations	Common settings	Common situations
A young girl An old woman A camper A person driving alone Two friends who think they’re braver than they are A person from your city’s past A distant relative A hitchhiker	Able to be sensed by animals and children Haunting the place where they died Appearing at night and vanishing by dawn Playful or prankish—playing music or moving things to scare people	Ghost needs to find an object or person they left behind Ghost needs to warn the main character about something Ghost needs to deliver a comforting message to the main character Ghost is out for revenge	Your house An abandoned mine A graveyard The woods Your local scary place (cranky neighbor’s house, the old creek, etc.) A long, empty hallway A castle Any isolated, spooky place	Going out alone at night Being alone in a spooky place Getting trapped in a haunted house overnight Picking up a hitchhiker Disregarding a ghost’s warning or a local legend Triggering events that summon a ghost

Don’t forget to use spooky ghost story words, like graveyard, curse, legend, bone-chilling, creepy, ominous, deadly, mysterious, eerie, grisly, gruesome, blood-curdling…anything that adds to the scary mood.

Using realistic details can make your story even spookier—having the main character be a girl who used to go to your school years ago, or having the story take place in your town, or down the street from your house, lends the tale an air of believability that draws your listeners in. Sometimes it’s helpful to have a friend in on the story—so that when you end your story with something like, “The girl was never found” (said in a somber, dramatic voice, of course), your friend can scream out, “I’m here!!!!” and make everyone else shriek.

TELLING IT RIGHT

Make sure you prepare—practice ahead of time, and coordinate with a friend if you’re going to be using a buddy for maximum scaring. When you tell your story, speak slowly, in a serious voice, and look at everyone you’re speaking to. Make sure to take your audience into consideration: if there are little sisters or younger girls there, you might want to save the super-scary stuff for after they’re asleep. And even if your crowd is a bit older, seriously scary stories can make for some sleepless nights. It’s fun to make yourself a little scared, but if a listener finds your tale too frightening, it’s also okay to turn on the light and remind everyone that it’s just a story.

OR IS IT??????

In this passage from Act I, Scene V, of the play Hamlet, we witness one of the spookiest scenes in all of Shakespeare: Hamlet is confronted by the ghost of his father, the former King of Denmark, who tries to tell Hamlet that he was murdered by his own brother.

ACT I. SCENE V

GHOST

I am thy father’s spirit,

Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,

And for the day confined to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my prison-house,

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,

Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,

Thy knotted and combined locks to part

And each particular hair to stand on end,

Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:

But this eternal blazon must not be

To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list!

If thou didst ever thy dear father love—

HAMLET

O God!

GHOST

Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.

HAMLET

Murder!

GHOST

Murder most foul, as in the best it is;

But this most foul, strange and unnatural.

HAMLET

Haste me to know’t, that I, with wings as swift

As meditation or the thoughts of love,

May sweep to my revenge.

GHOST

I find thee apt;

And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed

That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,

Wouldst thou not stir in this. Now, Hamlet, hear:

‘Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark

Is by a forged process of my death Rankly abused: but know, thou noble youth, The serpent that did sting thy father’s life Now wears his crown.

HAMLET

O my prophetic soul! My uncle!

GHOST

Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts,—

O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power

So to seduce!—won to his shameful lust

The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen:

O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there!

From me, whose love was of that dignity

That it went hand in hand even with the vow

I made to her in marriage, and to decline

Upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor

To those of mine!

But virtue, as it never will be moved,

Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven,

So lust, though to a radiant angel link’d,

Will sate itself in a celestial bed,

And prey on garbage.

But, soft! methinks I scent the morning air;

Brief let me be. Sleeping within my orchard,

My custom always of the afternoon,

Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole,

With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial,

And in the porches of my ears did pour

The leperous distilment; whose effect

Holds such an enmity with blood of man

That swift as quicksilver it courses through

The natural gates and alleys of the body,

And with a sudden vigour doth posset

And curd, like eager droppings into milk,

The thin and wholesome blood: so did it mine;

And a most instant tetter bark’d about,

Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust,

All my smooth body.

Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand

Of life, of crown, of queen, at once dispatch’d:

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,

Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d,

No reckoning made, but sent to my account

With all my imperfections on my head:

O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!

If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not;

Let not the royal bed of Denmark be

A couch for luxury and damned incest.

But, howsoever thou pursuest this act,

Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive

Against thy mother aught: leave her to heaven

And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge,

To prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once!

The glow-worm shows the matin to be near,

And ‘gins to pale his uneffectual fire:

Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me.