horror story essay 100 words

6 Sincerely Spooky Stories in 100 Words or Less

Halloween is upon us, but here in the digital age, it’s hard to find the time to read a short story, let alone a full-length horror novel. Here, then, are six blood-curdling tales for the digital age, each 100 words or less.

RELATED : 10+ Short Scary Stories You Definitely Don’t Want To Read Alone

Sally’s parents went out for a Halloween dinner, so Sally decided to invite a few friends over. There was some booze and pot, some slasher DVDs, and then the spooky highlight: a Ouija board.

Just gibberish at first and then, to their horror and delight, messages.

Specific messages.

S-A-L-L-Y , the board spelled out.

“Who is this?” said Sally.

SALLY OH SALLY

“Are you dead?”

“How did you die?”

“Who are you?”

YOUR MOTHER

Sally is still screaming when the police car arrives, and a single officer, cap respectfully in his hands, approaches the house.

Driscoll and Smedley are grave robbers. Their night’s work done, they head to the hospital on a cart loaded with fresh corpses.

No honor among thieves: Driscoll plans to cut Smedley’s throat after they get paid. Driscoll cackles to himself as they traverse the London dawn. He looks at Smedley, thinking: He has no idea.

“Excellent,” shouts Dr. Barron from a casement window as they draw up with their grisly cargo. “You’ve brought me those seven corpses I need!”

” ‘Ere,” says Driscoll. “There’s only six on the cart! You told me—”

“Yeah,” says Smedley, drawing his revolver. “I did, didn’t I?”

They entered the chamber.

Kendall was gripped by foreboding. There was the altar stone with its spiral pattern, carved millennia ago.

Glover shone his torch around the gloom. “The legends say this place makes people vanish.”

“Hard to see where anyone could vanish to.”

“Ten have, over the last 200 years.”

Kendall stared into the spiral carving; as he did so, he felt an awful sense of unease. Suddenly, he saw infinity. The same pattern repeating, over and over, reminding him of something. And then he was remembering, screaming—

Kendall was gripped by foreboding…

The Old Well

Frightened human eye pupil with a skull within it

I fell down the old well. Fortunately, I wasn’t hurt. At the bottom, there was a skeleton, a horrid thing in the tatters of a summer dress. I was terrified. I climbed out and ran back to the house but I couldn’t find my family, only a man and a woman I didn’t know. I approached them; the man ignored me, but the woman screamed, and then I realized there was something important I had forgotten.

Then I was back in the dark well again, with that horrible skeleton.

What have I forgotten? What was it?

From Room 116 come the sounds of flamenco in the hot Seville night. The clacking of castanets, the shuffle of heels, the melancholy guitar.

“Christ,” says Benson. “For the third night running!”

Before he knows it, he’s out of bed and hammering on the door of 116. “Keep that bloody noise down!”

The noises stop abruptly. The door creaks open.

On the bare floorboards are a broken guitar, cracked castanets and a pair of mouldering high-heeled shoes.

The dust is thick. Undisturbed.

All Benson can hear now is the sound of his own breathing, hard and fast.

Long Distance Call

At the hideout, the phone rang. Trembling, Dan answered.

“Dan! It’s Tony.”

Dan gasped.

“I thought you were—”

“Just listen. Guess the bank job didn’t go like we planned, huh? Still. At least one of us got away.”

“What are you—”

“Shhh. I had to describe it. This place.”

“Whispering shadows. The sky white with ash. The horizon roars, and the streets are bleached bone…”

“Nobody has a face.”

“This isn’t funny.”

“I mean, I expected flames, and pitchforks, laughing devils. Not this.”

“But you’ll see. Soon enough, Danny Boy. You’ll see.”

Cover photo: ifeel_infinite/flickr

This article was originally published on November 1, 2014

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The Writing Life

100-word horror story

Since tomorrow is Insecure Writers’ Support Group day, I’ll make this post short and sweet.

I was recently challenged to write a 100-word horror story. Feel free to write your own and share it in the comments, if you like.

The questions began every evening. I tried my best to answer them.

“daddy, why is the sky blue”, i sighed with relief—this one i knew. “it isn’t really—it’s colorless. the reflection of the sun’s rays makes it seem blue.”, she paused for a moment. her next question was a little harder., “daddy, where did mommy go”, the thought of her mother still made my chest tight. “mommy got sick, and the angels took her away so she wouldn’t suffer.”, her last question was the most difficult., “daddy, why did you kill me”, i wish i had the answer., 1 part newsletter, 1 part unnerving updates, 2 parts sneak peeks of new projects., 35 comments.

That is chilling. Didn’t see it coming.

Thanks so much, Alex! You ROCK.

yikes, totally out of left field!

I’ll take that as a compliment, Susan. 😀

Wow, I’m like Alex. I totally didn’t see that ending coming. Makes me want to know more.

Thoughts in Progress and MC Book Tours

Thanks so much, Mason! Who knows…maybe, like the best horror movie characters, they’ll come back.

Wow. Just Wow!

Aw, thanks Denise. Everyone is being so kind. I didn’t expect such a wonderful response–I’m a little overwhelmed. 🙂

That was amazing, and horrifying. I’ll have to play with something really short like this. I’m surprised how powerful it could be with so few words.

@mirymom1 from Balancing Act

Thanks, Samantha. I’m glad you liked it. The PR team at Samhain asked me to write it, and when they first suggested it, I thought, “I can’t do that–a horror story in 100 words? That’s crazy!”

Turns out I can! 😀

If you try it, tag me.

*chills* *chills* *chills*

That is SO creepy!

Aw, thanks Heather! *hugs*

Totally chilling!

And you know how much I love micro fiction AND horror. 🙂

Thanks, Madeline! It’s great to hear from a master of the genre.

It begs for an encore. Nicely done. 🙂

Thanks so much, Henry! And thanks for posting your own on my Facebook page . That was awesome.

You’re welcome. It was a fun challenge. I wish more people would give it a try.

You and me both!

Creepy. Makes me want to hear more.

Thanks, Lisa. You never know…maybe these two will speak to me some more one day, demanding a novel of their own.

Thanks so much, Adam! Welcome to my blog. 🙂

That ending is chilling! This reminded me of something I read before. I swear I’ve read something before about a child asking a dad questions and each one was harder for him to answer. Hmm…I can’t think of where I read it, though. Oh well. Great job! I should try 100 word stories. 🙂

Thanks, Chrys. Is it possible you read it when I promoted it for Samhain? They were the ones who asked me to write it initially, and I shared it back then.

Yep. That ending was chilling all right. Oh, the ghost of Mark Twain just followed your Twitter account — on account you were pretty he said, wagging his eyebrows! Sigh. Forgive the old rascal. He’s mostly harmless except to himself!! 🙂

Well, I’m flattered, Roland. And you can tell Mr. Twain I said so.

Wow! I did not see that coming and that is downright creepy but it would make a great book and movie

Wow, you’re too kind, Birgit! Thanks so much. 🙂

Horrifying, really. Well done.

Thanks so much, Mary!

CREEPY!!!! I love it. =) <3

Thanks, Nikki. I adore you!

That was great. I didn’t see that ending.

Thanks, Patricia!

i lovgfe your pageeeeeee

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4920+ Horror Short Stories to read

Submitted by writers on Reedsy Prompts to our weekly writing contest . From hauntings and murderers to terrifying creatures from the deep, our collection of horror stories will have you breaking out in cold sweats. Take a look… if you dare.

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“ the gingerbread cookies ” by aaron chin.

🏆 Winner of Contest #229

The Gingerbread Cookies Let’s go downstairs and bake some cookies, like mother used to make. The warm smell sits right at home in your nostrils, invading them like wild ax-murderers hacking and slashing their way through endless miles of human bodies that stand in the way of their inhumane, carnal desires. Shhh, shhh, but that’s too dark. It’s Christmas after all. So let’s go down...

“ Cerulean ” by AnneMarie Miles

🏆 Winner of Contest #223

The door is cerulean, a bright and vibrant blue, but really it is the color of my sudden uneasiness. The feeling creeps up me slowly, jumps out at me dauntingly, and I am frozen in it. If the door were a mirror – and how I wish it were as innocent as a mirror – I would see my face reflected back to me, and it would tell me to run.I’m not sure what’s more jarring: the fact that this door is a clashing contrast to the rest of the library décor, or the fact that I’ve never noticed the path we took to get here before. I supp...

“ Do Flamethrowers Belong In The Library? ” by Kenz Ross

🏆 Winner of Contest #211

We lose people all the time. It’s just the nature of the job. What can you expect from a place full of nooks and crannies people intentionally go to get lost in? I usually don’t worry when I don’t see someone for a while, but when it’s been days since someone’s checked out, it’s usually a sign that I need to step in. I’m not doing this alone, thankfully. No Librarian i...

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“ a belly full of apples ” by story time.

Submitted to Contest #247

Well, explain to me what it was doing on the tree if I wasn’t meant to eat it? I had a long, hard day, Adam. If you remember correctly, you were supposed to name all the animals with tails, while I handled the green ones. The next thing I know, you’re passed out by the water circle taking yet another one of your naps. That left me to come up with all those names, and by the time I was done, I was famished. The apple tree is the closest to the water hole, and that’s why I picked an apple. It was convenient. I wasn’t deliberately trying to dis...

“ The selfie of Dorian Gray ” by Fox Ferguson

⭐️ Shortlisted for Contest #244

[Content note: substance misuse, suicide, transphobia]Picture this: Dorian Gray, 25, gorgeous bachelor of the Brighton gay scene #handsomeAF #queen #slay. Picture his blazing blue eyes set above aquiline nose and a rosebud pout of a mouth. Cheeks ready to blush under the lick of glitter from a make-up brush. Deep gold locks styled to perfection. Forehead wide and empty as a summer sky #beautynotbrains #imageiseverything #skindeep.Picture this: Dorian perched on the sleek leather and chrome of a barstool in the Poison Ivy, margarita in one ha...

“ Safe and Sound Safe and Sound ” by Katharine Widdows

Trigger warning - psychological abuse.7.15am - go downstairs. Phone fully charged, remove cable. Stare at phone wallpaper – not familiar – photo of huge oak in West Park at end of my street – where Rich proposed. Maybe took it yesterday – maybe not. Not sure. Stare more. Check for messages. Mum, Sarah, Rich. Rich? Not heard from him in ages. Is he ok? Oh, he’s replying to me. I didn’t message him. I must have, yes, look. Asked if he had a good weekend, sent 23.03 yesterday. Was in bed by 10. Must have got up - come downstairs - forgotten. Sl...

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October 4ᵗʰ, 1921, Turkestan A.S.S.R We've arrived in the village of Derweze and have been offered a small hut for the evening. Ahmed brought some dates. He tells us it will take four days to procure the camels and provisions for the trek. Petrov is nervous. He says that the Soviets could come through any day and ask for our permits, or whatever other document they’ll choose to make up on the spot. We’re lucky to have Ahmed as a guide to take us through the old desert routes used by his ancestors. I've asked some of the locals in the villa...

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The timer – a pink plastic pig you had to twist around until its eyes faced the same direction as its butt – went off.Beverley Reade jumped. The sound was rare in her tiny kitchen – a shrill, metallic, mechanical noise. The smell of something baking was also rare. But if she hoped to be Whitney’s well-remembered grandmother once she passed, Bev had better get used to it. And she better get better, too. Grandmothers are good at baking. It was a universal law. ‘Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Oh, and once a woman has a grandchild,...

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TarDay 1, Docking Station 2H:There's a stubborn splinter, deep within the skin of my index finger, and just as large as it is painful. Some of the writing I may do for the next few days will be short and simple, rather dull in nature if my briefing is, for once, entirely accurate. The planet I have been stationed on is called Jhard, which is pronounced Jard in the Universal Dialect. Since my deployment, I have noticed one very peculiar place on the otherwise uncolonized world: The walls of Crater-1. Supposedly, there was a small mining opera...

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“ The Mermaid ” by Emerald Lace

The water splashed and sloshed over the side of the research ship as they huddled around the screen and watched the eerily empty ocean bottom slowly move in front of them. They'd been tediously searching the deepest part of the ocean for months and although they'd seen some amazing creatures and a couple of shipwrecks, they'd yet to find the prize. A Mermaid. Dr. Silas Fitz had been looking for a mermaid ever since he'd been saved by one. He’d been the only survivor in a tragic shipwreck that had taken the life of his entire family among o...

“ The House at the Edge of Shadows ” by Scott Taylor

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Submitted to Contest #246

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The Best Horror Short Stories

Horror stories. What is it that you think of first? Maybe it’s malevolent, otherworldly spirits. Or perhaps it’s psychopaths, serial killers, and struggling writers driven mad by a deserted hotel? Whatever it is, there’s one thing that unites you and every other horror lover out there — adrenaline. You know the feeling: your skin crawls, your heart pounds, a shiver runs down your spine. And, as all the best horror story writers will tell you, the cause of this feeling isn’t just the presence of a monster, but the creation of suspense.

That’s where short stories come in. Think Stephen King, Edgar Allen Poe, H. P. Lovecraft: some of their best horrors take the form of a short story. Tales that climb steadily towards a dark and horrific denouement. The kind of thing that, if you’re brave enough, you’d tell your friends around a campfire — a torch casting spooky shadows on your face.

Looking for some spine-chilling horror stories?

If you’re into creepy stories that keep you awake at night, then look no further than our collection of short horror stories, compiled from submissions to our weekly writing contest. Here we’ve gathered together all the scary stories that made us want to lock our laptops in a cupboard and hide under the blankets. And at the top of the page, is the cream of the crop: horror stories that have either won our competition or been shortlisted.

Lots of promising new writers have emerged from this collection, deftly creating atmosphere and building that all-important suspense. So who knows? You might just discover the next Stephen King. And if you enjoy this collection of horror stories, then why not try your hand at writing your own? You could join this week’s short story contest , and walk away with the cash prize — and a shot at publication in Prompted , our new literary magazine!

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Essay on Horror Story

Students are often asked to write an essay on Horror Story in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Horror Story

Introduction.

Horror stories are a genre of fiction that seeks to scare, disturb, or startle its readers by inducing feelings of horror and terror.

Elements of Horror

Key elements include suspense, surprise, and a sense of impending doom. Often, horror stories involve supernatural elements or entities.

Impact on Readers

These stories can have a profound impact on readers, evoking intense emotions and creating memorable experiences.

Despite their frightening nature, horror stories remain popular due to their ability to engage readers’ emotions and imagination in unique ways.

250 Words Essay on Horror Story

The intrigue of horror stories.

Horror stories have always captivated the human imagination. They are a mirror of our primal fears and anxieties, often personified in the form of ghosts, monsters, or uncanny events. The fascination for horror stories is not merely a pursuit of thrill, but a complex interplay of psychology, culture, and narrative techniques.

Psychological Appeal

At the heart of every horror story is the exploration of fear. Sigmund Freud’s concept of ‘the uncanny’ explains our attraction to horror as a confrontation with repressed fears and desires. This exploration of the unknown and the forbidden can be cathartic, allowing us to experience fear in a controlled environment.

Cultural Significance

Horror stories also reflect societal fears and anxieties. For instance, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” mirrors the 19th-century fear of scientific advancement, while George Orwell’s “1984” embodies the dread of totalitarian regimes. Thus, horror stories serve as cultural artifacts, offering insights into the zeitgeist of an era.

Narrative Techniques

The narrative techniques employed in horror stories are designed to evoke fear and suspense. Techniques such as foreshadowing, dramatic irony, and unreliable narrators keep readers on edge, while the use of dark, descriptive language helps create a chilling atmosphere.

In conclusion, horror stories are more than mere tales of terror. They are a reflection of our deepest fears, a commentary on societal anxieties, and a testament to the power of narrative techniques in evoking emotional responses. Their enduring popularity is a testament to their complexity and the human fascination with the macabre.

500 Words Essay on Horror Story

Horror stories have been a part of human culture for centuries, delighting and terrifying audiences in equal measure. They are narratives designed to frighten, cause dread or panic, or invoke our hidden worst fears, often in a terrifying, shocking finale. The horror genre taps into the primal fear within us, making us confront the unknown and the terrifying.

The Psychology behind Horror

Horror stories, in their essence, serve as a mirror to our psyche, reflecting our deepest fears and anxieties. They provoke a sense of fear and excitement, a thrilling cocktail of emotions that keep audiences coming back for more. The science of fear explains the allure of horror stories. The adrenaline rush, the heightened senses, and the relief after the threat has passed, all contribute to the addictive nature of horror.

The Evolution of Horror Stories

Horror stories have evolved significantly over the years, keeping pace with societal changes and shifts in what we fear. Early horror stories were often tied to religion, reflecting fears of the supernatural and the afterlife. As society became more secular, the focus shifted to the horrors of the human mind and the terrors of the unknown.

Modern horror stories, such as Stephen King’s works, often blend elements of the supernatural with the psychological, creating a sense of unease that lingers long after the story is over. The horror genre has also expanded into various sub-genres, such as psychological horror, supernatural horror, and body horror, each catering to different fears and anxieties.

The Impact of Horror Stories on Society

Horror stories have a profound impact on society, shaping and reflecting our collective fears. They often serve as social commentaries, highlighting societal issues under the guise of the supernatural or the macabre. The horror genre allows us to confront and discuss topics that might otherwise be considered taboo, such as death, violence, and the darker aspects of human nature.

In conclusion, horror stories are an integral part of our cultural fabric, serving as both entertainment and a means to explore our deepest fears and anxieties. They have evolved with society, reflecting our changing fears and serving as a commentary on societal issues. Despite their often gruesome and terrifying content, horror stories provide a safe space to explore the darker aspects of our psyche, helping us to understand and confront our fears. The enduring popularity of the horror genre is a testament to its ability to tap into our primal fears and its capacity to thrill, terrify, and captivate audiences.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Essay on Visit to an Old Age Home
Essay on There Is No Place Like Home
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Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

Horror in 100 Words

5 out of 5 Stars

Well, since this is pretty self-explanatory, it as an Anthology of Horror Stories (or Drabbles) each told in 100 words. So, I will skip the synopsis and go straight in to a couple of my favourite stories and my GUSHING praise!!

I can’t tell you all how much I LOVED this Anthology!! It is so hard to give you all examples of the amazing stories in this because I found myself highlighting almost every story in it! Lol!! The different views on what a Horror Story should be were amazing, so many different thoughts! Some were gruesome, some were psychological, some were scary because it deals in Reality and really makes you think, and some were silly… but in a scary kind of way!

I’m going to share a couple of MY personal favourites with you, but I’m not going to tell you which category they fall into so you will have to figure it out!!

Just a Game

Christopher motz , best of friends, stefan lear.

I’m a people person. I value the bonds, the memories, I create with another person. I’m not into superficial friendships, though. I want to explore relationships that will last a lifetime. I want to know you inside and out. I’ll do whatever it takes to completely and utterly understand my friends. It’s my belief that you never really know someone until you’ve looked someone in the eye as they beg for their life. “I’m sorry,” were the last words whimpered with his final breath. His eyes faded dull and all life left his body. I am not a superficial friend.

Disregarded Advice

BANG! He cowers under the blankets, holding his breath, knowing that… BANG! BANG! …two more will come. A few days ago, when the pounding first came, he convinced himself that it was only a vivid dream. Two nights ago, he blamed the wind and spent the next day securing the shutters on the north side of the house. When he was a boy, his mother warned him. “The third time it comes, don’t be home.” For two days, he could have been on the road, getting far away. “It will come for blood,” she said. He hears the doorknob click.

A Demonic Pact

Billy san juan.

There’s a demon in my bedroom. It follows me with its fiery eyes, daring me to escape. I tried to run already, but he roared, and I fell. My arm landed on the corner of the dresser. I can already feel the bruise forming. It knows the bruise hurts. It knows to grab me by the arm, to squeeze the bruise. To cover my mouth with his clawed talon so I can’t scream. I’ve been trapped with this demon before, but I can usually escape. Not tonight. Tonight, I think I will die. I can’t believe I married this man.

And the creme de la creme. In the midst of all the “Stormy” Weather going on, I’m sure you will all appreciate this one!

Knock knock.. , c.s anderson, this is just a tiny taste of what this anthology has to offer these writers are all so talented, i wish i could have showcased them all… but, that would sort of defeat the purpose i really took my time with this one and just read a story here and there to savour it and really think about each story some of them are so deep for only 100 words i honestly can’t recommend this book enough.

Kevin J. Kennedy himself said it best in his Afterword when he says

“I always feel that every book takes you on a journey, with anthologies often taking you on several. The stories in this book are extremely short, but I think all of the authors involved packed a lot into them. I hope you enjoyed our anthology of drabbles and, if you are new to flash fiction, I hope we have made a convert of you.”

I really hope that you allow yourself to be converted and get this book! The nice thing about each story being so short is that you can pick it up and read a little any time! (it would make a great bathroom book! Some of the stories may even scare the crap out of you!! Lol! To get things started, I’m going to give you links to go pick up a copy for yourself!!

Amazon Canada

Also, check out other AMAZING titles by Kevin at

his website: http://www.kevinjkennedy.co.uk/

his Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorkevinjkennedy/

and his Twitter: @ KevinJKennedy01

100 Word Horrors is Best Served with

A bloody orange cocktail.

The pictures are all mine though and it was a great drink!! Super fun!! Can’t wait to try it out on others around Halloween!!!

Ingredients

4 ounces vodka
2 ounces Licor 43
8 ounces Orangina or 1:3 orange juice to club soda (I went with the OJ mix because I find orange drinks disgusting! Lol!)
3 ounces raspberry syrup (recipe follows)
plastic syringes (available at party stores)

3.Fill each syringe with .75 ounces of raspberry syrup and set aside

4. Add vodka and Licor43 to a shaker with ice, shake until very cold (about 20 seconds). Add Orangina and stir. Pour into iced glasses and place filled syringes in drinks.

5. Add an orange wedge to the side of each glass and serve.

6. CHEERS!!

Spread the word to all of your fellow readers and drinkers!

26 thoughts on “ horror in 100 words ”.

Nice twists!

Like Liked by 1 person

You should read the rest of them! Some of them are truly mind blowing, ESPECIALLY for only 100 words!

Ha Ha..scare the scrap out of you…Not heard of liqor43 but I am sure my friend Mr G has 🙂 x

I hadn’t heard of it either, but it’s really good… Kind of a fermented fruit/vanilla flavour!

Sounds good..Thank you 🙂

I bought it on kindle 🙂 Love the drinkypoo 🙂

Both the book and the drink were SO GOOD!!

Flash fiction is really having its moment in the sun, it’s great! I love the favourites you posted here. I’m so envious of writers that can condense so much story into so few words. Thank you for sharing!!

Thanks for reading, the other stories are just as good as these ones! Maybe better to some people! Lol!

Horror flash fiction sounds like fun. I love the drink too.

Those are great drabbles judging from the examples you have given.

There literally wasn’t a bad one in the bunch! There were some that had me taking some time afterwards to think about it because it was so disturbing or unexpected I actually needed a moment!! I saved those for those who pick it up.. I didn’t want to spoil everything. 😋

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Some of those are the kinds of stories that play with your mind!

But, in a GOOD WAY!! And, it’s only 100 words!! So, you don’t have to suffer through a whole book of scary all at once!

Lol. I’ll go over to Amazon…no promises…. but i do like the idea of taking in a bit at a time. 😉

EXACTLY!! YOU’LL LOVE IT! If you don’t buy it, I’m TOTALLY gifting it to you!!

Stop threatening me! Lol. Only in this place can a book gift be seen as a threat… 😆😂

HA HA HA!!! Well, us Deviless’ can apparently turn ANYTHING into a threat, it takes YEARS of practice. 😂😂

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A fabulous review of this book, Nicole. Great drink too.

I’m so glad you found this one, Robbie!! This was one of my absolute FAVOURITE BOOKS!! loved Loved LOVED IT!! With every tale at only 100 words it is an amazing book to pick up and put down at busy times…. IF you can put it down! 😉

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Book News & Features

Click if you dare: 100 favorite horror stories.

Petra Mayer

Happy Halloween! A few years ago, we celebrated Frankenstein's 200th birthday by dedicating our summer reader poll to horror stories. We got more than 7,000 nominations and winnowed them down to a list of 100 spine-tingling titles. (Of course, lots has been published since then. After you get through these 100 you can check out this list of chilling and thrilling tales or these witchy books. ) Enjoy!

Who doesn't love a good scary story, something to send a chill across your skin in the middle of summer's heat — or really, any other time? And this year, we're celebrating the 200th birthday of one of the most famous scary stories of all time: Frankenstein.

NPR Reader Poll

It's aliiiiiive this year, our summer reader poll is all about horror.

Summer Horror Poll: Meet Our Expert Panelists!

H. P. Lovecraft And The Shadow Over Horror

A few months ago, we asked you to nominate your favorite horror novels and stories, and then we assembled an expert panel of judges to take your 7,000 nominations and turn them into a final, curated list of 100 spine-tingling favorites for all kinds of readers. Want to scar your children for life? We can help. Want to dig into the dark, slimy roots of horror? We've got you covered.

As with our other reader polls, this isn't meant to be a ranked or comprehensive list — there are a few horror books you won't see on it, despite their popularity — some didn't stand the test of time, some just didn't catch our readers' interest, and in some cases our judges would prefer you see the movie instead . (So no Jaws , sorry.) And there are a few titles that aren't strictly horror, but at least have a toe in the dark water, or are commenting about horrific things, so our judges felt they deserved a place on the list.

Summer Reader Poll 2017: Comics And Graphic Novels

Let's get graphic: 100 favorite comics and graphic novels.

100 Best Books

Happy ever after: 100 swoon-worthy romances.

One thing you won't see on the list is any work from this year's judges, Stephen Graham Jones, Ruthanna Emrys, Tananarive Due and Grady Hendrix. Readers did nominate them, but the judges felt uncomfortable debating the inclusion of their own work — so it's up to me to tell you to find and read their excellent books! I personally, as a gigantic horror wuss, owe a debt of gratitude to this year's judges, particularly Hendrix, for their help writing summaries for all the list entries. I'd be hiding under the bed shuddering without their help.

And a word about Stephen King: Out of almost 7,000 nominations you sent in, 1,023 of them were for the modern master of horror. That's a lot of Stephen King! In past years, we've resisted giving authors more than one slot on the list (though we made an exception for Nora Roberts during the 2015 romance poll — and she's basically the Stephen King of romance.) In the end, we decided that since so much classic horror is in short story format, we would allow authors one novel and one short story if necessary.

So screw your courage to the sticking point, and dive into this year's list! Here are some quick links to make it easier for you to navigate:

Blood Roots , Zombies And Vampires And Werewolves , The Fear In Our Stars , Horrible Homes , Final Girls , Horribly Ever After , Hell Is Other People , Short And Sharp , Scar Your Children , The Kids Aren't All Right .

Blood Roots: Foundational Horror

Frankenstein.

by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Mary Shelley's tragically misunderstood monster turns 200 this year, and he is still lurching along, one of the most influential creations ever committed to the page. While reviewers at the time condemned Shelley's "diseased and wandering imagination," her vision of human knowledge and technological advancement outstripping humanity's ability (or inclination) to use that knowledge responsibly still resonates today.

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by Bram Stoker

OK, it wasn't the first vampire novel, but Bram Stoker's most famous work was certainly the first book to pull together all the qualities we now associate with vampires — except the sparkling: Transylvanian, aristocratic, dangerous to young women, so, basically Bela Lugosi (who was actually Hungarian, but oh, that accent). Much like its monstrous companion Frankenstein , Dracula wasn't initially regarded as a classic — but once the film adaptations began to appear, it quickly achieved legendary status.

'Young Goodman Brown'

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story is the ur-American horror tale. Published in 1835, it's short and savage: A young husband travels through the dark woods and stumbles upon a satanic orgy. Everyone he knows is there, including his lovely young wife. Then he wakes up in his own bed. Was it all a dream, or do his neighbors lead secret double lives? Is his wife a blushing bride or an emissary from hell? Modern America still lives in the shadow of these implications.

'The Tell-Tale Heart'

by Edgar Allan Poe

Why do you think I'm mad? I'm just nervous. Nervous, I swear. Look at how calmly I can write up this summary of one of Edgar Allan Poe's most famous stories, about an unnamed narrator recounting how he killed the old man with the "evil eye." It wasn't the man, you see, but his "evil eye"! But what's that noise? Louder! Louder! Louder! It is the beating of his hideous heart!

by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

"I have been in love with no one, and never shall," whispers the lovely vampire, "unless it should be with you." Long before Dracula had any brides, Sheridan Le Fanu's deliciously shivery novella gave readers a thrill with its barely-veiled lesbian subtext. Though lesser known than Bram Stoker's work, "Carmilla" was a great influence on Dracula — and a classic in its own right.

'The Turn Of The Screw'

by Henry James

Nobody's entirely sure what evil lurks at the heart of Henry James' seminal story, but we can all agree that it's creepy as heck. Written in the form of a manuscript by a former governess, now dead, it describes her experiences caring for two unfortunate children on a country estate that may or may not be haunted by the ghosts of former estate workers ... who may or may not be communing with or somehow controlling the children. As with several of the stories on this list, readers are left to judge whether the horrors are real or whether our narrator is merely mad.

'The Great God Pan'

by Arthur Machen

Creating a hole in a human head is almost never a good idea, particularly when it's done by a mad scientist who wants to open up the skulls of mankind to the spiritual world. This story of a half-divine woman who inveigles men to their doom shocked critics in its time — and was a major influence on H.P. Lovecraft and authors in his orbit. (And the great god Pan here isn't much like the Pan of Greek myths; he is closer to being one of the Lovecraft-inspired Elder Gods.)

'The Monkey's Paw'

by W. W. Jacobs

That old saying about being careful what you wish for predates W.W. Jacobs' classic spooky story — but there may be no better illustration than this tale of a father, a son and three wishes gone horribly wrong. "'The Monkey's Paw' gets us to do the work of dreaming up the monster on the other side of the door. But it's no less real for that. Really, it's more real, probably," says judge Stephen Graham Jones.

'The Willows'

by Algernon Blackwood

Two friends, never named — though one, we learn, is "devoid of imagination," so remember that as you read — are on a canoe trip down the Danube during its summer floods. This seems foolhardy enough, but then they decide to make camp on an island that turns out to be packed with monstrous, night-walking willow trees who definitely don't want them there. This story was reportedly one of H.P. Lovecraft's favorites, and we can see why.

'The Yellow Wallpaper'

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Charlotte Perkins Gilman drew on her own experience of illness and powerlessness for "The Yellow Wallpaper" — prescribed a "rest cure" for her nerves, she was forbidden to work, to touch pen or pencil, allowed only two hours' intellectual stimulation a day and commanded to live as domestic a life as possible. It nearly broke her, and she later said she wrote this story of a young woman driven mad by a rest cure and some unfortunate wallpaper as a direct message to her doctor.

'Oh, Whistle, And I'll Come To You, My Lad'

by M. R. James and Darryl Jones

Between 1904 and 1925, M.R. James, an ascetic British scholar who lived his entire life at boys' schools, either as a student or a professor, turned out four short story collections that transformed ethereal phantoms into hideously corporeal apparitions with too many teeth, too much hair and plenty of soft, spongy skin. His characters merely had to read the wrong book, collect the wrong artifact or bump into the wrong person on the street, and soon one of his creations would be slithering into their safe spaces — their warm bedsheets, their cozy parlor, their beloved study — and enveloping their faces in a soggy, smothering touch.

Zombies And Vampires And Werewolves: Oh My

The werewolf of paris.

by Guy Endore

Kind of a Les Miserables for lycanthropes, Guy Endore's 1933 novel is The Great American Werewolf Novel. A man journeys through 19th century France, seeking to destroy his nephew — whom he suspects of having inherited the family curse — and along the way giving readers a tour of man's appetite for carnage, with stops during the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. What does it matter, Endore asks, if a werewolf kills a few people, in the face of a political system that kills thousands?

I Am Legend

by Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson's novel about the last man left after a plague turns humanity into vampire-zombie hybrids is as much a meditation on loneliness as it is a horror story. (Spoiler alert: Things don't end well for the dog.) I Am Legend was turned into several movies, and it was also a major influence on horror master George Romero, who once said he had taken the idea for Night of the Living Dead from Matheson's novel.

Let The Right One In

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

Sometimes we'll tell you to see the movie and skip the book, but in this case, you should read the book, too. Lonely, bullied Oskar befriends his new neighbor, Eli — who seems to be a 12-year-old girl, but is actually a centuries-old vampire. She has a few other secrets, too, but we'll let you find those out on your own. Let the Right One In is a skillfully spooky mix of horrors supernatural — vampirism — and sadly mundane — alcoholism, bullying and child abuse.

The Vampire Chronicles (First Triology)

by Anne Rice

In 1976, Anne Rice released Interview with the Vampire and no one much cared. In 1985, she released the swaggering, sexy The Vampire Lestat to massive sales, which retroactively turned Interview into a bestseller. What had changed? AIDS. Suddenly, everyone got scared of blood and bodily contact. Rice's sensuous, sexy vampires with their raw desire seemed suddenly so much more dangerous and decadent, like a raised middle finger to condoms and fear. The party continued with the third book, Queen of the Damned , but the series began to stutter after that.

Minion (Vampire Huntress Legend Series)

by L. A. Banks

Author L. A. Banks was a pioneer in black supernatural fiction and horror, says our judge Tananarive Due — and this saga of Damali, a young spoken-word artist who discovers she is part of an ancient struggle between good and evil will appeal to both fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood . But Banks adds extra layers of African spirituality, mythology and musical knowledge — Damali's guardians and guides travel with her in the guise of her backup band, camouflaging their weapons as instruments.

by Alma Katsu

The real Donner Party apparently wasn't scary enough for Alma Katsu, who recasts the story of the infamously ill-fated pioneers as supernatural horror. We know the Donner Party, trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevadas, turned to cannibalism to survive the winter – but what if there was more to it? What if it wasn't plain old wolves that killed that young boy and stripped his flesh? What if ... something ... is following the wagon train as the snows close in, tempers fray and death circles closer?

Those Across The River

by Christopher Buehlman

World War I veteran Frank finds himself broke and unemployed in the midst of the Great Depression, so he decides to try for a fresh start by moving back the rural Georgia town where his family once owned a plantation and writing a book about the estate and the awful events that happened there. Needless to say, this is a bad idea. Those Across the River is one of many books on this list that dig into the ways that humanity's great evils — war and slavery — can haunt countries and generations.

by Josh Malerman

Something is out there — something you can't see. Something you must not see, because one glimpse will drive you violently insane. In Josh Malerman's near-future apocalypse, it has been five years since "The Problem" began, and only a few survivors are left. One of them is a young woman with two small children in tow, who must get them 20 miles to safety, all while blindfolded to avoid catching sight of the mysterious horrors.

Feed (Newsflesh Series)

by Mira Grant

What if journalism was our last line of defense against a zombie apocalypse? (As a journalist, I ... well, actually no, this book scared the bejesus out of me.) In Mira Grant's zombified world of 2040, humanity is confined to tightly patrolled safe zones and bloggers are their primary source of entertainment and information. Brother and sister team Georgia and Shaun Mason are chronicling a presidential campaign convoy that gets attacked by zombies — leading them to uncover a vast conspiracy to use fear of zombies to force social change.

World War Z

by Max Brooks

Inspired by actual oral histories of World War II, Max Brooks' zombie-apocalypse novel chronicles a world on the brink of collapse after a zombie plague. In Brooks' dystopian vision, corporate malfeasance, government repression and incompetence allow the plague to run wild, eventually leaving just a remnant of humanity left to start planning a D-Day (Z-Day?) style attempt to retake the world from the mindless hunger of the zombies.

The Girl With All The Gifts

by M. R. Carey

Young Melanie — only 10 years old — isn't entirely sure why she needs armed guards or why she is so different from the adults who feed and educate her. And then she gets her first taste of human flesh. Melanie is one of the "hungries," humans infected by the cordyceps fungus (which exists in our world for real, though it mostly attacks insects ), and a lot of the horror in M.R. Carey's novel — apart from all the gooily gross descriptions of the infected — comes from what the few remaining "normal" humans do in the face of a fungal apocalypse.

The Fear In Our Stars: Cosmic Horror And Weird Fiction

'the shadow over innsmouth'.

by H. P. Lovecraft

"Even among unrepentant Lovecraft readers, 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' can start arguments," says judge Ruthanna Emrys, our resident Lovecraft expert. "The Deep Ones, hybrids between humans and their ancient, aquatic brethren, are among Lovecraft's most compelling creations, and it's a rare Lovecraftian anthology that doesn't include a story or five about their amphibious exploits. On the other hand, Lovecraft's terror of Other People is on full display here. Close parallels are drawn between having kids with non-human monsters and having kids with natives of Pacific islands, and there are repeated shudders over Innsmouth folk speaking languages other than English . If you can handle this sort of thing it's an entertaining read; whether you read it or skip it, modern takes like Sonya Taaffe's 'All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts' — also on this list — provide compelling alternatives." Emrys has also written a thoughtful essay for us on how to think about Lovecraft — check it out.

The Ballad Of Black Tom

by Victor Lavalle

Victor LaValle grew up reading H.P. Lovecraft — but when he got older, he began to recognize the racism in those stories he had loved. The Ballad of Black Tom is a powerful response to Lovecraft's racism, taking one of his most hateful stories, "The Horror at Red Hook" and recasting it in the voice of a young black man in 1920s Harlem (and, let's not forget, making a much stronger story out of it). LaValle doesn't look away from this darkness at the root of modern horror — instead, he builds something strange and angry and new on top of it.

The Fisherman

by John Langan

Two men, Abe and Dan, have both lived through terrible losses. They take up fishing together, which sounds perfectly peaceful and soothing — until they decide to look for a fabled fishing spot called Dutchman's Creek, which doesn't exist on any maps. It does appear in legends, though, generally featuring a huge, scary monster — but Abe and Dan press on into the upstate New York wilderness, and untold horrors await.

Laundry Files (Series)

by Charles Stross

Charles Stross' Laundry Files series starts off as half spy-thriller pastiche, half satiric take on the practically-Lovecraftian horrors of office bureaucracy, but it quickly gets into actual horrors like war, fascism, climate change and the inability of humanity to stop metaphorically punching ourselves in the face. "Manages to be both funny and gut-churningly terrifying," says poll judge Ruthanna Emrys.

by Kathe Koja

The first novel for Kathe Koja and the first book published by Dell Abyss, a legendary experimental horror imprint, The Cipher struck like lightning and won the Bram Stoker Award for best novel. A pair of starving artists in a burned-out industrial helltown find a hole in their storage space that swallows anything, and it's not long before someone sticks their hand in — and then things get really weird. A shot fired across the bow of a horror industry that was becoming increasingly misogynistic and conservative, it reminded readers that another early name for horror literature was "the weird."

John Dies At The End

by David Wong

There's a drug, it's called soy sauce, and it lets people see into other dimensions. How long will it take for all hell to break loose? "David Wong is an editor for Cracked.com and his John Dies At the End books (three and counting) deliver the overeducated, undermotivated smarty-pants tone of the best Internet writing, in an anything-goes whirlwind of flying dogs, reality-warping drugs and monsters made out of frozen meat," says judge Grady Hendrix.

At The Mountains Of Madness

by H.P. Lovecraft

"'At the Mountains of Madness' is a classic of cosmic horror and one of Lovecraft's best stories," says judge Ruthanna Emrys. "The terrifying thing isn't meant to be the strange creatures — one hesitates to call them monsters — but the simple fact that all civilizations, all species, fall eventually to entropy. Of course, 'Mountains' inevitably shows off Lovecraft's own well-known prejudices as well, since what actually brings down the ancient civilization of the Elder Things is a slave revolt, with the story squarely on the side of the slaveholders. The definitive abolitionist shoggoth story has yet to be written (though Elizabeth Bear's award-winning 'Shoggoths in Bloom' is an excellent starting point)."

'All Our Salt-Bottled Hearts'

by Sonya Taaffe

What must it be like to know your family will all return to the deep to live forever under the waves in fabled Y'ha-nthlei — and to know that a genetic quirk dooms you forever to dry land? Or worse, to live trapped between wave and shore? Poll judge Ruthanna Emrys calls this story "my single favorite modern deconstruction of Lovecraft. ... Sonya [Taaffe] is among my favorite emerging voices and not nearly enough people have heard of her."

by Junji Ito

A dental technician turned manga artist, Junji Ito is one of horror's singular visionaries. He employs tight, precise draftsmanship to deliver stories that are hard to read, not because they can become grotesque, but because they take ideas (living over a greasy restaurant, falling in love with a house) and pursue them to their logical, and deeply disturbing, ends. While his short stories like "Hanging Balloons" and "Glyceride" are more upsetting than anything else on the market, most people discovered him through his epic, novel-length manga, Uzumaki , about a town where everyone is obsessed with spirals. If you think that sounds harmless, then you don't know Junji Ito.

Communion: A True Story

by Whitley Strieber

"How does a book published as nonfiction sneak onto a list of fiction?" asks judge Stephen Graham Jones. "Easy: Read it all as made up, while also, for the scare, completely and 100 percent (secretly) believing in it, because not believing in this case draws a bull's-eye on your back that can only be seen from the sky." Our judges had a hard time deciding between Communion and Whitley Strieber's equally scary fictional Roswell alien tale Majestic -- so why not read them both?

'The Repairer Of Reputations'

by Robert W. Chambers

Robert W. Chambers' "King in Yellow" stories "are a foundational classic that doesn't get as much attention as Lovecraft for the simple reason that there are only four of them," says our judge Ruthanna Emrys. "This is the best of the lot and a sterling example of a story where the narrative undermines the narrator's prejudices (and eventually everything else he says). It starts with the main character talking approvingly about a rising fascist movement complete with 'suicide chambers' and forced removal of Jews, but quickly becomes obvious that the author is not in sympathy." She also points out that Chambers was one of the first authors to imagine a book (or in this case a play) that harms its readers.

Horrible Homes: Ghosts And Hauntings

The haunting of hill house.

by Shirley Jackson

One of the finest haunted house novels of the 20th century — if not any other century. A scientist convenes a group of four paranormally-experienced people at a mysteeeerious mansion, hoping to find some concrete evidence of the supernatural. What could go wrong? A lot, it turns out, as things begin to go bump in the night, and one of the four, Eleanor Vance, seems fall further and further under the house's evil spell. But are the ghosts real? Or is Eleanor just disturbed? The uncertainty is part of the scare.

The House Next Door

by Anne Rivers Siddons

Anne Rivers Siddons was best known for writing posh fiction about posh Southern people when she turned out this perfect haunted house novel. Taking one part economic anxiety from Robert Marasco's Burnt Offerings , one part emotional unease from Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House , and adding her own observations about Southern yuppies, she updated the haunted house formula to include this beautiful, modern home that wages unrelenting psychic warfare against its owners. Everyone has felt, at some point or another, that their house hates them. Siddons' book explains exactly how much.

Burnt Offerings

by Robert Marasco

At first, haunted house books were about intrepid investigators unraveling the secrets of a cursed fixer-upper (see: The Haunting of Hill House ). But Robert Marasco knows what really scares us: Money. Burnt Offerings created the formula of a family getting a fabulous deal on a piece of property they can't possibly afford, then being brutally punished for their sins. In this 1973 novel, Dad tries to drown Junior, Mom becomes an obsessive neat freak and Grandma's health fails, until the only thing they can do is run screaming into the night, losing their entire deposit. Every modern haunted house book about a deal that is too good to be true — from The Amityville Horror to The Shining — has its roots here.

The Shining

by Stephen King

"The Shining is one of those rare novels in which the premise pulls us in immediately," says judge Stephen Graham Jones, "before we're even through listening to the whole sentence: A writer at an empty hotel for the whole winter — and just like that, we're racing down those hallways, throwing balls at the wall, no schedule, a stocked pantry, a typewriter waiting over there and thousands of feet of floor space for us to fill with our imaginations."

House Of Leaves

by Mark Z. Danielewski

Mark Z. Danielewski was weird right from the start , as his debut novel House of Leaves amply proves (even the footnotes have footnotes, and eventually they take on a life of their own). Partly a haunted house story, partly a love story, partly an account of a fictional film, partly a saga of mental illness — and did we mention that it's written in different colors for different concepts and multiple fonts to designate the multiple narrators? -- House of Leaves will rummage around in your mind and leave it ever-so-slightly different afterwards.

The Elementals

by Michael McDowell

Proclaimed "the finest writer of paperback originals in America today" by Stephen King, Michael McDowell spent his career slumming in the low-rent paperback trade — but that didn't keep him from becoming one of the great 20th century chroniclers of Southern life. Rooted in Alabama, McDowell's characters explored haunted houses choked by sand dunes, pierced their dead mother's hearts with ceremonial knives and married into families of amphibious river monsters but remained always recognizably human. Though he is best known for writing the screenplay for Beetlejuice and contributing to the one for The Nightmare Before Christmas , McDowell's books are being rediscovered now by readers who want more humanity with their chills.

The Woman In Black

by Susan Hill

The heir to M.R. James' tradition of quiet, chilly ghost stories, leavened with some of Daphne Du Maurier's keen psychological insight, Susan Hill has spent years tending her small corner of the horror garden. Her 1983 novel, The Woman in Black , is essentially a slim thesis on the return of the repressed, but it has had an enormous impact, spawning a viewer-scarring BBC adaptation in 1989 and a two-person stage play in 1987 that has become one of the longest-running plays in West End history. Reading Susan Hill feels like standing in a dark room and feeling an ice-cold child's hand slip into yours.

by Bret Easton Ellis

A lot of readers voted for Bret Easton Ellis' best-known work, the slasher novel American Psycho. But our judges felt that Lunar Park was a stronger choice."You go into Lunar Park knowing it's a novel," says Stephen Graham Jones, "but then Bret Easton Ellis tricks you into forgetting that, at which point he can set up scare after scare, run you through this navel-gazing haunted house of a life — not necessarily his . But maybe."

The Bone Key

by Sarah Monette

Shy, awkward museum archivist Kyle Murchison Booth gets tangled up with all sorts of supernatural creepies in Sarah Monette's story collection — sometimes literally, as in the case of the demon lover whose touch leaves scars on his skin. In her introduction, Monette says she was inspired by H.P. Lovecraft and M.R. James, but our judge Ruthanna Emrys says that unlike Lovecraft, "Monette makes these into intense character studies where every ghost and monster provides a window into Booth's anxious, lonely psyche."

Wylding Hall

by Elizabeth Hand

A British acid-folk band retreats to a remote old country house for the summer to regroup and write music after one of their singers dies. But ... something ... is there with them. Or maybe it's not? They are, after all, all completely out of their minds on various substances the whole summer. Maybe there's a reason for all those dead birds in the house, for the doors that are locked and then unlocked, for all those odd little details that add up, day after day, reality fracturing a little more — until it breaks.

by Aaron Campbell, Jose Villarrubia, Pornsak Pichetshote and Jeff Powell

It's hard to tell what's scarier in this comic series about a Muslim woman and her multiracial neighbors: the evil spirits that haunt their apartment building or the real-life hatred and xenophobia those spirits feed on. Or the shadowy, scratchy art by Aaron Campbell, which will give you creeps for days.

by Scott Smith

After Scott Smith's debut with a black-as-night best-selling thriller, A Simple Plan , everyone wanted to know he was going to do next. And it turned out that he wanted to do next was write about Yankee tourists getting trapped in Mexico by a sentient plant. The Ruins could have become a travelers' advisory on the dangers of Latin American tourism, but instead it's a cautionary tale about the risks of bumbling around foreign countries and assuming their culture and traditions only run as deep as what you see on the manicured grounds of your five-star resort.

Final Girls: Horror By And About Women

by Daphne du Maurier

Published in 1938, Rebecca wasn't just a massive sales success and it wasn't just the basis for a blockbuster 1940 Hitchcock film that won two Oscars — it also inspired a resurgence of gothic romances (those unavoidable books with covers featuring women running from houses) 20 years later. A tour de force of first-person narration, Rebecca sweeps readers into the point of view of a woman who feels so little right to exist that we never even learn her name. In 1960, Ace Books editor Jerry Gross relaunched the gothic romance after spotting his mother reading Rebecca . "They don't write like that anymore," she told him. She was right.

'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'

by Joyce Carol Oates

Sulky teenager Connie is tired of being compared to her perfect older sister. She wants to hang around with the older kids; she wants to talk to boys . What she gets is an encounter with one of horror's great monsters — Arnold Friend and his creepy gold car. Joyce Carol Oates has said this story was inspired by a real-life serial killer, but everything beyond that has been debated endlessly — is it a feminist fable? An allegory for the changes America was going through in the 1960s? Both? And what do those numbers on the side of Arnold's car mean?

The Red Tree

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Sarah Crowe may be a novelist, a storyteller by nature, but she is the most unreliable of unreliable narrators in Caitlin R. Kiernan's dark tale of love, obsession and suicide. Sarah moves into a spooky old house, where she unearths a manuscript written by a former resident about his fixation on the gigantic red oak near the house. The tree seems to be connected to a series of murders and accidents ... but then, Sarah's own sanity is slipping, as reflected in the journal entries that tell her story.

by Robert McCammon

Just a magical girl and her dog ... up against unfathomable evil. Seven years after a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union blows America apart, the country is an unrecognizable hellscape, overrun by competing armies, poisoned by toxic rain and sunk in the permanent gloom of a nuclear winter. Young Swan — along with her dog Killer and her pro-wrestler buddy Josh — must face down the entity known as "Friend" to avert further horrors — and with her power over growing things, restore life on Earth.

'The Screwfly Solution'

by James Tiptree Jr.

This 1977 short story by Alice Sheldon is still scarily relevant today in its depiction of a world devastated by a disease that causes men to murder women, and the religious movement that helps justify the killings. Notably, Sheldon is better known by her pen name, James Tiptree Jr. — her true gender wasn't known until late in her career. And today, the James Tiptree Jr. Award is given for works of sci-fi and fantasy that expand our understanding of gender.

'Left Foot, Right'

by Nalo Hopkinson

Nalo Hopkinson "uses Caribbean mythology to create stories that are as horrific as they are character-driven and fresh," says judge Tananarive Due. And this story of loss and guilt and grief, of sparkly red shoes and a young woman coming to terms with an accident that cost several lives is both. It'll warm your heart at the same time it sends a chill down your spine.

Come Closer

by Sara Gran

Amanda has it all — a great career as an architect; a happy, tidy marriage ... and a strange voice in her head that tells her to shoplift, pick up random men and drop obscene prank documents on her boss's desk. And the dreams — at night, she dreams of a woman with sharp teeth, standing beside a bloody sea. Is this the demon Naamah, who has apparently been visiting Amanda since her childhood? Or is she just losing her mind? (Amanda herself is pretty certain it's a demon.)

by Livia Llewellyn

Perhaps we should put a content warning here: Poll judge Ruthanna Emrys says Livia Llewellyn's work is "occasionally X-rated, with a dash of Y, Z and WTFBBQ." However, she adds, "I'm a hard scare and it scares me." The stories in Furnace are surreal and gorgeously written, shot through with equal parts lust and confusion, dripping with bright blood. Read with care.

Horribly Ever After: Fantasy And Fairy Tale Horror

The bloody chamber.

by Angela Carter

A gallery of darkly glittering fairy tales, Angela Carter's 1979 book takes "Sleeping Beauty," "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Bluebeard" — among others — and mutates them until they're poisonous draughts of sex and death, garnished with baroque curlicues of sadomasochism and cruelty. A decadent, throbbing book in which the Beast licks off Beauty's flesh, the Erl-King is garroted with his own hair, and Little Red Riding Hood is warned about men who are "hairy on the inside" before throwing her clothes in the fire and seducing the wolf, it resulted in Neil Jordan's feverish and ravishing movie, The Company of Wolves .

Through The Woods

by Emily Carroll

Don't step foot in the forest — or if you choose to, read cartoonist Emily Carroll's short story collection first, so you get an idea of what you might be up against. Carroll's illustrations are shiveringly gorgeous, all bloody washes of red and icy blue shadows, spidery black and faint yellow glows in the darkness, woven through with skittering lines of story. "These are tales of strange things that come from or go into the woods — and what they did to people, or had done to them, along the way," says our reviewer Amal El-Mohtar.

by Neil Gaiman, Mike Dringenberg, Malcolm Jones III and Sam Kieth

Neil Gaiman's chronicle of Death's little brother Dream isn't strictly horror (he is more a mopey goth, annoying and still somehow compelling), but our judges agreed that vast swaths of his realm, the Dreaming, are pretty horrific. And then there is the 1989 story "24 Hours," about a villain who steals an artifact from Dream and uses it to trap a group of people in an all-night diner and torture them — forcing them to confess their sickest secrets, worship him as a god and ultimately kill each other in gruesomely beastly ways. Where's Dream? He shows up at the end and doesn't do much (*shudder*).

Her Body And Other Parties

by Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado's debut story collection is an unsettling mix of ghost stories, campfire tales, the things young girls whisper to scare one another at sleepovers (the woman with the ribbon around her neck, ugh) and even Law & Order reruns. They run the gamut from fairy tale to horror, but all of these stories consider the bodies and experiences of women, the violence visited on them and the ways they respond.

White Is For Witching

by Helen Oyeyemi

Teenage Miranda Silver is tormented by a craving for things that aren't food, like chalk and plastic, and as this early novel by Helen Oyeyemi opens, she is dealing with her mother's death and the malevolent spirits in her house. Lush and incantatory, packed with twins, strange hungers and hauntings, White is for Witching is a cornucopia of creepy scares.

'Goblin Market'

by Christina Georgina Rossetti

Oh Laura, oh Lizzie — maybe you should just have stayed home. But who can resist the temptations of "Figs to fill your mouth, Citrons from the South, Sweet to tongue and sound to eye?" And who wouldn't peep at goblin men, no matter how dire the consequences? I'll buy, I'll buy.

Experimental Film

by Gemma Files

There is a line you can draw between the ghosts and spirits of horror and the silver nitrate ghosts that flicker across the frames of early silent films, and Gemma Files makes the connection clear in Experimental Film . Film critic Lois is at a low point in her life when, one night at an experimental film screening, she sees a few fragments of mysterious silent footage featuring a woman in a shimmering dress, moving through fields and speaking to workers; this is Lady Midday, a spirit fading along with her films, who sees in Lois a chance to regain her powers.

Hell Is Other People: Real World Horrors

'the lottery'.

You know this story even if you haven't read it: A seemingly-idyllic New England village gathers for an annual lottery, at which it is gradually revealed that one resident will be stoned to death to ensure a good harvest. Outraged New Yorker readers canceled their subscriptions when "The Lottery" first appeared in 1948, appalled at Shirley Jackson's insinuation that their comfortable lives might be hiding horrors. But some letter writers wondered whether such rituals were real, and if so, where could they be seen?

The Collector

by John Fowles

The horrors in John Fowles' first novel are purely human — it is Fredrick's monstrous desire for and feelings of entitlement toward beautiful art student Miranda Grey that drives the story. Where before he had been happy collecting and immobilizing butterflies, now it's Miranda he must pin down and keep. And how dare she be so ungrateful, so unwilling?

by Dan Simmons

Give this to the Shackleton fan in your life, but then run away quickly. No heartwarming tale of ice-bound persistence here; The Terror takes on Sir John Franklin's ill-fated 1845 expedition in search of the Northwest Passage in which he and both his ships were lost. Franklin's real fate — frozen and starving, locked in the Arctic ice — is awful enough, but Dan Simmons ratchets up the horror with a mystery and a monster that looks like a giant polar bear.

by Dean R. Koontz

Our readers loved Dean Koontz, and our judges agreed that Intensity , his tale of a woman frantically fleeing a murderer, was their choice for the list and a natural fit in this category. There are no evil spirits here, no Elder Gods under the waves — just a tense duet between "homicidal adventurer" Edgler Vess, addicted to the intensity of experiences, and intended victim Chyna Shepherd, who turns the tables on Vess, risking her life to stop him.

The Girl Next Door

by Jack Ketchum

"The Girl Next Door takes us down step after step, until — too late — we realize we're in a small damp cellar, and then it grabs our head, makes us see what is going on over in the corner," says judge Stephen Graham Jones. "Worse, it leaves us there, doesn't allow us any of the usual outs, it makes us accept that this horror is a potential built into ... people? Society? All of us? Hopefully not, but if we don't guard against it, maybe so, too. The Girl Next Door is that guard."

Exquisite Corpse

by Poppy Z. Brite

The big star of the Dell Abyss imprint, Poppy Z. Brite (now Billy Martin) spoke in the language of the marginalized, the forgotten and the lost. Brite's first two novels, Lost Souls and Drawing Blood , were inspirational texts for goth kids, gay kids, lost kids, unwanted kids — basically everyone the Happy Shiny '90s didn't have room for — telling them that no matter what anyone said, they belonged. Exquisite Corpse , on the other hand, was a romance novel about two serial killers so bleak and unforgiving, it almost ended Brite's career.

"Night They Missed the Horror Show"

by Joe R. Lansdale

"Night They Missed the Horror Show" is "a story that doesn't flinch even once," says judge Stephen Graham Jones. "It's a story that looks straight on at terrible things, yeah — but the real power of this story is that it has a clear moral center. It pulls off that impossible trick of getting us to side with people we have no business siding with, and then it punishes us for our complicity, it punishes us for leering, it leaves us feeling dirty and compromised. When horror is really working, it works like this." (And a language warning — there's some ugly stuff here.)

by Dathan Auerbach

What hath the Internet wrought? To find the most original ghost stories these days, you have to dive into the online world of creepypasta: urban legends unleashed by anonymous authors online. Like a nest of squirming eels, these stories mutate, procreate and cross-pollinate with alarming speed and slipperiness, occasionally getting mistaken for reality. Penpal — and its close relative John Dies at the End — capture the spirit of online horror and trap it between two covers. Dathan Auerbach originally posted Penpal in serial form on Reddit's r/nosleep board, and while it loses something in book form, it's still a disconcerting tale about a kid who learns that his childhood may not have happened quite the way he remembers it.

by Joe Hill

Not strictly a vampire story, despite the license-plate pun of the title — but Joe Hill's tale of a child predator who whisks his quarry away to a place called Christmasland where their souls are imprisoned to the tune of sugary Christmas music is still plenty blood-chilling. With its biker heroine with supernatural gifts pursuing her classic-car-driving nemesis through roads real and strange, NOS4A2 is a wild ride.

'Bloodchild'

by Octavia E. Butler

The aliens in Octavia Butler's short story are awful-looking insectoids who implant their eggs in human hosts, but that is actually not what is horrible in "Bloodchild." While there is a touch of body horror in Butler's depiction of male pregnancy, what is scary here is the queasily familial relationship between the alien Tlic and their human hosts. The Tlic see humans affectionately, as big warm convenient animals. And the humans, though troubled, mostly return that affection.

Lord Of The Flies

by William Golding

Keep your vampires, werewolves and haunts — few things are as scary as "the darkness of man's heart." William Golding's tale of tale of castaway boys gone murderously feral has become shorthand for any situation in which people start turning on each other. "What are we? Humans? Or animals? Or savages?" asks the ill-fated Piggy, and it's pretty clear what Golding thinks. Bonus: Stephen King got the name Castle Rock from one of the locations in Lord of the Flies .

The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

Blessed be the fruit ... of Margaret Atwood's horrifically sharp mind. This classic feminist dystopia is prominent in the public mind right now, and not just because it has been made into a TV series. Atwood's book mines true horror from what people do to one another (poor Offred, suffering through the Ceremony every month) — and to themselves. (Who really thinks Serena Joy was happy with her accomplishments?)

by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison's towering and beautifully crafted story concentrates the horrors of slavery into one singular horror — the apparition of Beloved, whose mother Sethe has killed her to spare her from being taken by slave catchers. While slavery has been over for a decade when the book opens, it's as much a specter in Sethe's new home as Beloved is and is destined to haunt and scar lives long after her unquiet spirit disappears. Beloved isn't a horror novel in the strictest sense of the word, but our judges felt it more than deserved a place here.

Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation

by Octavia E. Butler, John Jennings and Damian Duffy

Octavia Butler's story of a young woman yanked backwards in time from the 1970s California to the slave quarters of a Maryland plantation is horrifying enough on the printed page, but John Jennings and Damian Duffy's graphic adaptation means you really can't look away. "The graphic novel makes the horror of imagining being whisked back to the slavery era even more visceral," says judge Tananarive Due.

The Devil In America

by Kai Ashante Wilson

"Horror often tries to explain the inexplicable," says judge Tananarive Due, and Kai Ashante Wilson's novelette about the things lost to slavery and hellish destruction of a black town in the years just after Emancipation "is as good an explanation as any for why incidents of mass violence against blacks have peppered our history."

'I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream'

by Harlan Ellison

Lots of movies, books and stories have been built on the premise of an out-of-control artificial intelligence. But except for maybe HAL 9000, none of them are as scary as AM, the supercomputer created by warring nations in Harlan Ellison's horrifying short story. AM abruptly gets tired of the war, ends it by triggering a mass genocide and spends the next century or so working out its hatred of humanity by torturing the last five remaining humans — but not letting them die.

Short And Sharp: Story Anthologies

Books of blood.

by Clive Barker

In 1984, Clive Barker burst onto the scene with one of the most remarkable debuts in horror: three volumes of short stories known as the Books of Blood . It was as if a band you had never heard of released a box set instead of a first album. Never treated with much respect in the United States (his American publisher only printed them in paperback), the stories raised the bar for horror, making it sexier, queerer and more poetic. Ranging from slapstick comedy to gross-out horror to breathtaking surrealism just in the first volume alone, each story is technically perfect and philosophically unnerving.

The October Country: Stories

by Ray Bradbury

Evil babies, mysterious jars, bodies in a lake, strange inheritances, monstrous families — whatever your favorite flavor of horror is, you're likely to find something to your taste in this collection. Ray Bradbury wrote these 19 stories early in his career, but they read like the work of a mature master, gripping and stylish. If you can, find one of the editions that includes the striking, stark-edged illustrations by Joseph Mugnaini; they'll add an extra frisson for your reading pleasure.

The Weird: A Compendium Of Strange And Dark Stories

by Ann Vandermeer and Jeff VanDermeer

Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's massive anthology includes everyone from Franz Kafka to George R.R. Martin — and some of the weirdest stories ever assembled between two covers. It won a World Fantasy Award in 2012, and it's guaranteed to keep you occupied (and thoroughly creeped out) for a good long while. Alternatively, you can use it to squash any pesky monsters under your bed.

The Imago Sequence and Other Stories

by Laird Barron

Tough guys are generally no match for the eldritch horrors of Laird Barron's Imago Sequence — which, if you had to sum it up, you could describe in an extremely reductive manner as H.P. Lovecraft meets Raymond Chandler. Imago Sequence is a great read if mere noir isn't dark enough for you, and it has a peculiar humor all its own — Lovecraft's Great Old Ones become, in Barron's world, crotchety but plenty scary old people.

Alone With the Horrors: The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell, 1961-1991

by Ramsey Campbell

Modern horror's ultimate stylist, Ramsey Campbell started his career as a Lovecraft imitator before going off in his own direction. Specializing in the horror of cities, dirt, squalor and the general mind-shattering everyday degradations of urban life, Campbell creates a world in which there is no difference between our brutalist, lunatic buildings and their brutal and insane inhabitants. Strongest in his short stories, a massive selection of which are collected here, he writes from the point of view that our cities are haunted garbage heaps, and we're all just the ghostly, numb cadavers infesting their derelict ruins

Things We Lost In The Fire

by Mariana Enriquez

Contemporary Argentinian politics provide plenty of horror in Mariana Enriquez' story collection — crime, abandonment, corruption, drugs; Enriquez grew up in Argentina during the country's brutal Dirty War period and draws on it in her writing. But then the horrors begin to creep in from outside the boundaries of our own world — haunted houses, evil rituals, disappearances that seem political but prove ... otherwise. "I guess I've always been a dark child," she told NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro. "There's comfort in darkness for me."

The Kids Aren't All Right: Creepy Kids

by Peter Straub

Teenagers Tom and Del are miserable at their extremely grim boarding school — tormented by staff and upperclassmen alike — until a tragic fire halfway through Peter Straub's book leads them to retreat to Del's uncle's spooky house in the Vermont woods (called, of course, Shadowland). Uncle Coleman is a master stage magician and, to put it mildly, not a very nice fellow. And it turns out that the magic he is teaching Tom and Del has much more to it than just stagecraft. Also, at one point the Brothers Grimm appear, making for a truly warped fairy tale of a novel.

A Head Full Of Ghosts

by Paul Tremblay

Old-fashioned and very modern horrors collide, explosively, in Paul Tremblay's novel. As a teenager, Merry Barrett's older sister Marjorie, begins to display signs of mental illness, leading her parents to consult a priest, who recommends exorcism and who brings in a TV production company to make a reality show about the troubled family, with tragic consequences. Years later, Merry begins to dig up the past, leading to what our reviewer Jason Heller calls a "bloodcurdling revelation ... as sickeningly satisfying as it is masterful."

Rosemary's Baby

by Ira Levin

The first horror novel to hit the best-seller list since Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca in 1938, Ira Levin's trim, sleek thriller stapled eyeballs to pages with its passionate commitment to "going ... there." Realizing that the scariest moments in horror happen in the lead-up, rather than the payoff, Levin decided that nothing could be scarier than pregnancy, when your womb is rented to an unseen tenant who turns your body into a life support system for nine months. Throw in what most mothers suspect anyways — that their child is the spawn of Satan — and you've got true horror. Precise, understated and without a single wasted word, director Roman Polanski cemented its legend with his scrupulously faithful blockbuster film adaptation.

The Exorcist

by William Peter Blatty

William Peter Blatty's novel — and William Friedkin's subsequent movie — became a cultural landmark, helping launch the horror revival of the late '60s and early '70s. Rewritten, reinvented, deconstructed and just straight up ripped off numerous times over the years, the original story of a single mother and her daughter possessed by a demon can sometimes edge over into melodrama, but mostly it's a "what happens next?" read that grabs you by the throat with prose as primal and bloody as the King James Bible, forcing you to care about issues of faith and sin as deeply as Blatty did when he wrote it.

"Stephen King is the absolute worst brand-name author," says judge Grady Hendrix. "Open up a John Grisham or Nora Roberts book, and you know you're getting a legal thriller or a romance. But the only thing that ties Stephen King's horror novels, nonfiction, young adult and mysteries together is his name on the cover. True believers became aware of this with 1978's "The Woman in the Room," a story inspired by his mother's death, but it was "The Body" that told everyone else King had more to say than "Boo!" Made into the movie Stand By Me , it's still one of the great American coming-of-age stories." And, says Hendrix, it's got a dead body and the horror of growing up — so it belongs on the list.

'It's A Good Life'

Mirror, Mirror: Classic SF By The Famed Star Trek And Fantastic Voyage Writer

by Jerome Bixby

Dr. Spock's 1946 Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care reassured nervous parents that their children were going to be just fine and that you couldn't hug them or love them too much. But books ranging from William Golding's Lord of the Flies to William March's The Bad Seed reminded us that a child's natural state is evil. Science fiction writer Jerome Bixby delivered the most economical reminder with his 1953 short story "It's a Good Life," since adapted into The Twilight Zone show and movie three times and into one episode of The Simpsons . A young boy gets everything he wants — or else he makes bad things happen with his mind, resulting in a town of helicopter parents who live in mortal terror of denying this little monster anything.

by Thomas Tryon

The dark horse among the trinity of books that kicked off the horror revival of the late '60s and early '70s, The Other will never be as well-known as Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist because it lacks a hit movie version. But just as The Exorcist owned the possession genre and Rosemary spawned a whole brood of satanic pregnancies, The Other gave us a graduating class of homicidal children and evil twins. The story of identical twins living on an idyllic farm, it slowly descends into madness involving drowned babies and hidden pitchforks. Possessing an M. Night Shyamalan-worthy twist and told in dense, poetic language, it's a hammer wrapped in velvet.

by Nick Cutter

When you think of Canada's idyllic Prince Edward Island, you think of Anne of Green Gables , right? Not for long. The Troop brings that old urban legend about tapeworm diet pills to body-horrific life in a story about a group of PEI Scouts whose camping trip on a nearby island is rudely interrupted by an emaciated stranger ... and the genetically-engineered parasite he carries. Trapped on the island after the parasite takes their scoutmaster, the boys must survive however they can.

by Ken Greenhall

Written under the pen name Jessica Hamilton, this is a classic tale of a sociopathic young girl with powers far beyond the natural. Elizabeth – perceptive, detached, ruthless – becomes obsessed with an apparition in an antique mirror, a beautiful woman who says she is a distant relative – and after Elizabeth gets through with her murderous agenda, pretty much her only relative. Stylish and nasty, Elizabeth will make you look twice at any mirrors you may pass.

Please, Momma

by Chesya Burke

Grief and loss are truly, gruesomely haunting in Chesya Burke's short story about a mother unable to let go of her ghostly daughter and a daughter desperate to save her mother from the horrors she has brought on herself. Burke makes the pain of loss physical and malevolent, and her writing feels like riding in a car at night, watching strange things flicker at the side of the road. (Image: Getty/Chirag Rai/EyeEm)

Scar Your Children: Horror For Beginners

Scary stories to tell in the dark.

by Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell

The book that named this category — a generation of children were scarred by Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark . Not so much because of Alvin Schwartz's stories themselves, which are certainly creepy but nothing to look under the bed about. No, it's Stephen Gammell's "ugh get it off me" illustrations, in all their skin-crawling scribbly watercolor blot glory, that haunt everyone who ever found this in their school library as a kid. They reissued this with updated, cutesified illustrations a few years ago — SACRILEGE. Gammell or get out.

Goosebumps (Series)

by R. L. Stine

If you were a kid in the '90s, chances are you read at least one volume of R.L. Stine's long-running and immensely popular Goosebumps series. Not, perhaps, the scariest books on this list — Stine has frequently said he avoids real terror — they're still a great way to warp budding young readers into a lifelong love of horror. (Also, Slappy the Dummy was extremely creepy, I don't care what you say.)

by Daniel Kraus

Daniel Kraus' book pays lip service to the hoary old story of a young boy who loses his mother and is sent to live, and bond with, his estranged dad. Only this time out, Dad is a squatter who lives in filth, and he and his son bond over his job: grave robbing. Learning the best ways to yank gold fillings out of corpses and how to remove their rings, the two learn to love and appreciate each other while going facedown into rat nests and cracking open coffins full of liquefying corpse-meat. Taking every societal norm — cleanliness, honesty, not desecrating the dead — and setting it on fire, this is literally the most anti-social book ever written.

The Jumbies/Rise Of The Jumbies

by Tracey Baptiste

Young Corinne La Mer doesn't believe in Jumbies at first ... but that isn't stopping them from trying to take over first her family and then her entire island. Author Tracey Baptiste draws on her own Trinidadian heritage for this darkly fantastical duology that mixes mythology, folklore and the real-world horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. "I felt giving [children] this kind of story where something horrible happened, but something beautiful resulted from it, would be some small amount of comfort," Baptiste told NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro .

The House With A Clock In Its Walls

by John Bellairs

Trafficking in the kind of American Gothic perfected by Ray Bradbury, John Bellairs' three books set in the fictional Michigan town of New Zebedee are lonely and charming and shot through with a sense of creeping damp and creeping doom. Sort of a Harry Potter for less sporty boys, they star chubby Lewis Barnavelt, who has been banished to live with his Uncle Jonathan after his parents die in a car wreck. The good news: Uncle Jonathan is a wizard. The bad news: Living with him means that Lewis will probably die. Simultaneously comforting and creepy, the New Zebedee books, with their scratchy illustrations by Edward Gorey, scarred children throughout the '70s and '80s.

Spirit Hunters

by Ellen Oh

After a series of traumatic events, seventh-grader Harper Raine — half-Korean and half-white — moves to a new house her friends say is haunted. Spoiler alert: It is. An evil spirit gets its hooks into her younger brother, and Harper has to break through to her repressed memories of the trauma in order to free him — with the help of her grandmother's knowledge of Korean tradition. Spirit Hunters is a genuinely scary read, full of ghosts and gore and family trauma.

by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

Neil Gaiman's tale of a young girl who steps through a strange door and finds a magical new family is charming ... at first. But then Coraline realizes her other mother and father aren't going to let her go home. " Coraline is deft and creepy and fun and dark and wrong," says judge Stephen Graham Jones. "It's our knee-jerk fantasy come to life too fast, without us having had time to draw boundaries around what we thought we wanted."

Down A Dark Hall

by Lois Duncan

When 14-year-old Kit arrives at the Blackwood School for Girls (that's not an ominous name at all), she knows right away that there's something dark, something wrong about the strange old house. And that's before she even meets the other three students — and before they discover the strange new talents for painting, math, music and poetry that only come out as they sleep. Down a Dark Hall is a gothic classic, and one of Lois Duncan's best.

132 Best Horror Writing Prompts and Scary Story Ideas

Horror stories send shivers down our spines. They are gruesome, shocking, and chilling. Scary stories are meant to horrify us, and there are many ways to make a powerful impact on the reader. The element of surprise is crucial to make the readers’ blood freeze.

There are different types of horror stories. They often deal with terrible murders, supernatural powers, psychopaths, the frightening human psychology and much more.

Although many horror writing prompts and scary ideas have been written, the following 132 horror writing prompts can spark great creativity in aspiring writers of the horror genre.

A family is on a camping trip. The parents are walking with their two children, a daughter and a son. The little boy trips and falls into a dark river. His father jumps to rescue him. Somehow the boy manages to swim to the surface. The father is nowhere to be found. When the mother gets a hold of the boy, she can’t recognize him. She tries holding him, but the moment she touches his wet body, her hands start burning.
A young girl goes missing in a nearby forest. The whole town is searching for her. Her parents find her sitting and smiling in a cave. Her eyes are completely white.
A woman starts watching a movie late at night. The movie seems all too familiar. Finally, she realizes that it is a movie about her own life and that she might be already dead.
A house finds a way to kill every visitor on its premises.
A child makes her own Halloween mask. She glues a lock of her own hair on her mask. The mask comes to life and threatens to take over the girl’s body.
While digging in her backyard, an old lady discovers an iron chest. She opens it and finds a pile of old photographs of her ancestors. All of them are missing their left eye.
A priest is trying to punish God for the death of his sister. He is getting ready to burn down the church, when supernatural forces start to torture him.
Every year a woman goes to the cemetery where her husband is buried, and when she looks at his tombstone, she notices her own name carved in it.
A woman puts a lipstick on in the bathroom when she hears a demonic voice saying to her: “Can’t you see?”
A mysterious child psychiatrist promises parents to cure their children if they give him a vile of their blood.
A group of 10 friends decide to rent an old English castle for the weekend. The ghosts are disturbed and seek their pound of flesh.
A photographer travels to an Indian reservation for his next project. He starts taking photos, but there are only shadows in the places where people should have been.
A young married couple decide to renovate an abandoned psychiatric hospital and turn it into a hotel. Everything is going well until their first guest arrives.
Three sisters are reunited for the reading of their grandmother’s will. She has left them a diamond necklace, but they have to fight psychologically and physically for it.
An old woman pretends to be lost and asks young women to help her get home. She offers them a cup of tea and drugs them. When the women wake up, they are chained in the basement. The old woman gives them tools and boards, so that they can build their own coffin. If they refuse, she inflicts pain on them.
A mysterious stranger with a glass eye and a cane commissions a portrait. When the portrait is finished, the painter turns into stone.
A little girl’s sister lives with a monster in the closet. She exits the closet on her sister’s birthday.
The demons under the nuclear plant get released after an explosion and start terrorizing the families of people who work at the plant.
A woman gets trapped in a parallel universe where every day she dies horribly in different ways.
A cannibal hunts for pure children’s hearts hoping they will bring him eternal youth.
A politician hides his weird sister in the attic. She’s had her supernatural powers after their family home burned to the ground.
A 16-year-old girl wakes up on a stone-cold table surrounded with people in black and white masks. They are chant and start leaning forward. All of them carry carved knives.
A boy hears screaming from his parents’ bedroom. He jumps and hides under his bed. Suddenly, everything becomes quiet. A man wearing army boots enters his room. He drags the boy from under the bed and says: “We’ve been searching for you for 200 years.”
A husband and his wife regain consciousness only to see each other tied to chairs, facing each other. A voice on the radio tells them to kill the other, otherwise, they would kill their children.
A mysterious altruist gives a kidney to a young man, who has potential to become a leading neuroscientist. After a year, the altruist kills the young man because he proves to be an unworthy organ recipient. The following year, the mysterious altruist is a bone marrow donor.
A group of friends play truth or dare. Suddenly, all the lights go out and in those ten seconds of darkness, one of the group is killed.
A young man becomes obsessed with an old man living opposite his building. The young man is convinced that the old man is the embodiment of the devil, and starts planning the murder.
Concerned and grieving parents bring their 8-year-old son to a psychiatrist after their daughter’s accident, believing that the boy had something to do with her death.
A woman is admitted to a hospital after a car crash. She wakes up after three months in a coma, but when she tries to speak, she can’t utter a sound. When the nurse sees that she is awake, she calls a doctor. The last thing the woman remembers is hearing the doctor say: “Today is your lucky day,” right before four men in black robes take her out.
A small-town cop becomes obsessed with a cold case from 1978. Three girls went missing after school, and nobody has seen them since. Then one day, in 2008, three girls with the same names as those in 1978 go missing. The case is reopened.
After his parents’ death a cardiologist returns to his small town where everyone seems to lead a perfect life. This causes a disturbance in the idyllic life of the people since none of them has a heart.
A man is kidnapped from his apartment on midnight and brought on a large private estate. He is told that he will be a human pray and that ten hunters with guns will go after him. He is given a 5-minute head start.
A strange woman in labor is admitted in the local hospital. Nobody seems to recognize her. She screams in agony. A black smoke fills in the entire hospital. After that, nobody is the same. A dark lord is born.
A young girl finds her grandmother’s gold in a chest in the attic, although she isn’t allowed to go there by herself. She touches the gold and she starts seeing horrible visions involving her grandmother when she was younger.
An anthropologist studies rituals involving human sacrifice. She slowly begins to accept them as necessary.
A family of four moves in an old Victorian home. As they restore it, more and more people die suddenly and violently.
An old nurse has lived next door to a family that doesn’t get older. Their son has remained to be a seven-year-old boy.
A girl wakes up in her dorm and sees that everybody sleepwalks in the same direction. She acts as if she has the same condition and follows them to an underground black pool where everybody jumps.
A bride returns to the same bridge for 50 years waiting for her husband-to-be to get out of the water.
An old woman locks girls’ personalities in a forever growing collection of porcelain dolls. Parents of the missing girls are in agony and they finally suspect something. When they tell the police, their claims are instantly dismissed.
A chemistry teacher disfigures teenagers who remind him of his childhood bullies. One day, he learns that the new student in his school is the son of his childhood’s archenemy.
A girl starts digging tiny holes in her backyard. When her mother asks her what she is doing, the girl answers: “Mr. Phantom told me to bury my dolls tonight. Tomorrow night I am going to bury our dog. And then, you, mother.”
Twin brothers were kidnapped and returned the next day. They claim that they can’t remember anything. The following night, twin sisters disappear.
A boy has a very realistic dream about an impending doom, but nobody believes him until during a storm all the birds fall dead on the ground.
Room 206 is believed to be haunted, so hotel guests never stay in it. One day, an old woman arrives at the hotel and asks for the key to room 206. She says that she was born there.
A genius scientist tries to extract his wife’s consciousness from her lifeless body and insert it into an imprisoned woman who looks just like his wife.
Two distinguished scientists develop a new type of virus that attacks their brains and turns them into killing machines.
A woman steps out of her house only to find four of her neighbors dead at her doorstep. Little does she know that she isn’t supposed to call the police.
A bachelor’s party ends with two dead people in the pool. Both of them are missing their eyes.
A young woman wearing a black dress is holding a knife in her hand and threatening to kill a frightened man. She is terrified because she does not want to kill anybody, but her body refuses to obey her mind.
A strange religious group starts performing a ritual on a playground. The children’s hearts stop beating.
A woman discovers that her niece has done some horrible crimes, so she decides to poison her. Both of them take the poison, but only the aunt dies.
A man encounters death on his way to work. He can ask three questions before he dies. He makes a quick decision.
An older brother kills his baby sister because he wants to be an only child. When he learns that his mother is pregnant again, he decides to punish her.
A husband and his wife move to a new apartment. After a week, both of them kill themselves. They leave a note saying: “Never again.”
A man is trying to open a time portal so that he could kill his parents before he is ever conceived.
A famous conductor imprisons a pianist from the orchestra and makes him play the piano while he tortures other victims, also musicians. Every time the pianist makes a mistake, the conductor cuts of a finger from his victims.
A popular French chef is invited by a mysterious Japanese sushi master for dinner. A powerful potion makes the French chef fall asleep. He wakes up horrified to learn that he is kept on a human farm, in a cage.
A nuclear blast turns animals into blood-thirsty monsters.
A mysterious bug creeps under people’s skins and turns them into the worst version of themselves.
A kidnapper makes his victims torture each other for his sheer pleasure.
Four friends are invited to spend the afternoon in an escape room. A man’s voice tells them that they have won a prize. They happily accept and enter the escape room. They soon realize that the room was designed to reflect their worst nightmares.
Two sisters have been given names from the Book of the Dead. Their fates have been sealed, so when they turn 21, dark forces are sent to bring them to the underground.
A mother-to-be starts feeling severe pain in her stomach every time she touches a Bible. Despite the fear for her own life, she starts reading the New Testament out loud.
A literature professor discovers an old manuscript in the college library. He opens it in his study and suddenly a black raven flies through the window.
You are the Ruler of a dystopian society. You kill every time your control is threatened.
You are an intelligent robot who shows no mercy to humanity.
You are a promising researcher who discovers that all the notorious dictators have been cloned.
A nomad meets a fakir who tells him that he would bring agony to dozens of people unless he kills himself before he transforms into a monster.
A most prominent member of a sect goes to animal shelters to find food for the dark forces.
A man hires unethical doctors to help him experience clinical death and then bring him back to life after a minute. Little does he know that one minute of death feels like an eternity full of horrors.
You travel home to visit your parents for the holidays. Everything seems normal until you realize that demons have taken over their consciousness.
A mysterious woman moves into your apartment building. One by one, all of the tenants start hallucinating that monsters chase them and jump into their own deaths.
Divorced parents are kidnapped together with their son. Both of the parents have been given poison, but there is only one antidote. The boy needs to decide which parent gets to be saved. He has 30 seconds to make that decision.
A patient with a multiple-personality disorder tells you that you are one of six characters.
You wake up in bed that is a blood-bath.
The Government abducts children with genius IQ and trains them to fight the horrors in Area 51.
A woman who has just given birth at her home is told that the baby is predestined to become the leader of the greatest demonic order in the country.
A man signs a document with his blood to relinquish his body to a sect.
A woman enters a sacred cave in India and disappears for good.
A man opens his eyes in the middle of his autopsy while the coroner is holding his heart.
You look outside the windows in your house only to see that the view has changed and there is black fog surrounding you.
The gargoyles from the Notre Dame have come to life and they start terrorizing Paris.
Somebody rings your doorbell. You open the door and a frightened girl with bloody hands is standing at your doorstep. “You’re late,” you reprimand her.
You wake up in the middle of the night after a frightful nightmare, so you go to the kitchen to get a glass of water. You turn on the light and a person looking like your identical twin is grinning and pointing a knife at you.
A renowned book editor receives a manuscript elegantly written by hand. The title grabs her attention and she continues reading page after page. When she finishes, the manuscript spontaneously starts burning, and the editor is cursed forever.
The last thing you remember before losing consciousness is fighting a shady Uber driver.
You find yourself in a cage in the middle of a forest and black mythological harpies hovering above the cage.
A woman wants to quit smoking, so she visits a therapist who is supposed to help her with the use of hypnosis. She goes under and when she wakes up, she feels like a born killer.
Five hikers get stranded during a horrible storm. One of them kills the weakest and starts burning his body.
A mother goes in the nursery to check up on the baby and discovers that the baby is missing and, in her place, there is a baby doll.
A killer is willing to pay a large sum of money to the family of a volunteering victim. A cancer patient contacts the killer. The killer ends up dead.
The sacred river in a remote Asian village fills up with blood. The last time that happened, all the children in the village died.
A tall, dark, and handsome stranger invites a blind woman for a romantic date in his botanical garden. The garden is full of black roses in which women’s souls have been trapped. He tells her that she will stay forever with him in his garden.
A frightened man is trying to lead a werewolf into a trap and kill him with the last silver bullet.
An architect designs houses for the rich and famous. What he doesn’t show them is that he always leaves room for a secret passageway to their bedrooms, where they are the most vulnerable.
A man’s DNA was found on a horrible crime scene and he has been charged with murder in the first degree. He adamantly negates any involvement in the crime that has been committed. What he doesn’t know is that he had a twin brother who died at birth.
Every passenger on the Orient Express dies in a different, and equally mysterious way.
A magician needs a volunteer from the audience in order to demonstrate a trick involving sawing a person in half. A beautiful woman steps on the stage. The magician makes her fall asleep, and then he performs the trick. In the end, he disappears. People in the audience start panicking when they notice the blood dripping from the table. The magician is nowhere to be found. The woman is dead.
A mother discovers that her bright son is not human.
Specters keep terrorizing patients in a psychiatric hospital, but nobody believes them.
A man’s mind is locked into an immovable body. This person is being tortured by a psychopath who kills his family members in front of him, knowing that he is in agony and can’t do anything to save them.
A bride-to-be receives a DVD via mail from an unknown sender. She plays the video and disgusted watches a pagan ritual. The people are wearing masks, but she recognizes the voice of her husband-to-be.
A man turns himself to the police although he hasn’t broken the law. He begs them to put him in prison because he had a premonition that he would become a serial killer.
Jack the Ripper is actually a woman who brutally kills prostitutes because her own mother was a prostitute.
A ticking noise wakes her up. It’s a bomb, and she has only four minutes to do something about it.
After a horrible car crash, a walking skeleton emerges from the explosion.
A world-famous violinist virtuoso uses music to summon dark forces.
A philosopher is trying to outwit Death in order to be granted immortality. He doesn’t know that Death already knows the outcome of this conversation.
A beautiful, but superficial woman promises a demon to give him her virginity in exchange for immortality. Once the demon granted her wish, she refused to fulfill her end of the deal. The demon retaliated by making her immortal, but not eternally youthful.
A voice starts chanting spells every time somebody wears the gold necklace from Damask.
Three teenagers beat up a homeless man. The next day all of them go missing.
Thirteen tourists from Poland visit Trakai Island Castle in Vilnius. Their bodies are found washed up the next morning. They are wearing medieval clothes.
A group of extremists ambush the vehicle in which a head of a terrorist cell is transported and rescue him. They go after anybody who was involved in his incarceration.
A hitman is hired to kill a potential heart donor.
A man is attacked by the neighbor’s dog while trying to bury his wife alive.
A woman disappears from her home without a trace. He husband reports her missing. The police start to suspect the husband when they retrieve some deleted messages.
After moving to a new house all the family members have the same nightmares. Slowly they realize that they might be more than nightmares.
A psychopath is drugging his wife, pushing her to commit a suicide so that he could collect the life insurance.
A woman loses her eyesight overnight. Instead, she starts having premonitions.
A vampire prefers albino children.
A man commits murders at night and relives the agony of his victims during the day.
A black horse carriage stops in front of your house. A hand wearing a black glove make an inviting gesture. Mesmerized, you decide to enter the carriage.
Demons rejuvenate by eating kind people’s hearts.
People are horrified to find all of the graves dug out the morning after Halloween.
Men start jumping off building and bridges after hearing a mysterious song.
A voice in your head tells you to stop listening to the other voices. They were not real.
A severed head is hanging from a bridge with a message written in the victim’s blood.
A delusional man brings his screaming children to a chasm.
A 30-year-old woman learns that a baby with the same name as her died at the local hospital 30 years ago.
A vampire donates his blood so that a child with special brain powers can receive it.
A teenager is determined to escape his kidnapper by manipulating him into drinking poison. He doesn’t stop there.

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Short horror story essay 8 Models

Last updated Friday , 15-03-2024 on 11:35 am

Short horror story essay is one of the popular intimidation methods that help parents in correcting children and improving their behavior in many educational aspects.

Through this article, we will provide you with many models that talk about stories of horror and intimidation that may help or influence the behavior of children, show the goals of horror stories, and the extent of the impact of these stories on improving children’s instincts, and strengthening their personality.

Short horror story essay

The school plays an important and significant role in educating children and improving their behaviour. In a similar article that talks about horror stories, the student can learn about the dimensions of these stories, the extent of their impact and why they are used.

The student can talk about his fears and terrifying situations he went through. The teacher can take advantage of these events and try to address these fears by guiding him and talking to him, or by making him research more about the dimensions of the problem and the benefits that he benefited from despite going through a terrifying situation.

At the beginning of the article we will put several points that show the goals that must be present within the topic, and several models will be created using these points inside them, so that the articles are useful for the student in case he wants to present them to the school, or if he wants to know the aspects that he should talk about inside a similar article he talks about the horror stories and the bad situations he was exposed to.

Objectives of the article

1- To obey orders.

2- Giving up bad behavior.

3- Repressing the evil instincts that are inside every human being.

4- Controlling the child in the safety zone next to the parents.

5- Planting correct means and methods through intimidation.

Several years ago, my father told me a story about a boy who went out without telling his family where he was going. And this was late at night. After he left, he met some children and played a little with them and enjoyed this, but because of the late time these children left him, some of them returned to their home alone, and some of them their families came to to pick them up, and he found himself alone in the end.

He decided to walk around for a while, so that he might encounter other children and continue playing with them. But after walking for a long time, he found that all the streets were empty, and it was dark everywhere, and he could no longer discern where he was, and that he was far from home and lost his way.

And whenever he tried to return from where he came, he found himself in dangerous areas with street dogs, and in order to avoid them, he kept entering other streets, until he lost the way completely. So he sat crying and did not find anyone to bring him home because all the people of the town were asleep.

The time at night was getting hard for this naughty little boy. Every minute that passes feels like it’s a long time and he’s so afraid of darkness and loneliness. And whenever he heard the sound of dogs howling, intensified in crying. And whenever he called his father, he did not come to take him, because he was far from the house and did not tell them that he was going out, and did not tell them where he was going.

Then he learned that he had made a big mistake and that his father would not come to look for him because he thought he was asleep. And he decided to try to call for help and search for any place where there are people and tell them what happened.

And he kept walking in the dark crying for a long time until he found some people, and told them his name, where he lived, and the name of the neighborhood in which he lived. Fortunately for him, they weren’t bad guys, and they brought this guy home.

The father was very angry with him for this behavior and punished him for a week for this behavior. But the boy was happy that he came home and learned the lesson well and knew that this wrong behavior was dangerous and could have lost his family for life.

While hearing this story, I was very afraid and put myself in the place of this boy, and I found myself learning from him what to do. And that I must tell my family where I am going, and watch the time, and take care of myself and not stay away from home. When I finish playing, I go home.

In the early morning, I was very careful to memorize my full name, the name of the neighborhood in which I live, the name of my mother, and the house number.

Although the story was scary for me, I learned a lot from it and had a reaction to every event that takes place in it.

Dear student, a basic form was submitted for the topic on short horror story essay, In addition to many other models such as, horror short story essay, creepy short horror story essay, a short horror story essay, short ghost story essay, short ghost story essay, scary short story essay, scary experience essay.

If you prefer to add any other topic, you can contact us through the comments of this article and we will study your request and add it as soon as possible.

horror short story essay

At the weekend I went on a trip with my friends to the forest. We took camping equipment, some food and water. The weather was nice, the trees were leafy, the birds were flying from tree to tree, the landscape was beautiful.

We wandered in the woods and ate the fruits on the trees, and as we wandered, a huge bear appeared in front of us, looked at us and prepared to attack us.

We were all very terrified, but the instructions reminded us not to run, not to scream, and to act calmly. I took out of my bag a self-defense spray bottle, which should be used in this case. But the bear left quietly and none of us were hurt.

creepy short horror story essay

I get up early and sit in the garden of the house, enjoying the fresh air, listening to the sound of birds, watching beautiful flowers and other beautiful landscapes, but yesterday something terrifying happened to me.

When I sat on the bench in the garden and was enjoying nature I felt something moving under the chair.

I quickly looked under the chair and found a large black snake.

It moves slowly, I felt very terrified and could not move, I remained frozen in my place, the snake crawled slowly and I looked at it with horror, until it moved away several meters, I called the competent authority immediately and a trained man came and caught the snake.

a short horror story essay

Last week I went with my family to the zoo, the weather was nice, and we were enjoying the nature, where there are a lot of green leafy trees and decorated with beautiful flowers and large areas that allow us to run and play, everything was beautiful.

Then we went to the animal cages and watched the animals from a distance.

But there is a person who got very close to the lion’s cage, even though there is a sign on it that says Do not go near the animal cages.

He was not satisfied with that, but he extended his hand into the cage, and the lion grabbed his hand with force, and this person was unable to rid his hand of the lion’s fangs.

The man screamed loudly from the severity of the pain, and the guard came quickly and tried to give the lion a piece of meat to leave the man’s hand, but to no avail.

The veterinarian quickly intervened and gave the lion an anesthetic injection, and the man was able to get his hand out of the cage, but it had many wounds and was taken to the hospital. It was really terrifying moments.

Short ghost story essay

There are many people who feel terrified in the dark, and my brother is very afraid of the dark and feels terrified and imagines frightening things.

So when the electricity went out and the house became dark. I went to his room quietly without feeling, and stood in front of him, making some strange sounds.

My brother jumped quickly and came out of the room saying a ghost of a ghost, but he hit the wall and cut his head and bled a lot, it was a big wound.

At that time I was telling him don’t be afraid, I am your brother, but he was very frightened. I was very sorry for him and regretted that I had caused him to feel terrified and made him crash into the wall.

And I told him I was just trying to joke with you and I wouldn’t do it again but you should train yourself not to be afraid of the dark.

A Short Scary Story Essay

Last weekend I went with my friends on a fishing trip. We chartered a fishing boat with all our fishing gear and went into the sea for a long distance, so that we could see neither the beach nor the city.

We started fishing and we were very happy because there are many fish and they are also big, and the weather was nice.

Suddenly strong winds blew and the waves rose, and the fishing boat was swinging with us over the water, up and down, and we couldn’t control it.

At this time we felt so afraid that we would drown.The fishing boat cannot withstand these bad weather conditions.

But after a while the wind calmed down a bit and we miraculously survived.

Scary short story essay

Last weekend I went with my colleagues on a school trip to one of the archaeological sites, and we had some teachers with us organizing the trip and supervising our transfers.

We entered a museum that houses great antiquities and stood listening to the tour guide talking about the history of these antiquities.

I was fascinated and listened to the tour guide with great interest, so that I did not feel the departure of my colleagues and teachers, as they left the museum and got on the bus and left this place and did not feel my absence.

When I found myself alone in the museum, I felt very afraid and searched for them all over the museum, but I could not find them, so my fear increased and my crying became louder.

Suddenly I found one of the teachers entering the museum and looking for me, so I ran towards him and grabbed his hand and felt safe.

Scary Experience Essay

At the end of the year I had a frightening experience. I went to the beach and decided to snorkel, so I bought wetsuits, put them on, and dived into the sea. But it was not what I expected and almost drowned.

I was so scared when I found myself unable to dive, and could not swim to the top.

It was a difficult situation but one of the lifeguards on the beach saw me, knew I was going to drown and ran to save me.

Therefore, I advise others to learn before we do anything that might endanger our lives.

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101 Horror Writing Prompts That Are Freaky As Hell

Looking for some scary story ideas for your next writing project?

Sometimes, a good scary prompt idea is all you need to get started on a dark story your readers won’t be able to put down.

And that is the goal. What’s a horror story without white-knuckle suspense?

You want your readers at the edge of their seats, unable to stop though they know something bad is about to happen.

You also want to reward them for reading to the end and leave them wanting more.

So, how can this collection of horror writing prompts help with that?

What Are the Main Elements of Horror Writing?

List of most common horror themes and tropes to write on .

66 Horror Writing Prompts

Halloween Writing Prompts

Mystery writing prompts, psychological horror story ideas, “the monster you know” story ideas, ghost story writing prompts, funny horror story ideas, horror story ideas.

Every good story needs an idea that takes root in your imagination and doesn’t let go. Horror stories in particular need to affect you a certain way. If they don’t sound an alarm in your head, they won’t sound one in the heads of your readers, either.

They need to reach into your psyche, take a scrap of memory, and turn it into something that would keep you up at night.

And as you’ve no doubt read already, “No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

Look through the prompts that follow, and choose one that calls out to you and lingers in your imagination.

Paint a picture in your mind of the characters involved. Give yourself a reason to invest in them by giving each one some interesting backstory.

Then set a timer and write.

Since Earl Horace Walpole’s gothic horror The Castle of Otranto hit shelves in 1764, English readers have clamored for dark plots that excite primitive instincts and tickle our fear bones.

Many horror authors leverage shadowy impulses by sprinkling stories with uncomfortable happenings and gruesome fatalities.

But that’s not all it takes to write within the genre, begging the question: What are the main elements of horror? Traditionally, there are five: suspense, fear, violence, gore, and the supernatural.

Suspense : Creating anxious tension is a critical component of horror as it keeps the audience glued to the story. They need to find out what happens! Traditionally, suspense is valued as a sophisticated form of horror, and building it well is a skill.
Fear : Confronting fearful things is a powerful emotion with chemical reactionary consequences, making it a hallmark of horror writing.
Violence : Savagery is scary because it’s inextricably linked to death and pain — two of the four great human fears.
Gore : Brains and guts are a cornerstone of classic horror. For better or worse, our neural pathways light up when confronted with intestines, brain matter, and gushing fluids. Successful horror writers keep readers and watchers engaged by deploying gore effectively.
Supernatural: The main difference between “true crime” and “horror” is a supernatural element. While horror stories draw people in with realism, they usually feature an emotional detachment valve in the form of an explicit or implicit otherworldly presence.

Vampires, ghosts, zombies, and murderers are big-picture mainstays of the horror genre. But what are some other, more detailed tropes associated with scary storytelling?

Babysitter Alone in Big House: The naive babysitter trope is oft-repeated because it works. The sitter acts as a stand-in for the reader or audience in that, like you, they’re vulnerable. Horror-sitters are the character conduit through which readers and viewers can experience the impending fear.
Manipulative Vampires: Maybe it’s their piercing eyes, snappy attire, or mysterious penchant for the “nightlife.” Whatever the case, people stan vampires, and sensual and manipulative ones are an incredibly effective horror character trope.
Ghost-Haunted House: Ghost-haunted houses are a recurring horror motif. Whether you approach it from a traditional or modern angle is up to you. Both can work.
Creepy Kid: In real life, it’s kind to see all kids as precious and special, no matter their quirks. But when it comes to Horror World, creepy kids are a dime a dozen! Sometimes they’re the main attractions or “red herrings” (which we’ll get to more below); other times, they’re supernatural catalysts that serve as a story’s MacGuffin. Whichever the case, unnerving kids go a long way when devising a disturbing scene and fomenting suspense.
The Nonbeliever: Most horror stories have at least one character whose lack of fear or faith (in the story’s “supernatural” element) lands them six feet under.
The Red Herring: A “red herring” is a false clue. The term dates back to the 1400s to describe a culinary preparation for fish, but the first known use as a euphemism for “distraction” appeared in 1884.
Isolation: Few things frighten people more than being all alone while danger looms. As such, isolation can be a helpful trope when crafting horror stories.
Graveyard Chase: A well-conceived chase around a graveyard is another horror mainstay that continues to deliver. Try adding a twist to modernize the trope.
Distorting Mirrors: Whether a single reflecting glass or a full-on maze, using mirrors as a motif is a tangible and effective way to signal distortion.
Aliens and Cultists: The human psyche can’t resist rubbernecking when confronted with the possibility of aliens and the sociopathic underbelly of cults. Resultantly, they work well as engaging frameworks for horror stories.

101 Horror Writing Prompts

Whether you’re writing for a special occasion or just to experiment with the horror genre, any of the scary story prompts in the following groups should get you started.

Go with your gut on this one, and choose an idea that feels both familiar and provocative. Then give it a go!

1. A mysterious gift from an estranged aunt arrives on Halloween with a crystal ball and a note addressed only to you, her godchild.

2. One of the trick-or-treaters bears an uncanny resemblance to your departed sibling and repeats that sibling’s last words before picking your sibling’s favorite candy bar.

3. On Halloween night, you find a box at your door that contains a strange note and a little something from each of the people who have hurt you in the past year.

4. On this Halloween night, your guinea pig won’t stop running in circles, and your dog keeps staring at the door, emitting a low growl.

5. You run out for candy on Halloween afternoon to find the streets empty and the store abandoned. A single car cruises into the lot and pulls into the spot next to yours.

6. Every time you went to answer the doorbell, no one was there. The next day, you heard about the missing children. The worst part? Your kids spent Halloween with your ex and were supposed to come trick-or-treating last night.

7. You arrive home on Halloween to a large package from your new boss, who’d bought every piece of your favorite candy from local stores. The note reads, “Save some for me.”

8. You’re watching TV on Halloween night when your show is interrupted by a faintly familiar someone declaring their love for you and saying they’ve watched you all your life.

9. You come home to find a stranger walking through your home, sipping your wine and admiring your collected antiquities. They startle at your approach and act as though you’re the intruder.

10. The night before Halloween, you have a dream in which you wake up to see a dark shape standing outside your closet. You wake up screaming with your hands around your spouse’s throat.

11. Election day looms, and Halloween feels more ominous than ever. You’ve kept the lights off, but that doesn’t stop one visitor from leaving a note: “Knew you lived here.”

12. Your best friend has gone missing, and someone keeps leaving small reminders of them in your mailbox. You see someone approach to deliver something else, and your heart nearly stops when you recognize them.

13. You’ve always wanted a dog, so when a rain-soaked mutt shows up on your front step, you let him in. Unfortunately, something else hitched a ride.

14. Someone moves into the apartment next door and starts playing loud music at night. You call the police, who find the guy dead holding a note with your name and address.

15. Someone keeps replacing items in your home with different objects that look vaguely familiar. No one else has a key to your home, and there are no signs of forced entry.

16. You bake some cookies to share with the new neighbor, but the terrified woman backs away from the plate, shaking her head. Someone from inside calls out, “I’ll have those.”

17. Someone at work has offered to do a tarot card spread for you, and you politely decline. You find a single tarot card in your mailbox when you return home.

18. You don’t remember wandering alone on a country road as a small child, but someone does. And he wants to make sure you’re not around to testify against him.

19. Someone has gotten to your laundry before you and left it neatly folded in piles on top of the dryer. A note reads, “For more TLC, knock on #303.”

20. The window of your apartment leads to a fire escape, but twice you’ve come home to find it open. Nothing is missing. But someone keeps leaving a ring on your kitchen table.

21. You order a Christmas wreath for your door and the company sends you a package with money instead. The note reads, “Keep half. I’ll pick up the rest in 72 hours.”

22. A child knocks on your door and tells you you’ll be visited by three people that night. One of them will show you your future. The child’s face reminds you of someone.

23. Your best friend is dating a woman who seems familiar to you — and not in a good way. Turns out, she’s got a bad feeling about you, too, and she warns your friend.

24. You receive a surprise delivery of a holiday flower arrangement with a note from someone who went to jail for assault. The message reads, “I’ll be home for Christmas.”

25. An abuser from your past has written you a long letter of apology, and you agree to meet them for coffee. You find your favorite coffee place deserted — on Black Friday.

26. You broke up with your sweetheart when he lied about taking you to the prom and begged you to run away with him so he could escape an abusive home. He’s back.

27. An old friend, who had tried to warn you about an ex-boyfriend years ago, has come back to town to run a diner. Within a week, known bullies start disappearing.

28. For the past three dates, the guy you met ended up dead and posed as if proposing. A note on each one’s empty chest cavity reads, “My heart belongs to [your name].”

29. You’re with a friend at the home of the guy she’s dating. In the bathroom, you find a box with jewelry for almost every birthstone. Yours is the only one missing. You hear a scream.

30. Everyone keeps telling you your memories can’t be trusted. You’re safe with them. They’ll protect you. But you haven’t left the house in years.

31. You thought it was cute when your little sister wanted to wear your aunt’s high heels and pose with a hand on her hip. But your sister had an uncanny way with accidents.

32. You never expected to win the ‘57 Chevy from the church raffle. Neither did the car’s owner, who immediately tried to buy it back. He didn’t respond well to “No, thanks.”

33. Every time you saw anything like “Tornado Warning” or “Flash Flood” in the news, you knew someone would end up dead. And your ex would blame the weather.

34. You come home to a dozen roses from a guy who’s been telling his friends you’re dating, and you get angry. For some reason, though, everyone you know is on his side.

35. Your “Secret Santa” leaves an expensive bottle of wine with a note, “Drink me.” You call a familiar number and hear the phone ring on the other side of your door.

36. Your dad has a secret known only to his twin brother, who mysteriously disappeared but left a note with a box of his belongings in the attic. You take it with you when you leave.

37. You just broke up with the person who’s catering your best friend’s wedding. They also made the cake.

38. Some of your in-laws have decided to deliver their sibling from you. When they cross the line, you make a promise to them and to your spouse. One by one, they disappear.

39. Your health is steadily declining, and you don’t know why. Neither do your doctors, who test for the usual health issues and find nothing. Then someone calls to warn you.

40. Your estranged father sends you a porcelain doll — the one he swears you told him you wanted. It has the face and hair of your missing mother. And her eyes are glued open.

41. You’ve just told your family you’re asexual, and they seem to accept it. Out of the blue, the handsome guy next door shows up to ask you out, and your parents quietly nod.

42. A cop pulls you over for driving a few miles over the speed limit, tells you to get out of your car, slams you against the hood and whispers in your ear, “This is from your ex.”

43. You emailed your fiancé for months before meeting him for the first date. Now, you’re getting strange phone calls from someone claiming to be his wife and telling you to run.

44. You stood numb at the coffin of a close friend and flinched when your father rested a hand on your shoulder. “Had to be done,” he whispered. “Remember the bigger picture.”

45. A small package bears the name of your sister, who died five years ago. It contains a pendant that matches her own and a note asking you to activate it by chanting, “Sisters Forever.”

46. Your elderly neighbors died on the same day of an apparent suicide pact. In their will, they left their pug to you, along with a small box of what they called “magical items.”

47. You receive a note penned by your best friend, who died in a car accident the month before, His parents had found it in his room and hand-delivered it, barely looking at you.

48. You pounce on a new opening in the apartment building close to your favorite coffee place. The first night there, you wake up to ghostly shapes surrounding your bed.

49. At your first slumber party, your friend’s older brother surprised you during a late-night run to the bathroom. He died a decade later in prison. Now you see him in your dreams.

50. Your home is the high-tech brainchild of your best friend, who bequeathed it to you (rather than to his wife). It anticipates your every need and desire.

51. You’ve been having dreams about a door that shows up in your room. In one, you walk through it and see someone you love being murdered . You warn them the next day.

52. You’re the lone survivor of a horrific train crash, and everywhere you go, you see the ghosts of some of the passengers. Some have told you the crash was no accident.

53. You’re looking through your mother’s possessions when a note slips out of the book she’d been reading, warning you about “the ghost who runs this house.”

54. Your new boyfriend is obsessed with ancient artifacts, but when something hitches a ride on his latest find, you witness disturbing changes in his behavior.

55. Your life is already complicated when your boss asks you to stay at his home to care for his dog while he’s away. You soon learn the house is as mischievous as the dog.

56. You’re an editor for the college literary journal, and you’ve been getting poetic hate mail from a student who’s angry you didn’t choose their poems for the latest issue.

57. Your favorite neighbor is a trans woman named Lani who looks out for you. She warns you about a guy down the hall, who keeps trying cheesy pick-up lines to get you to smile.

58. Your co-workers tease you about your weight gain. One is found dead in the bathroom, her mouth stuffed with candy. Everyone but the custodian suspects you.

59. An anonymous admirer sends you a singing telegram with a chilling question. Now you have less than 24 hours to sing your answer in a public square, with a flash mob.

60. You sign up for wine deliveries but are disappointed by the first bottle you open and taste. On the label, you find a crass, insulting note from an old enemy.

61. Your date finds out your BFF is asexual and starts asking intrusive and insensitive questions. When your friend shuts him down, he insults and warns you both.

62. You’re working the dinner rush, and a customer loudly insists on changing her order the moment you deliver it. Someone quietly follows her as she storms out the door.

63. You’re having an open house for your new shop, and you catch a customer shoplifting. She says, “I was told to come in here and take these. You’re being watched.”

64. You arrive at your new house, and the keys from the realtor don’t work. Someone answers the door with a disarming smile. “So, you’re here about the room? Come in!”

65. Your date is going well until you reveal that you have a dog. “I’m not really a dog person,” you hear. When you get a bad feeling and end the date, things get messy.

66. Your journal goes missing, and within a week, a goofy, adorable guy starts showing up at your usual stops. He seems surprised to see you, but something isn’t quite right.

Creepy Writing Prompts

67. The old tunnel had been blocked off for as long as anyone could remember, but late at night, you could still hear the faint screams echoing from deep within.

68. As you walk past the abandoned house on your way home from school, you notice one of the curtains move slightly in an upstairs window, but the house has been empty for years.

69. You wake up suddenly in the middle of the night and see two small handprints on the foggy bathroom mirror that are far too small to belong to anyone in your family.

70. Every night when you go to sleep, you feel an uncomfortable pricking sensation on your skin, yet every morning, you find strange symbols carved into your arms that you don’t remember making.

71. While exploring the attic, you find an old doll that looks eerily like you did as a child, and when you pick it up, its eyes suddenly open.

72. The scraping sound from the closet stops whenever you turn on the light, but it always returns as soon as the room goes dark again.

73. Every time you glance in the mirror, your reflection behaves slightly differently than you do – blinking at the wrong time or moving too late.

74. You wake up covered in mud and scratches with no memory of where you’ve been all night, and the soles of your shoes are worn through as if you had walked for miles.

75. Lately, your pets have refused to go into certain rooms of your house, but you have no idea what frightens them so badly about those areas.

76. You discover a trap door hidden under an old Persian rug in your basement and shining a light into it reveals a set of footsteps descending into the darkness below.

77. You wake up one morning to find all the mirrors in your home have been turned around to face the wall, even though you live alone.

78. Your television is switched on in the dead of night, the static slowly resolving into shapes, and what looks back at you from the screen makes your blood run cold.

79. You keep finding sticky notes around your house with messages written on them in unfamiliar handwriting, like “GET OUT” or “I’M WATCHING YOU SLEEP.”

80. Every time you look at a clock, the time is exactly 3 minutes slow, though all the clocks in your home are set correctly and keep perfect time when others view them.

81. On your way home, you notice a figure standing motionless at the end of the street, staring directly at your house with its face hidden in the shadows of its hooded robe.

82. Your dog comes running inside with its leash still attached but hanging limply, yet when you call the number on the leash’s tag, your own cell phone starts ringing from within your house.

83. Your computer camera activates unexpectedly while you’re working, and you see your own bedroom behind you from an impossible angle near the ceiling, suggesting someone is watching through the camera right now.

84. You hear your name called out softly in an empty room, and even though the voice sounds familiar, you live alone, and you know no one else is inside.

Spooky Writing Prompts

85. Every night when you lie in bed, you hear the floorboards outside your room creaking as if someone is pacing back and forth, but every time you quickly open the door to check, the hallway is empty.

86. While exploring the woods behind your new house, you discover a crumbling old stone well, and when you peer down into the darkness, you think you see pale faces staring back up at you.

87. Your reflection in mirrors and windows often moves independently, quickly looking away whenever you try to catch it, watching you from impossible angles that don’t align with where you’re standing.

88. An unfamiliar chat window opens on your computer screen with only the message “I can see you through your webcam” written inside it by an unseen sender.

89. Plants within your home have been dying overnight no matter where you place them, the leaves and stems drained of all color as if the life has been completely sucked out.

90. You wake up to find a pile of dead birds on your lawn, their wings broken and necks bent at odd angles as if they crashed directly into the ground from high altitudes.

91. The old paintings hanging on the walls of your recently inherited mansion seem to follow you with their eyes, and occasionally, you notice mysterious new figures added in the backgrounds that disappear by morning.

92. Turning on all the faucets causes blood to drip out instead of water, yet when others in your home check them, the liquid running from the pipes is perfectly clear.

93. You wake from a nightmare convinced someone was standing silently at the foot of your bed, only to find the imprint of two bare feet seared into your bedroom carpet right where the figure was standing.

94. Whenever you look in the bathroom mirror late at night, you see dead relatives standing silently behind you who disappear when you turn around to check if anyone is there.

95. The baby monitor in the nursery suddenly emits a strange crackling sound followed by a singsong voice you don’t recognize whispering your baby’s name over and over.

96. Your shadow appears to have a mind of its own, often following you more slowly or quickly than it should and reaching areas you know your body has not moved to.

97. Photos taken with phones or cameras in and around your home show blurry figures lurking in the background that do not match any of the people in the images.

98. Any writing you leave out overnight – from sticky notes to notebooks – has mysterious reoccurring symbols added in unfamiliar handwriting scattered among the existing text.

99. You wake in the middle of the night to the sound of your locked window being forced open from the outside, but when you jump out of bed to check, it’s closed securely as if nothing happened.

100. From your garden, you can see directly into your neighbor’s bathroom mirror, but instead of the neighbor’s reflection, you swear you sometimes see your own face staring back with an expression you don’t recognize.

101. While searching through the attic in your recently purchased Victorian home, you find an old portrait of a severe-looking woman whose eyes seem to follow you around the room; later that night, you wake to find the same woman standing at the foot of your bed, silently watching you sleep.

How Do You Come Up with Horror Ideas?

Coming up with fresh, frightening ideas is key to crafting an effective horror story. While horror inspirations can spring from ordinary events and observations, it helps to have strategies to unleash your most sinister creativity. Here are some tips for conjuring bone-chilling tales:

Mine your nightmares. Dreams often access our deepest fears. Pay attention to recurring nightmares or startling images from your subconscious, as these can inspire terrifying new monsters or situations.
Twist tropes. Take common horror archetypes like haunted houses, demonic possession, or slashers and put a new spin on them. Surprise readers by changing elements they assume to be familiar.
Extrapolate fears. Think about phobias you or others have, like darkness, insects, or tight spaces. Imagine those fears exponentially intensified to petrifying extremes.
Research real horror. Study disturbing historical events, murders, superstitions, or unexplained phenomena and fictionalize them in a new horror setting.
Observe people. Carefully watch those around you and look for small creepy details in their appearances or behaviors that could be expanded into something sinister.

With an observant eye and inventive mind, creators can find endless inspiration from both mundane moments and their most nightmarish dreams. Putting ordinary things in an ominous light or letting one’s imagination run wild with “what if” scenarios generate the kinds of situations and figures that fuel truly frightening tales.

Pay attention to the world around and inside you, and plumb the depths of your creativity, and you’ll never run short on horror ideas.

Can you write a scary story in 150 words? (7 Scary Good Shortcuts)

If love stories make you swoon and comedies make you belly laugh like a deranged raccoon, then horror stories make you clench your gut, slam shut your eyes, and pray for the nightmare to end. Scary stories deliver fear. That’s their job. But can you write a scary story in 150 words?

That’s a question terrifying enough to send shudders down the spine of the most experienced writer.

Yes, you can write a scary story in 150 words (or less). The keys are: 1) To trigger fear fast by leveraging age-old human psychology, and 2) To narrow the story to its most basic elements. In this post, you’ll learn 7 ways to terrify readers while keeping your story super short. Plus 75 fear-themed prompts to give you all the goosebumps.

That brings up a few other questions: how to write a good horror story? what even makes good horror?

Let’s start with how to write micro-stories, then layer on the scary.

Read some r eal life writing convention horror stories .

How to Write Short Horror stories

There are a number of effective ways to write super short stories, or micro-stories (also called micro-fiction or, in our case, micro horror). It’s all about drilling down to the heart of the story. Then cut away the fat. After that, you keep scraping away at the story until you get all the way to the bones.

Three scary effective ways to write short:

Story Stripping (I promise this is SFW – safe for work 😉 )

Find the Bones

Write the bones, story stripping.

To write a short story, you write a story short.

Trust me, that sounds more profound than it actually is (don’t end sentences with is, it’s just poor grammar-ship). But the point stands. Writing short stories doesn’t mean that you shortchange the story. It means that you take the complete story and strip it down to its essence.

So, that means you have to really understand the story. That’s the only way to know what to save and what to shave.

Consider these tips when stripping your story:

Complete this story template (Character + Conflict + Crucible). Just fill in the details of your story so that you have the main elements – the character (who the story is about), the conflict (what is the main character up against), and the crucible (the setting or situation that traps the character in the story so they can’t just run away).
If you don’t have a story, use a prompt (like the 75 scary-themed prompts later in this post)
Strip your story down to one or (at most) two characters. You only have 150 words after all.
Strip your story down to a single setting. More settings mean more words, which you don’t have at your disposal.
Strip your story down to one conflict.

Can I write a scary story in 150 words skull image

Table of Contents

After you finish story stripping, it’s time to find the bones. In practice, it’s really just another, deeper level of cuts. You might have a scene or series of scenes in your mind.

Time to kill those darlings. Prepare yourself because this is going to hurt.

It’s time to find the bones of your micro-horror story:

Cut your story down to one character (really, give it an honest try). You probably don’t need the other character (at least not much). Pretend you HAVE to cut your story down to one character. How would you do it? (Then do it).
Cut your story down to one scene. (There’s probably no time for multiple scenes. Go deep with one scene instead of drifting on the surface of several scenes).
Now cut your story down to a slice of that scene (a micro-scene). Which slice? The most dramatic slice. The scariest slice (Scary Spice?).
Cut your story down to one slice of the setting, the micro-setting. (If your setting was a graveyard, now it’s one tombstone. If your setting is an abandoned school, now it’s a haunted bus or empty classroom)

Once you complete those steps, you will have a super bony story ready for the page. You have finished the brutal work of chopping away at your story. Now it’s time to focus on techniques for translating your slimmed up story into actual words.

But before you grab your pencil or keyboard, I have two more cool techniques to share with you. These methods will help you maintain your narrow focus to reach your goal of penning your story in a maximum of 150 words.

The first approach is called the Napkin Test. Here’s how it goes. You attempt to write your entire story on one regular-sized napkin. I know! It’s a terrible test. The worst, really. But it forces you into conciseness. The physical edges of the napkin taunt you with their limits.

Try it out. Grab a napkin (or go buy a cheap pack the next time you are at the store). Try to force yourself to write the entire story in the square space of that napkin.

The second method is even worse. I call it Twitterizing your story. Instead of the napkin, write your entire story in one 150-character tweet (or whatever the current Twitter limit is – if Twitter still exists lol). Even if Twitter is a distant relic of the past when you are reading this post, you can still attempt to write your entire story in 150 characters. Let’s be nice and not include the spaces in the character count.

Why punish yourself with the nearly impossible? Because, once you struggle to write your story in 150 characters, 150 words will seem like a football field of space.

Then there is the actual writing of words. Writing a scary story in 150 words is a challenge best met with intention.

Apply these best practices for writing super short copy:

Use short words (as a bonus, often shorter words pack more punch)
Use short sentences
Avoid adjectives and adverbs (you can always add them in later if you are under word court)
Use vivid verbs with more emotional connotation
Use nouns with more meaning
Use symbols, subtext, and multiple meanings as often as you can (you can double the emotional impact of your writing while keeping the word count low)

Check out my post on The Best Thesaurus for Writers .

In summary, to write short requires short, simple sentences filled with short, simple words packed with subtext.

7 Ways to Terrify Readers (Based on Neuroscience)

You have the bones of your story. It’s time to talk terror. There are certain tools and techniques writers use to create the unsettling atmosphere of psychological suspense.

When you are writing micro-fiction, you must employ the best horror tactics to terrify readers in the small space of your story. Apply these next tips to scare your readers’ shorts off.

By the way, all of these tips work wonders because they are based on real brain science (sources at the bottom of the article).

1. Scare them Early

Things are scarier if you are already afraid. So scare them early and often. Once we are primed for fear, we interpret everything else through this fear-smeared lens. Especially in a micro or short story, we need to get to the fear fast.

In your story, don’t go for the slow burn by building to suspense or fear. Dive into the middle of the scary. Think that’s hard to do in 150 words? Try 5 words.

Can you write a scary story in 150 words? six word horror stories

2. Threaten the Ordinary

Un-scary things can be the scariest (humans imagine the worst). One of Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite techniques was to invoke fear in normal settings, like showers, and into normal things, like birds.

Sure, graveyards and old, empty houses are scary. But so are rain gutters with smiling clowns.

scary clown image for can you write a scary story in 150 words

When choosing your story and scene settings, think outside of the graveyard. Invoke fear into the ordinary. Pick a normal place and make it terrifying.

3. Slow Time Down

When scared, people experience time distortion where time appears to move slower. Novice skydivers, for instance, often think the preparations before jumping take longer than they do. Horror scenes in movies and fiction often exploit this slo-mo feature to terror by increasing the pace of terror while simultaneously slowing time down to focus on the fear.

You can achieve a similar effect by raising the pace of action in your story while slowing down the experience of the horror. You do that by focusing in on specific character actions, description of simple setting details (like the bloodstained baby shoes), and entering into the mind and emotions of the character.

4. No Way Out

According to neuroscientists (people way smarter than me), the purpose of fear is to prompt us into appropriate adaptive action. Mainly, that is to escape the source of the threat or perceived threat.

That’s why it’s so terrifying to feel trapped. So, ramp up the fear in your stories by hemming in your characters so that they can’t do what everything in their biology is screaming at them to do: get the hell out .

Now all of those buried alive stories make more sense. So do the stories of being conscious but immobile on the surgeon’s table, the scalpel sharp and gleaming inches away from the whites of your eyeball.

When you think about trapping your character or characters, think not only about the physical location. Also, think about access to help through cell phones and other resources like food, water, and air.

5. Helpless

Another primitive fear is powerlessness. When we feel helpless, we feel desperately alone. That’s another reason those buried alive stories are so dang terrifying.

Spook up your story by getting your character alone and without any outside help. In your 150-word story, you might only have one character anyway. But this technique also works for longer stories.

When plotting out your story (or pantsing your way through it), ask yourself, “How can I make my character more helpless?” and, “What do they need? How can I take that away?”

6. Vulnerable

Like helplessness, vulnerability is another fear trigger. That’s one of the reasons the shower scene in Psycho is so visceral. The female character is completely vulnerable.

The same can be said of the movie Jaws. When we are floating in the ocean, we are easy prey. Vulnerability can be terrifying.

What parts of your story can exploit vulnerability? How can you make your character more vulnerable?

Consider these possibilities:

Darkness (When we can’t see, we are more vulnerable)
Handicapped (Such as when we are injured and can’t run or defend ourselves)
Weaker/Smaller (Children are vulnerable, when facing bigger and stronger opponents, we are all vulnerable)
The unknown (When we don’t know what is out there or what we are up against, fear magnifies)

7. Empathetic Fear

The terror that I can relate to is more terrifying. Vampire horror stories and zombie stories can be very scary, but I can’t really relate to them. But hearing a knock on the door in the middle of the night? I’ve been there .

That’s why scary stories involving pets (Pet Cemetery) and dolls (Chucky) scare the goodness right out of us. Most all of us have experienced pets. Most of us have glanced side-eyed at a creepy doll perched on a dusty dresser and wondered at the dark intelligence that might be starting back at us.

When crafting your story, dig into relatable experiences and places. They terrify us in their normalcy. We connect to them more easily and fully.

75 Scary Story Writing Prompts

In case you need spooky story starters to write your short horror story, here are 75 writing prompts. Use them for writing sprints, creative fodder to generate new and terrifying micro or long-form horror story ideas, to write creepy fanfiction, or just as a mental exercise to train your mind to see story possibilities everywhere. You could even consider them 75 Halloween themed prompts (since some of the prompts reference this spooky holiday) . It’s completely up to you!

Download a copy of all 75 Horror writing prompts as a PDF below: (Just click the Download button)

You come home and no one recognizes you.
The old civil war painting in the hall just blinked.
Describe Halloween from a Jack-O-Lantern’s point of view.
What is the most terrified you have ever been?
What are some unusual tools that you could use to carve a pumpkin?
Write a scene where someone carves a pumpkin while the pumpkin screams.
Something is following you while trick-or-treating.
You realize that you are slowly losing your mind.
Your character must stay overnight in the room where a dozen people were murdered.
The old man in front of you has fully black eyes (no whites)
Your dog is acting strangely like it doesn’t recognize you.
Your character wakes up trapped somewhere.
What is the most terrifying day of the year? Why?
A kid suspects his or her parents may be trying to murder them.
Your mirror image stops mimicking you.
Your character finds a long-lost letter that chills his spine.
The doll on the dresser just moved by itself.
Who do you want to scare this Halloween? How will you scare them?
Your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere.
What would you do during a zombie pandemic?
You suspect the old lady next door is cooking more than bread.
Write a story about a haunted playground.
Share your first pumpkin carving experience with a person deathly afraid of knives.
Can you write a poem from the point of view of a serial killer?
Prepare a questionnaire to interview the monster under your bed.
How would you define yourself, a scaredy-cat or strong-hearted person who is difficult to scare?
Do you believe in ghosts?
Write a descriptive recipe from the point of view of an evil witch.
Complete the sentence- When I looked behind the basement water heater …
Your little brother tells you that he saw a monster underneath the bed. Then he shows you the claw marks on his shin.
Write a persuasive letter to your pen pal pleading with them to never to play “Bloody Mary.”
Flip to three random words in the dictionary and create a scary story that connects all three.
Make a list of decorative items that can be used by a Vampire to lure victims into his lair.
A new mother finds a jack-o-lantern with a secret spooky message inside it.
What would you do if you woke up in the middle of the night to find someone staring at you?
Your shadow stops following you. What do you do?
You wake up in the middle of the night and can’t breathe.
Write about the history of a ghost town.
Write a story about a kid who goes trick-or-treating but gets lost in the woods.
While taking a shower, your character realizes she is covered in giant tarantulas.
All the power and lights suddenly go off in the middle of a storm.
Your character starts spitting up blood.
You are a vampire trying to get invited into a house. Write a first-person account of what you would say to gain entrance.
What scares you the most?
What are the similarities of your top three scary movies?
Write about a normal object that becomes unsettling.
A traveling minister brings your dead brother back to life but something is different about him.
List as many words as you can that sound “scary” to you.
You start hearing the thoughts of a serial killer.
A new girl in town puts a curse on you.
You wake up in bed next to a dead body.
A man attends a funeral and realizes the body in the coffin isn’t dead.
A woman gets in touch with her dead younger sister.
A woman attends a funeral and realizes the body in the coffin is her.
If you could bring any Halloween monsters back to life who would it be and why?
A man is accused of kidnapping a child he has never met.
A woman wakes up with no eyesight in a place she has never been.
Write a story where nothing is as it seems.
A scary clown is walking towards you in the dark.
The local psyche ward just lost all power and all staff has mysteriously disappeared.
The empty subway train slows to a stop in the middle of a tunnel.
A serial killer is recreating every one of Stephen King’s novels .
A man takes a beautiful woman home, but she starts acting oddly inhuman.
A woman’s spouse is convinced she’s been replaced with a clone.
A man’s dog starts becoming more aggressive.
Create a social media profile for one of the following: mummy, clown, zombies, vampires, or werewolf.
All the children in town disappear.
A woman gets out of the shower to a strange message written in the steam on the bathroom mirror.
A mythical being comes back to life.
The faces of a man’s neighbors start to sag grossly.
Write about a household item possessed by an evil spirit.
Complete the story – The moment she stepped off the curb onto the deserted street…
You think you might be starting to crave blood.
The magnets on the fridge spell out, “I’m in the room with you.”
You start to hear whispering in the walls of your house.

How to use These Horror Writing Prompts for Writing Sprints

Choose one or more prompts from the list
Prepare your writing tools
Decide on a word count goal, for example, 1,000 words (hey, that’s almost 7 of those 150-word stories. The actual calculation is 6.66. Coincidence??).
Set a timer for between 15 and 60 minutes.
Start the timer.
Write as many words as you can until the timer stops or goes off.
Record Your word sprint data on a spreadsheet or using online software. For example, your word count achieved compared to your word count software.

For a complete breakdown of writing sprints, read Writing Sprints: The Ultimate Guide to Successful Writing Sprints .

So, that’s how to write a scary story in 150-words (or less). For even more awesome content, consider these articles:

21 Ways To Write a Complex Villain [Ultimate Badass Guide]
How To Write Morally Gray Characters [Bestseller Secrets Revealed]
How to Become a Writer for SNL (The Insanely Complete Guide)

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110+ Horror Writing Prompts (With A Twist)

Give yourself the chills with this list of over 110 horror writing prompts. From scary ghost stories to creepy stories about animals and monsters. Now is the time to write your own horror story , just like Goosebumps or The Haunting of Aveline Jones.

From the gory to the scary, from the monstrous to the supernatural, from the humorous to the wacky, we have it all! Use this horror writing prompts generator to get a random horror writing idea to write about:

Keep on reading for a list of horror story prompts.

Most horror stories are based on one thing, fear. And it’s always a good idea to have a bit of that in your own life. Fear makes us all think differently, it makes us do things we wouldn’t normally do. And it’s the same thing that makes horror stories so scary. It’s a good idea to think of something that scares you, and then write about it. As a starting point, we have provided you with this list of horror prompts. For some of these gory ideas, we have included a twist, while for others it’s up to you how the story goes! Feel free to use any of these prompts in your writing, and to expand on any of the ideas.

List of Horror Writing Prompts

This list of horror writing prompts will you give you the well-needed inspiration for a good horror story:

The Haunting Hospital: A small girl named Julie is walking down a country road when she finds a cemetery and realises it is her home town. She goes to her house and finds that it has been turned into a hospital. She finds her father and her mother there. Her father tells her that she is now a part of the hospital and that she must work to be paid. Julie and her mother go to work as nurses.
Chasing Shadows: A girl named Becky is walking in her neighbourhood when she sees a little boy playing in the street. Becky runs over to him and asks him what he is doing. He tells her that he is a little monster and that he will kill her if she does not leave him alone. Becky takes off running and the little monster chases her.
Park of Peril: A little girl named Melissa is walking through the park when she finds a little boy who tells her that he will eat her if she does not take him home. Melissa takes off running and the little boy chases her.
Claws of the Night: This one involves a kid named Angela. One night she goes to sleep and when she wakes up the next morning her hands have turned into the claws of a cat.
The Poisoned Harvest: A boy named Billy is walking down the street one day when he sees a homeless man. He notices some fruit by the man. When the homeless man is not looking, Billy steals the fruit. Later on, he goes home and eats this piece of fruit. The fruit is poisoned, and Billy goes blind.
Carnivorous Confrontation: A story of a kid who loves to eat the flesh of dead animals, but one day a man appears and tells him not to eat them.
Invisible Menace: Write a story about a young boy who is terrorized by an invisible monster.
Nightmare Room: The invisible monster is eating kids and it is in their room all the time.
Enchanted Chaos: A handsome prince on a quest to learn magic wants to marry the beautiful princess, but the kingdom is being attacked by demons, ghosts, and…his dad.
Insanity’s Feast: The whole little town goes insane. They start killing people with their mouths. They kill them in the most gruesome way.
Shuttered Nightmares: A serial killer is taking photos of their victims. He is telling them how he is going to kill them. And then he starts his killing.
Witch’s Chains: Two kids named ‘Bud’ and ‘Chip’ got separated from their parents. They live next door to a witch and are unable to leave the house. One day, the witch makes their parents get into a container, and leaves them in the backyard, chained to a tree.
Enchanted Camp: A summer camp where a powerful wizard casts a spell on the children to make them do his bidding.
The Weeping Specter: A ghost that follows you around and cries on your shoulder and if you get sad it gets angry and turns into a ghostly voice that spooks people.
Haunted Truths: The lead character is haunted by a ghost who knows the truth about their past.
Distrustful Shadows: A girl named Dana, who works at a daycare centre, doesn’t trust anybody. This causes her to make sure she does everything she can to stop any other person from ever entering her place.
Realm of Nightmares: One day, the princess wakes up in a terrible nightmare. She is being chased by something, she cannot see what it is. And then she hears the voice of her mother, telling her to run away. She goes to her room and sees that the covers on her bed are in a shape that reminds her of the monster she just saw. She knows she cannot sleep in this place. She goes to the other side of her room and sees a window. She goes to the window and finds that it is an opening to a new world…
Witch’s Wrath: A girl named Misty lives with her parents and their next-door neighbour who is an evil witch. One day her father and the witch get into a fight and the witch accidentally kills him.
Brief Awakening: A boy named Sam is suffering from a terrible disease and he only has days to live. He’s in a coma, and he’s not responding to any medical treatments. Until one night he starts to experience some new changes…
Vengeful Wishes: A little girl named Mina finds a genie. The genie grants her 3 wishes. Because Mina has been a victim of bullying, she uses all her wishes to punish her bullies with ghoulish consequences.
Jar of Horrors: One day, a boy named Marcus went out to take a walk, and he found a jar that he thought was full of gold. Marcus had also found a bag that was heavier than he could lift, but he drags it home anyway. When he opens to bag he discovers something disgusting…
Game Over: A creepy character named Nemesis is trying to kill Luke, who plays video games and lives in his basement. At night, Luke hears voices telling him to hide. He goes to the basement and a creature knocks him out. He ends up as a character in his gruesome game.
Bracelet of Resurrection: A boy named Josh loses his best friend to a freak accident. He finds the other half of a bracelet he gave his friend that day. He hangs on to it until one night the bracelet brings his best friend back to life.
The Ghost Writer: Write a story titled, The Ghost Writer. Write about the ghost of someone who haunts you.
Eternal Specter: Write a scary ghost story about a man who is cursed to spend eternity as a ghost.
Hidden World: A boy named Brody is having problems adjusting to life in his new home after his parents divorced. He tries to see his dad, but they don’t want him around. One day he discovers a secret passage to a hidden underground world where his father now lives.
Stuttering Shadows: A story about a young man named Kenny, who works as a garbage man. He also has a terrible stuttering problem that he has to deal with. One day he discovers that his stuttering is getting worse and worse and he becomes scared to death because of it. He thinks that the talking squirrel next to him is a demon.
Haunted Corner: Write a story about an object in your room that becomes haunted.
Ghostly Deception: A boy named Bryce has been hiding out from his abusive father. One day his father is gone and his dad’s new girlfriend walks into the house. He thinks it’s the ghost of his dead mother. The ghost shows him that his dad’s new girlfriend has been lying to him about how his birth mother died.
Trapped in Terror: A young boy named Spencer and his sister Sarah, are on a camping trip when they find a box of mysterious objects. When they open it, one of the items shoots at them, striking Sarah and trapping her in a pod inside a tree. While locked inside the tree, Sarah meets an evil doll named Alice.
Possessed Playtime: A young girl named Cassandra is babysitting her neighbour’s two kids. One day the kids eat some forbidden foods and a demon spirit possesses one of the kids and turns him into an evil creature who haunts the neighbourhood.
Eyes of the Bunny: A little girl named Hayley discovers a secret house that no one in the neighbourhood knows about, and is welcomed inside by a red-eyed white bunny. One day when Hayley goes to a party, her newfound friend kidnaps her and traps her inside this mysterious house.
Eternal Echo: Write a horror story about a horrible accident or a nightmare that has haunted you your whole life.
Drowning Destiny: A boy named Joshua falls into a river and is about to drown when he gets rescued by a beautiful mermaid. She tells him that he will die the next day because that is his destiny.
Keys of Madness: A young boy named Alex finds a set of glowing door keys and uses them to enter a huge abandoned mansion. When he explores the mansion, he is visited by a dark spirit who attacks him and drives him insane.
Alien Abduction: A boy named Sam wakes up one day to find that his parents have been missing for over a year. The day he discovers them, they tell him that he was kidnapped by aliens, and they built an experimental human brainwashing machine.
Dreams of Stella: A young boy named Toby starts having strange dreams of a girl named Stella. One day, he sees Stella when he’s on a roller coaster, but it turns out to be a ghost who is trying to take over his mind.
Eye of the Leaf: A little boy named Ben is playing outside one day when he finds a strange leaf. When he picks it up, it turns into a leaf with a red eye and starts to follow him.
Vengeful Spirit: Write a horror story about a ghost who just wants to kill the person who called him a monster when he was alive.
Nightmare Adoption: A young girl named Annabelle is adopted by a family that lives in a very old house. One day when is playing outside, she is kidnapped by a scary man named the Nightman.
Stuffed Shadows: A young boy named Jack gets lost in the woods and finds an old abandoned house. He enters the house and finds a huge stuffed animal. When he touches it, it wakes up and attacks him.
Depths of Fear: Imagine your worst fear and write a scary story about it.
A Rude Awakening: Write a horror story titled, A Rude Awakening. What would you do if you woke up in a place that you weren’t familiar with?
The Mysterious Case: What happens when someone goes missing and no one knows where they’ve gone?
Dreamstalker : Write about a monster that might be stalking you in your dreams.
Write a story titled, When The Wind Blows. This story could be about a sudden change in weather that comes with a new problem.
Mirror Demon: Continue the following story: Suddenly, the demon in the mirror reappeared and she began to scream.
Doctor’s Dread: When the doctor gave her the news, she screamed out loud and ran in circles.
Safekeeping Shadows: In her final hours, she told me to be thankful that I had done my best to keep her safe. That I had made sure no evil would ever hurt her again.
Camping Secrets: Continue the following horror story: As I was growing up, every year our family went camping in the woods. My grandfather passed away a few years ago. He was a rich man, and I wanted to visit his grave at the cemetery.
Forest of Shadows: While walking around the forest, I came across a monstrous-looking creature. I was scared and ran back home. The next day, I decided to go back and see what the monster was doing.
Echoes of Dread: Write down your biggest fear. And then write a story based on this fear.
Silent Stalker: When I looked in her file I saw that she had gotten five serious stab wounds. But, I could not see any sign of her attacker. Her wounds were all over her body and all over her arms.
Arachnid Terror: After discovering that a spider was sleeping in her bed, a young girl named Amy screams and runs away, locking herself in the bathroom.
Electric Fury: A scientific team is doing research on electricity. They find a very strong cell that could create many things when it is exposed to electricity. Suddenly the electricity static comes alive. It gets angry and attacks the scientists.
Imaginary Friend: A little girl named Amber loves to play with her new imaginary friend. She calls him “Giant” and she makes up stories about him. She believes that he is her friend for real.
Melting Nightmare: Continue the following story: As it continued attacking, it even caused my teeth to start to melt off of my jaw. My skin would start to burn, and my hair would become brown.
Friday Night Terrors: It’s Friday. The TV is on, and you are wide awake. As you lie there listening, you begin to feel tired. And just as your eyes begin to close, you hear a creak of the floorboards. Your eyes snap open. What you see scares the living hell out of you.
Blood Dawn: You wake up one morning to find your entire body covered in blood. What do you do?
Room of Despair: How would you react if you were locked in a room and told you could never leave?
Haunting Memoirs: What is the scariest thing that has ever happened to you? Can you explain this in great detail?
Chilling Chronicles: Make a top ten list of the creepiest books or stories you have ever read.
The Gruesome Creation: Describe the most gruesome and disgusting creature you can imagine.
Zoo’s Menace: Write a horror story where there is a threat of animals getting out of the zoo.
Red-Eyed Pursuit: Continue the following starter: A red-eyed man of tall and dark build looms over a bus stop on a lonely, deserted country road, staring at me intently. I run like hell to get to the other side of the street, but it’s too late…
Homebound Horror: A strange animal has been following you through your home. Have you been doing anything strange or dangerous that has made it freak out?
Midnight Messages: Someone is leaving you messages in the dead of night. What’s the creepiest message you’ve received?
Ghostly Watcher: Create a ghost story about a creature that watches and waits in the corners of dark, abandoned places.
Jack and Jill’s Nightmare: Jack and Jill went up the hill, but they never came back down. Will they ever make it to the bottom? Write a horror story based on this idea.
Dark Secrets: The history of your town has a long dark secret that nobody wants to talk about. What is it?
Mutated Reality: Reality show participants get kidnapped and sent on a dangerous mission, where they must learn how to blend with mutated creatures.
Beastly Intrusion: In a small community in Japan, a supernatural force enters the community through a sewer. To beat it, the village must learn to work as a team and think like a beast.
School of Shadows: School kids don’t believe in ghosts until they’re suddenly being terrorised in their school at night.
Vampiric Genesis: Someone is using a contaminated strain of bat DNA to create vampires in real life. And it’s up to a group of scientists to put an end to it.
Promised Souls: The dead walk, and all they want to do is get what they were promised. Will you figure it out?
Spellbound Silence: An aspiring rapper, who always dreamed of singing in front of an adoring crowd, becomes the target of a spell that makes him unable to sing, his most cherished talent. Will he survive the consequences of his initial desire to be a star?
Mirror Man: Continue this story: You look into the mirror and see a man in black standing in the corner…
Cryptic Chronicles: Imagine that you stumble upon a really creepy story in your local library and it leads you on a very strange and frightening journey.
Lost in a Strange World: When night falls, people get teleported to an area far away, in a very different world! The only way to return home is by combining body parts with the different elements of the land.
Wicked Takeover: A small town gets taken over by a wicked witch, who’s on a mission to suck the souls of all the inhabitants.
Soul Seeker: When someone posts an ad online about finding a soul and bringing it home for a price, things get really interesting.
Human and Beast: What would happen if human DNA was spliced with that of a deadly monster?
Unknown Beyond: A guy receives an advance warning from his friends in the afterlife to get ready for the afterlife, or something worse may happen…
Death’s Present: A girl gets a letter that someone wants to give her a present before they die, but the present comes with a very specific clause. What happens when she follows the instructions?
Dark Diary: As a local woman is trying to recover from the death of her husband, she discovers an old diary, in which she discovers something that happened in her past that has led to events that followed.
Christmas Carnage: It’s beginning to look like Christmas! But there’s more to Christmas than Santa and presents. A deadly secret is hidden away in a child’s bedroom. And with a massive killer about to make an appearance, it’s a race against time to track him down.
Empire of Evil: A ship sets sail for the distant colony of the Empire, but its mission becomes a mission to find the source of evil.
Hell Town: Using a sinister new machine, a small-town mayor is convinced to turn his town into a hell-like world.
Wild Dogs: A group of four friends are lured into an abandoned house by a pack of wild dogs.
I Went To A Party: Complete the following sentence in three different spooky ways: I went to a party and…
Sea’s Claw: The captain was anxious to get home, but the sea was so rough that his ship could not make it. Suddenly, from the fog, a giant black claw appeared. The giant black claw grabbed the ship and then brought the ship to the bottom of the ocean.
Dybylu’s Awakening: A monster named Dybylu wakes up one morning, alone in her room. She can feel it in the air; her pet cat is afraid. She goes to look in the mirror and see’s a human staring back at her.
Murdered Spirit: A little boy is asked to help a spirit of a man who was murdered, but as he hears the story, it sounds weird and a bit confusing, and he begins to wonder if the story is even true.
Playground Horrors: In a playground near an orphanage, there are many playgrounds where kids play. The best playground is found next to an abandoned asylum.
Barn Cat’s Secret: A drifter named Mick goes to a farm with his friend Sam, and the owner of the farm is a creepy scientist. Mick climbs a barn ladder and sees a strange cat in there…
Cape Creature: A sweet girl named Annie and her sister, Charley, are having an adventure in their neighbourhood. Suddenly, Annie spots a strange black cape creature lurking in the distance. It was the most feared and horrible creature Annie has ever seen.
Island of Souls: The main character goes to an island that no one has visited before. He is enjoying his vacation, but one night he finds out that his home is being invaded by creatures who want to steal his soul.
Spookie’s Nightmares: A witch known as ‘Spookie’ causes horrible hallucinations to victims of her nightmares. Her victims can’t scream or cry or run. All they can do is panic.
Stick’s Mischief: A girl named Paige finds a stick that attracts a mysterious creature that will play a sick joke on her.
Black Blood: One day, a girl named Robin started having problems in school. Her parents, who are very smart and caring, see something is very wrong with Robin so they take her to the doctor. The doctor makes her go through a lot of tests, and everything is okay except for one last thing. Robin has black blood running through her veins.
Mirror’s Curse: A teenage girl named Sarah who is obsessed with her appearance starts turning into an old, ugly witch every time she looks into a mirror.
Bee Killer: When bees start dying suddenly out of nowhere, the lead detective in a bee colony must find the culprit.
Demon’s Puzzle: A strange jigsaw puzzle holds a horrific secret… In it, a grinning demon holds a girl’s head in its giant mouth.
Forbidden Drawing: A little boy sees a drawing of him in a forbidden book he had found. He is then transported to a never-ending forest, lost forever…
When the Past Comes Back: An adult is being haunted by their younger self.
Beast of the Woods: A reporter goes into the woods where there was a fierce animal attack. In this attack, five women and a little boy were killed. He decides to search for evidence on who this killer creature might be…
Letters of London: A man lives by himself in a flat in London. A mysterious person starts sending him letters which talk about how scary things will happen if he doesn’t leave his flat.
The Ghost in Her Friend’s Mother: A 7 year old girl is having a sleepover at her friend’s house. Her friend’s mom leaves them alone, but they soon find out that she was poisoned, and that a ghost has taken over her body.
Creepy Crawlies in Your Kitchen: The first animal the kids see is a snake that eats people’s brains. It sneaks around in people’s kitchens.
Revolving Nightmares: The story starts off with a character telling the readers about the night he and his parents got stuck in a revolving door. The night would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Tommy’s Window: A long time ago there was a man named Tommy, who was lost in a forest. Tommy thought he heard a ghost calling him. Tommy went in the direction of the noise and found a scary-looking house that has windows that never opened. Tommy finds out that the house belongs to a witch and that if he opens the windows, the witch will turn Tommy into a puppet.
Tommy the Dog: This is a story about a little boy and his dog. The little boy goes to a big park, and he sees a dog that is alone. He walks over to the dog, but it just barks and then runs away. The next day Tommy starts turning into a human-sized dog.

Fear no more! Just use this list of horror writing prompts to start writing your own fantastic horror story! Use any of these scary prompt ideas to take the story from your mind to your computer screen.

Looking for more creepy horror prompts? Check out this list of Halloween writing prompts , as well as this scary Halloween picture prompts .

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are the 5 elements of a horror story.

Every good horror story contains the following five elements: Character, Setting, Action, Horror and Resolution. You can’t write a good horror without these elements.

How do you write in creepy writing?

To write in creepy writing, you need to immerse yourself in the world of horror. You think to think exactly like your main character or antagonist. Imagine yourself as a ghost, a demon, a monster, or a murderer. You can be a ghost who haunts people in their dreams or a monster who stalks them in the real world. Use extreme details to describe scenes of horror with gory and disgusting elements.

How do you get inspiration for horror?

Most horror stories are based on fear. Think about the things that scare you or haunt you in your nightmares. You can also get inspiration from watching scary movies or reading about scary stories. Finally, horror stories can also be inspired by real-life situations. For example, a girl who is bullied decides to take revenge on her bullies in a gruesome way. Of course, you can also use this list of horror writing prompts to inspire you too!

What are common horror themes?

Horror themes can be based on personal experiences, fears, or nightmares. Here are some common horror themes to explore:

Stalker: Someone who stalks you in your dreams or in the real world.
Monsters: Someone or something who appears to be human, but isn’t.
Revenge: Someone who is still haunted by a past event, and needs to seek revenge to overcome it.
Secrets: A deadly secret that could shake the lives of anyone involved.
Psychopaths: People who just kill or hurt others for the fun of it.

Did you find this list of over 110 horror writing prompts useful? Let us know in the comments below.

Marty the wizard is the master of Imagine Forest. When he's not reading a ton of books or writing some of his own tales, he loves to be surrounded by the magical creatures that live in Imagine Forest. While living in his tree house he has devoted his time to helping children around the world with their writing skills and creativity.

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The ‘American Horror Story’ Essay

The ‘American Horror Story’ (AHS) is a horror anthology that was launched in 2011 to shatter the modern limits of what is acceptable. ‘Depraved’, as they claim, AHS brought along the classical horror themes (mental disorders, physical deformity, extreme violence) in the quantities that, according to reviewers, have ‘completely destroyed any remaining limitations that television censorship has placed on the horror genre’ (Hale 2015, para. 1-6; Hoppenstand 2012, p. 1; Joyrich 2014).

So far, the anthology consists of five seasons, and it has no intent of stopping. The episodes of every season are united by a theme, a plot, and a number of characters (played by a cast that tends to migrate from one season to another).In the season one, for example, all the stories are connected to the Murder House that is owned by the Harmon family.

The Briarcliff Sanitarium, an asylum for criminally insane, is the scenery for the second season; the third, the ‘Coven,’ develops the topic of witchcraft. The fourth, ‘Freak Show,’ exploits the imagery of physical deformity, and a mysterious Hotel appears in the fifth season (Sevenich 2013).

Apart from that, the genre of anthology offers a marvellous opportunity to expand the range of the terrifying topics. For example, you will learn that in AHS, the past affects the present and repeats itself, leaving no chance for the characters to avoid their grim fate.

The second episode of the ‘Murder House’ could serve as an illustration for this topic: when a group of murder fans attempts to repeat a crime that took place in the House several decades ago, the resident spirit demonstrates them, that the House does not need accomplices but is always interested in expanding its collection of lost souls…

It is difficult not to notice that many of the series’ themes are classical and recognisable. AHS interprets real stories (like that of Black Dahlia) and refers to the works of fantasy that true horror fans will undoubtedly recognise (Carman 2012; Vink 2014; Farrimond 2013).

‘The Shining’ and ‘The Amityville Horror’ have definitely been the inspiration for the first season, along with ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, even though AHS has significantly revised the idea of a diabolical child.

Similarly, in the ‘Coven,’ Delphine LaLaurie learns what ‘The Premature Burial’ feels like, but she survives for decades due to her (bad) luck and the curse of immortality. When citing familiar themes, the anthology does not hesitate to change or, rather, twist them to create something that is definitely in tune with AHS.

It is also obvious that AHS develops the traditions of the Gothic canon with its regression, insanity, violence, and, of course, scary twins as the symbol of the dualities and controversies that constitute the world of horror (Keetley, 2013).

Morbid humour and sexual themes add some spice to the plot while the relationship topics straight from a soap opera moisten it with an unexpected touch of drama (Hoppenstand 2012; Carman 2012). As you will see, it is these elements that allow AHS to ‘humanise’ its monstrous characters, suddenly forcing the viewer to sympathise with an abusive mother or a hideous racist.

The cast of the series is also worth mentioning: most of the actors are so good, that the director wants to see them in every season; however, everyone’s favourite, Jessica Lange has, unfortunately, left the show. From season to season she was the “malevolent den mother”, but now the role is given to Lady Gaga, and the fans are not amused (Hale 2015, para. 6).

Hopefully, though, the quality of the series will not decrease. Classically gothic and present-day eclectic, unexpectedly dramatic and morbidly hilarious, the AHS episodes are the new face of the contemporary horror show. They push the boundaries of acceptable, but it seems that this is exactly what fans have been craving: a violent, explicit, morbid, and depraved true American horror story.

Reference List

Carman, C. (2012) ‘Weird Wonders on Cable TV,’ The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide 19 (4), pp. 50-51.

Farrimond, K. (2013) ‘Postfeminist Noir: Brutality and Retro Aesthetics in the Black Dahlia,’ Film and History 43 (2), pp. 34-49.

Hale, M. (2015) Review: ‘American Horror Story: Hotel,’ as Depraved as Ever. The New York Times. Web.

Hoppenstand, G. (2012) ‘Editorial: The Horror of It All,’ Journal of Popular Culture 45 (1), pp. 1-2.

Joyrich, L. (2014) ‘Queer Television Studies: Currents, Flows, and (Main)streams,’ Cinema Journal 53 (2), pp. 133-139.

Keetley, D. (2013) ‘Stillborn: The Entropic Gothic of American Horror Story,’ Gothic Studies 15 (2), pp. 89-107.

Sevenich, R. (2013) ‘Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are’ Queering American Horror Story. Gender Forum. Web.

Vink, O. (2014) ‘American Horror Story: Coven’, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies 13, pp. 146-149.

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Bibliography

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Mifepristone: its value beyond reproductive health, paradise falls: chapter 21, changing tides, inner eclipse, the new phase, the order of things, walking on water, remember to play, april showers, naltrexone shortages reported across u.s., growing up -the bangalore years, paradise falls: chapter 20, a day of fools, the island flamingo: chapter 29, all things abandoned, seeds of doubt, an unused compass, everyday beauty, three months in, buried saints, paradise falls: chapter 19, growing up – the delhi years, moonstruck at midnight, storm drain: a 500 word horror story.

The early summer rainstorm ceased. But, dark clouds remained and hovered above the sparsely populated street. Rainwater trickled into the storm drain below and lured the brown, slimy creature to the surface. Overcast skies and rain-drenched surface created the perfect environment for the underground creature. Conditions were ideal for it to go in search of a meal. It seeped out through a small crevice between the road and the round drain cap.

The sinister blob slithered down the deserted street and headed toward the nearest home. It glided across the dampened pavement with an eerie silence. Driven by hunger, the brown goo then drifted onto the wet grass where it devoured pill bugs and worms. The mysterious mass lacked a mouth, so it absorbed things through its gelatinous skin.

As it neared the solitary house, it sensed large sources of food and quickened its pace. The blob slithered into the backyard, inched its way up the steps, and squeezed through a screen door. Once inside, the creature squirmed into the family room and moved up the backside of the sofa where a male dozed. With stealth and silence, the goo rolled toward him. It slid over the man’s forehead and dove into his opened mouth.

The male bolted awake, and his eyes flew open. He coughed, retched, and struggled to breathe. The man reached up and grabbed at the goo to yank it away, but the creature ingested his hands. Before long, he succumbed to the attack.

The mass then inched its way down the man’s esophagus and into his stomach. After consuming the innards, the slimy creature forced its way out through the abdomen of the lifeless male. It slithered in and out repeatedly until it consumed every bit of flesh, bones, organs, blood, and hair. Evidence of the male’s body was non-existent. Gone—vanished into the belly of the blob.

The creature left the couch and made its way into the kitchen where it detected a female. The mass glided toward her leg and ascended.

She looked down and screamed. The female shook her leg and whacked at the brown goo to free her body from the ghastly creature, but it latched on with unmatched strength. It made its way toward her face, entered her mouth, and rendered her silent.

The slime entered through her eye sockets and consumed her brain, then moved down to ingest her body. A droplet of blood remained on the floor—until the gelatinous creature rolled backward to absorb it.

The slimy creature sensed movement coming from above. It slithered up the refrigerator, toward the family feline.

Fearful of the strange brown blob, the calico cat jumped down and dashed out of the house.

The nefarious creature, satisfied with its consumption of food, rolled down from the appliance. It slithered out of the house and headed back toward its home—the underground. It intended to roam the storm drains, to lie in wait for the next rainstorm and the meal it’d provide.

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100+ Horror Words

Whether you’re crafting a ghastly ghost story or you’re simply seeking to hone your vocabulary skills, learning the meaning and usage of horror words is an excellent way to engage with popular culture. Below is a list of some of the best and brightest spooky words that will enrich your everyday life experiences.

Words Related to Halloween

Table of Contents

Halloween

Halloween means different things to people of different cultures across the globe. Traditionally, the holiday is a remembrance day for the deceased. In modern culture, this focus has shifted to things of a more supernatural nature. It’s a night for tricks, treats, and scaring yourself silly as you munch on candy and lull yourself to sleep in front of the ghostly haze of a Lon Chaney film.

Like many horror words, the term sinister implies that a threat, some sort of unfortunate circumstance, is on the horizon. The very pronunciation of this word attests to imminent danger that makes you shudder in preparation for the ominous threat that lies ahead.

Spine-Tingling

A jolt of adrenaline, a shot of surprise—this word points to the trigger that zips through you when you’re scared out of your wits. It’s a harrowing feeling when something is spine-tingling since your nervous system’s on high alert as you brace yourself to make a fast escape from either physical or psychological threats.

Although experiencing a phantasm is a frightening phenomenon, this word indicates that the mind is, indeed, playing a trick of its own. A phantasm is an illusion, an imposter, that is often mistaken for a ghost or other supernatural being.

Suspense

Although not necessarily as doomful as terms like sinister , this horror vocabulary word keeps you on your toes as you anticipate what will happen next. The term implies an adrenaline rush that you’ll likely experience as you anxiously await an eerie encounter with an unwelcome guest.

As one of the most apocalyptic of all horror words, the word cursed indicates that something, or someone, is untouchable and unredeemable and that those who disregard the warnings will suffer the consequences. For instance, if a tomb is cursed , those who touch or enter it could face serious repercussions for trespassing. Typically, something that is cursed is going to cost you some sort of lasting mental or physical harm.

Hauntings are essentially sensory encounters with supernatural entities. It typically occurs in desolate settings that include creepy houses, lonely barns, quiet alleys, or other deserted locations. Be it film, books, or in-person accounts, hauntings usually are reported at night or early dawn.

The hauntings themselves certainly aren’t limited to simply sighting a phantom with your eyes; all five of your senses can be key indicators as well.

For example, upon entering the foyer, a woman might repeatedly smell the same fragrant flowers that were a personal favorite of the former deceased owner of her home. Likewise, a man might experience the tickle of a feather across his forehead as he reclines on the couch alone after a long day.

Nightmare

In all forms of artistic media, as well as personal reports, you regularly encounter the term nightmare , and it’s a word that triggers massive anxiety at its very utterance. Trembling legs, sweaty sheets, and a racing heart are just a few of the horrific effects of a truly terrorizing nightmare.

In terms of horror, a nightmare is usually much more than a simple snag in your REM cycle. It presents an open door for creepy guests to live rent-free in your head and take advantage of the fact that there’s little you can do to stop it.

Paranormal

The term paranormal explores all that’s beyond the scope of what’s able to be reasoned. The physical world often holds mysteries that bypass the bounds of logic, so the word paranormal alludes to those hair-raising phenomena that just don’t fit the bill when it comes to arriving at a rational explanation.

List of Horror Words

Wizards
Haunted House
Dracula
Vampire
Crypts
Grim Reaper
Mummies
Levitation
Cobweb
Tombstone
Grave
Chill
Graveyard
Zombies
Monster
Coffin
Werewolf
Bloodsucker
Dreadulness
Jack-O Lantern
Witches
Corpse
Skeleton
Cemetery
Trick or Treat
Halloween Costume
Spine-chilling
Pumpkin
Disguise
Goblin
Fangs
Burial
Dreadfulness
Poltergeist
Supernatural
Abomination
Necromancer
Monstrosity
Spine-tingling
Suffocating
Nightmarish
Catastrophic

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Write a horror story in about 150-200 words.

When i was about 10, my family of six lived in an extremely small apartment. two bedrooms upstairs and then the living room. when i was tired of my siblings i would sleep downstairs. one night i am lying on the couch facing the front door and watching the sky through the window by the door when a face shows up in the window illuminated by a lighter. i freeze, and the face goes away. i’m pretty relieved, thinking it was maybe our druggie neighbours seeing if my parents were still awake when it shows up again. i try to scream but when i hope my mouth nothing came out, not a sound. the person then kicks in the door and walks into the room, he sees me, smiles, and goes towards the kitchen. as he comes out of the kitchen with a knife my dad makes it down the stairs and the guy boots it out of there. i still can’t sleep easily on couches to this day..

Top 10 Short Ghost Story in English 100, 200, 500 Words PDF

Short & long ghost story in english.

10 Top Short & Long Ghost Story in English 100, 200, 500 Words: You can Download PDF of all these ghost stories from the link given below. Today we will introduce you to some such scary and ghostly stories which you will be shocked to read. Some such things are difficult to believe, yet we cannot live without reading them, so let’s start with 10 such best scary and ghost stories.

Ghost Story in English

1. ghost in the lift.

This story is from Delhi, we used to live in Ambedkar Colony. The name of our building was Apsara. There was a rumor that there is a ghost in the lift! In fact, a woman had committed suicide by jumping from the 14th floor. Since then people used to say that the ghost of that woman is seen in the lift!

Our house was on the fifth floor! Although I didn’t believe much in the ghost thing, still I was afraid to go on the lift at night! Well, I didn’t even need a lift.

One day I was coming back home with a friend of mine. He also lived in the same building! At that time it was around 10:00 at the night. We were scared to go in the elevator! But we didn’t want to show each other that we were scared! So we got into the elevator! The lift reached the third floor, and the door was half open and closed by itself!

The lift started going up! We tried to stop the lift but none of the buttons were working! The lift went to the top floor and then came down to the bottom floor. This happened 7-8 times and then the lift stopped on the 14th floor. The elevator door opened on its own!

We were very scared! We quickly ran downstairs off the lift and enter our respective homes! Everyone in the house asked why I was panting, so I made an excuse that I was coming after a race with a friend. After that day I never used the lift again during the day!

2. The Witch on the Roof

My name is Amar! I am going to tell you all a story I saw with one eye! The matter is 5 years old, at that time we used to live in Lucknow city. For some days there was a rumor of a witch roaming in our locality.

Some people said that they have seen a scary woman walking in the night! Sometimes she is seen roaming on the roof of houses and sometimes in the streets.

Because of this people stopped sleeping on the terrace. The streets used to become deserted as soon as it got dark. One day the people of the locality together kept watch for the whole night, but no one came!

I didn’t believe it at all, I used to make fun of anyone who talked about witches! I believed that this is the misconception of the people or some person is scaring the people!

One night the lights went out! Everyone inside was asleep in the summer! No one dared to go on the roof for fear of the witch! I was also forbidden to go upstairs! But when the heat could not be tolerated, I took my bed and went to the terrace!

Reaching the roof, I saw a woman sitting on the eaves of the roof! She had a piece of meat in her hand which she was eating! His face was on the other side! Only his hands looked like animals! My condition worsened after seeing all this!

I ran away leaving my bed there and bolting the door! From that day I also believed in the witch talk!

For the next few days, there were incidents of seeing a witch, but after a few days, the witch stopped appearing! People’s fear also started to end! But I will never forget what I saw!

3. Ghost in the Pond

It’s about when I was 10-11 years old! It was summer vacation! I had gone to my village! There was no work in the village other than having fun! There was no freedom in the city which was there in the village.

There was a pond near the village. One day I asked my brother who lived in the village to walk there. He told that a ghost lives in that pond! If you go there, you will be killed!

I said go secretly no one will know! The next day in the afternoon when everyone was resting at home, we both left secretly! We even took our fishing gear! After reaching the pond, we started fishing!

After a while, my brother got up from there and went somewhere. I was left there alone, suddenly someone pushed me hard from behind! I fell into the pond! The pond was not very deep, but still, I could not get out! Like someone is pulling me inside!

I was out of breath! Meanwhile, someone grabbed my hand and pulled me up! He was none other than my brother! After a while when I became normal I asked why did you push me?

He swore he didn’t push! It seemed from his face that he was not lying! We both quickly ran out of there and never went there again!

4. Haunted House

It’s been almost 5 years since then my aunt’s health had deteriorated a lot! She used to do wrong things and used to say anything to anyone.

We have seen many doctors but to no avail! Then one of our relatives told us that he was possessed by a witch and that he would have to be taken to Balaji! The housemates left for Balaji without delay!

As soon as Balaji reached, aunt got down from the car and went inside running. Frightened, even the family members followed him. Going there, it was found that uncle had cut down a tree in his garden in which the witch and her children lived!

The witch had come to break into their house! But after a little persuasion there, she agreed! He asked for milk for his hungry children! Uncle brought milk and as soon as he wanted to give milk to him, he refused and said my children will drink sweet milk!

Uncle bought jalebi from the front and put it in milk! After that, the witch asked to plant a tree in the forest and also asked to keep milk under it every day for 2 years!

After that aunt started recovering and everyone came back, but while coming back, aunt started doing some strange things again! The family members got very upset! On asking, it was found that now it is the shadow of some other ghost!

He told that my uncle used to have a dream a few years back! In the dream, a man used to ask him for water. He told that he is the same man! What happened after this, no one told anything even after asking a lot! But the aunt was absolutely fine, which everyone was satisfied with!

5. Aunt’s Ghost

This story is from my village! There my two uncles and their family used to live in the village. Everything was going well but my great-uncle died in a road accident! Shortly after that my great aunt also died!

After that my younger uncle and his family also left the village house and came to the city. After a few months, my younger uncle had to go to the village house to get it repaired! They started the repair work on the house!

One evening after finishing the repair work, my uncle was lying on the terrace at 10 pm. They saw the ghost of my great-aunt sitting in the courtyard! My uncle’s eyes were filled with tears! As he reached the bottom of the stairs, he saw my great aunt sitting at the bottom of the stairs, staring back at him!

Seeing this, my uncle was completely scared and lost his senses! After that when he regained consciousness, he went to the neighbor’s house. He told them the whole scene! After that my uncle’s health deteriorated badly. He quickly came to the city but never forgot that thing!

6. Mother’s love

Ramesh who is 25 years old is newly married and has a beautiful wife. Both of them went to Himachal for their honeymoon where they spent 5 days.

Now it was time for him to return to his home. Both sat in their car and left for Noida. It was 10:00 at the night. Now they were about to cross the valley of Himachal, the road was completely deserted and the car was going very fast.

Suddenly Ramesh saw a woman in front of his car who was wearing a red saree. She was stopping the car by waving her hand from a distance. Seeing him, Ramesh’s wife refused to stop the car as she was afraid that it might be a conspiracy to commit a robbery. Suddenly the woman came in front of the car due to Ramesh had to stop the car.

The woman started banging loudly on the door. From the expression on his face, it seemed as if he was in some big trouble. Ramesh’s wife refused to open the car door. She said it could be some trick, we should not go out.

Ramesh said that if she was really in trouble then she would need us because looking at her she was looking good from home. As soon as I said this, Ramesh opened the car door and came out.

The woman said in a panic, “Please help me”. Ramesh said what happened. He replied that my car had fallen into the ditch below and hit a tree and my little girl was trapped in it. Please take him out.

On hearing this, Ramesh’s wife also came out and all three went toward the ditch. Saw that the car had collided with a tree a little below and a small girl sitting behind was crying. Ramesh tried a lot, then the door of the car opened. Ramesh took that girl out and kept her in his lap, but the girl was still crying.

That’s why Ramesh’s eyes went to the one in front where he felt someone sitting. When Ramesh saw it, his feet and tail slipped on the ground. He couldn’t believe it, he saw that there was none other than the mother of the child in the front seat who was calling Ramesh for help.

Ramesh saw that blood was coming out from the forehead of that woman and she had died. Ramesh’s wife came to him and she too was surprised to see her.

On seeing this, Ramesh and his wife looked back and saw where the woman was standing but now she was no one.

7. Hostel Ghost

There is a college near our village. It is counted as a very good educational institution. Children come from far and wide to get an education here.

It was about 9 years back. A boy used to study while staying in the hostel here. He was very intelligent and friendly. The children living with him in the hostel used to call him Sonu Bhai.

Once upon a time, he went to his village for 10 days to attend his elder brother’s wedding. After 10 days that boy started coming back to the hostel. But used to talk less with his friends, even though he did not eat food with his friends and used to say that he will eat later.

Now he was also less interested in studies, when the children with him wanted to talk to him, he used to talk about work, do not know where he lived during the day, and came to the hostel at night only to sleep. It was only a week since he came to the hostel from home that one day Sonu Bhai’s family members came to the hostel.

A boy told his family that Sonu Bhai comes to sleep only at night. Sonu’s family members started crying after listening to the boy and said how can he come even at night. We have come to collect his belongings.

Sonu is no more. Two days after leaving here, he was going to a relative’s place by motorcycle, his motorcycle collided with a speeding truck and he died. By saying this, those people started becoming more intense.

There were children in the hostel who were listening to the talk and they started crying. They were thinking again and again whether the boy who was with them at night whom they used to see was the ghost of Sonu Bhai.

Well after that day Sonu’s ghost never again came to the hostel to sleep and for many months all the children of the hostel were scared. The lock remained hanging in Sonu Bhai’s living room. He kept saying that Sonu Bhai had a lot of attachment to his hostel, so even after being late, he could not leave the hostel.

It is said that even today the children used to sleep with Sonu Bhai. They live in fear, and can’t say whether this incident is right or wrong, because I have heard about this incident from the villagers.

8. Do not turn back, death is certain

Friends, one night I was going from my village to the bus stand with my friend late at night on the way to the farm, then one of my friends said, “Friend, walk a little faster, there is some problem with this field to the next two fields” so I asked what’s the matter If yes, he repeatedly avoided the matter.

But when I put more pressure, he told the whole story.

Many years ago a man was passing through these fields at night from his village. Went under a tree to urinate on the way. After that, as he walked a little, he heard the cry of a child.

He thought it would be the child of the night watchman, but only then he remembered that this field belongs to Rameshwar who died hanging here 3 years back.

The man kept moving forward with fearful steps. The words of those people will be remembered in his mind. Never turn back at night while passing through this farm. If someone asks for a way, don’t look at his feet. Do not listen to anyone no matter how much they say.

Thinking all these things in his mind, that man’s condition became very bad and started thinking about why he did not think about all this before coming here. As he progressed, the child’s voice became louder and it seemed as if he was walking with him.

Then suddenly he saw that a child was crying under the tree, so fearing, he called out whose child it was, but there was no response.

Due to fear, he went ahead but hearing the child’s cry, he could not help it and he looked back. He saw that the child was lying behind him in the swing. Taking this child in his lap out of mercy, he started running away. After a while, that child started to feel heavy for him.

He was shocked to see that his feet were long and almost touching the ground. He panicked and dropped the child. As soon as the child fell down, the child laughed loudly like a grown man. You were saved today, if my feet had touched the ground, no one could have saved you here today. Your death was certain. That child disappeared.

The man reached the house fell down and fainted as soon as he reached home when he regained consciousness, he told the whole story to the villagers, as soon as I heard this, without turning back in panic, he ran as fast as and did not go ever back to that field.

9. Soldier’s Ghost

This matter is of Madhya Pradesh. I was coming back from the fair with my friend. We both were very tired so we were not talking much. Suddenly my friend started mumbling something. He was speaking something in Punjabi, but he did not know Punjabi and was asking questions and answering himself.

I could not understand why he was doing this. I thought he might be joking. Was demanding something from himself and was saying to himself that I do not have it.

After going a little distance, the road split into two. One way went towards the village and the other towards the forest. There my friend called my name Mohan and fainted there.

I saw a man wearing a military uniform and a green turban walking toward the forest. He disappeared after going a short distance. I somehow brought my friend home and told the whole thing.

There was a little tension in his house. But in a short, while he regained consciousness and after a few prayers, everything became normal.

I had heard many stories of ghosts but can never forget the incident I saw with my eyes.

10. Old Cemetery

This is not a fictional story or a movie story but it is true as seen by the eyes. I went on a picnic on behalf of my company. The picnic was at a resort outside the city.

Earlier the people of the company played cricket and other games. After that, we went to the water park. There were only a few people swimming in deep water, the rest all were swimming in less deep water.

We friends made a bet. A coin will be thrown into the water and the one who finds the coin in the least time will be able to find it. He will win.

Everyone dived in turn, but no one ever found the coin. It was my turn next, I jumped into the water, but everything changed as soon as I entered the water. I found that the cemetery was visible under the ground.

There was a woman standing there who did not look Indian in face and dress. He had the same coin in his hand. She stood with her hand raised up. It seemed as if she was standing to give the coin to me.

As he was moving forward in his hypnosis. In a few moments, I was close to him and I took the coin from his hand. As soon as I started coming back, he grabbed my hand and pulled me. Now she and my face were faces to face.

In an instant, his face changed and took on a terrifying look. His eyes were bleeding and there was a sinister smile on his face. There was no limit to my fear. I trembled with fear.

I released my hand, and after that, both the graveyard and the woman disappeared and I caught myself. I felt as if I was in a dream. I quickly came out of the water and went away and sat down. I was out of breath.

My friends started helping me. Everyone asked what happened. I replied nothing. I opened my fist and saw that the coin was in my hand. Seeing this, my friends started dancing with joy and started congratulating me.

Friends bet again, but I did not go into the water again. It was evening, our bus was about to leave. Some of us went out to smoke cigarettes. My friends were joking and laughing out loud.

An uncle standing in front of us was listening to our talk and was cracking up every now and then. I stood silently, and one of my friends jokingly asked why I was silent since then.

Have you seen any ghosts inside? Hearing this, the uncle jokingly said that this used to be a graveyard during the British era. You must have seen a lot of fair people.

Everyone started laughing after hearing this but I was really sure that what I had seen was not my illusion.

Let’s hope so! You must have liked all these ( Ghost Story in English ) ghost stories. If you like such interesting stories then comment us in the comment box.

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COMMENTS

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Scary Story Essay example. Scary Story I looked up at the black sky. I hadn't intended to be out this late. The sun had set, and the empty road ahead had no streetlights. I knew I was in for a dark journey home. I had decided that by traveling through the forest would be the quickest way home. Minutes passed, yet it seemed like hours and days ...
Write a horror story in about 150-200 words.
Write a horror story in about 150-200 words. When I was about 10, my family of six lived in an extremely small apartment. Two bedrooms upstairs and then the living room. When I was tired of my siblings I would sleep downstairs. One night I am lying on the couch facing the front door and watching the sky through the window by the door when a ...
Top 10 Short Ghost Story in English 100, 200, 500 Words PDF
Ghost Story in English. 1. Ghost in the Lift. This story is from Delhi, we used to live in Ambedkar Colony. The name of our building was Apsara. There was a rumor that there is a ghost in the lift! In fact, a woman had committed suicide by jumping from the 14th floor. Since then people used to say that the ghost of that woman is seen in the ...