This past Friday, I celebrated the Halloween season by going to a ghost story reading at Daniel Stowe Botanical Gardens. I sat around a campfire with a bunch of other people with a glass of wine, listening to a staff member read stories as the daylight faded and darkness overwhelmed. The stories were a mix of some stories specifically written about the Gardens themselves and some that were more traditional sounding stories about monsters in the woods and ghosts haunting rural cabins.

I had a great time, and it got me thinking about how I would love to read ghost stories to people around a campfire, and also started thinking about what stories would be fun to read! I posted a random list on Bluesky, and I had so much fun thinking about it I thought I would share the list here and elaborate on it.

Unlike my Halloween Treats posts, the stories I’m suggesting here are not necessarily public domain: I am thinking more about what would be fun to read aloud instead of what is free to read! I provide links to books whenever they are not freely available.

In my opinion, part of what makes a story good for reading aloud is having a really “punchy” ending, which these stories have!

So here’s my suggested list…

The Upper Berth, by F. Marion Crawford (1885). This is widely considered one of the greatest ghost stories of all time! A narrator describes his experiences staying in a cabin on the ship Kamchatka that may be haunted by a ghost — and a particularly murderous one, at that. This story has one of the best closing lines of any horror story ever.

Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book, by M.R. James (1895). M.R. James was a medievalist scholar in the UK who wrote and told ghost stories to his students and friends at Christmas time, as was the tradition at the time! (Valancourt Books has released multiple volumes of classic Christmas ghost stories, if you feel like carrying on the tradition.) It turns out that James was particular good at writing such stories, and is now regarded as one of the masters of the genre. In Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book, an English tourist buys the old scrap-book of Canon Alberic from a cathedral, only to find that some thing is tied to the book. All of James’ stories are perfect for reading aloud, as that’s what they were written for!

The Unexpected Stop, by Larry Blamire (2008). Larry Blamire is most well-know for his delightful tribute and parody of 1950s science fiction and horror, Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, but he has also written two volumes of western horror that are absolutely sublime, Tales of the Callamo Mountains and More Tales of the Callamo Mountains. The stories are set in the fictional Callamo Mountains, untamed and filled with inexplicable horrors. The Unexpected Stop is perfect for reading aloud: when a stagecoach makes an unexpected stop in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, it precipitates a nightmare of paranoia and terror.

Seeing the World, by Ramsey Campbell (1984). Campbell is one of the greatest horror authors of all time and my personal favorite, and a lot of his stories manage to capture a sense of fun while still having a horrific punch. In “Seeing the World,” a couple are invited over to the home of their extremely tedious neighbors to watch a slide show of their recent European trip. It seems at first that their greatest worry is being bored to death, but they will soon find that they have much, much more to be concerned about. Campbell is so precise in his writing — it has been said that not a word is wasted in his fiction — that this would be fun to read aloud.

The Monkey’s Paw, by W.W. Jacobs (1902). This classic story has been reimagined and parodied countless times, and for good reason — it is one of the greatest stories of supernatural horror ever! When a family gets possession of a wish-granting monkey’s paw, they are skeptical but wonder if it might lead to prosperity for them — but the paw was created for a very different purpose.

The Man From America, by Michael Arlen (1925). The titular “man from America,” afraid of nothing, takes a bet from acquaintances to spend the night in a notorious haunted house. But the night evolves in a way that none of them can predict, and leads to horrors beyond their imagination. In my opinion, this story has one of the most incredibly tense depictions of being faced with a supernatural being.

Confession, by Algernon Blackwood (1921). (pdf link) This story by Blackwood will mess with your mind! A shell-shocked WWI veteran is lost in the fog in a panic when a chance encounter leads him into a crisis situation. What I love about this story is that I can concoct at least a handful of different explanations of what actually happened.

In the Vault, by H.P. Lovecraft (1925). Before Lovecraft launched his tales of cosmic horror, he wrote a few tales that may be considered traditional ghost stories. In the Vault follows an undertaker getting trapped in a vault with bodies being stored until they can be buried in the spring; as he tries to escape, however, his past is quickly catching up with him…

The Shadows on the Wall, by Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman (1903). As a family struggles to recover from an unexpected death in the family, they find that the person may not be quite as dead as they thought. Part of what makes this story work is the increasingly strained dialogue between the characters as they struggle to maintain a sense of normalcy even as it becomes increasingly clear that nothing around them is normal…

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These are stories that immediately come to mind for me; if you have read-aloud horror stories to recommend, feel free to share them in the comments!