VIDEO: Terrifying Ghost Horror Stories

We’ve all heard stories about mysterious shadows and inexplicable happenings – like objects floating around the house or doors opening/closing by themselves. There are probably more people out there who strongly believe that ghosts are real than there are skeptics. However, regardless of where you stand on that, you have to admit those stories are entertaining!

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This video presents four absolutely terrifying ghost stories. Disclaimer – they are very disturbing and they will keep you up at night!

According to Wikipedia, ghosts in the classical world often appeared in the form of vapor or smoke, but at other times they were described as being substantial, appearing as they had been at the time of death, complete with the wounds that killed them.

Spirits of the dead appear in literature as early as Homer’s Odyssey, which features a journey to the underworld and the hero encountering the ghosts of the dead, as well as the Old Testament in which the Witch of Endor calls the spirit of the prophet Samuel.

The play Mostellaria, by the Roman playwright Plautus, is the earliest known work to feature a haunted dwelling, and is sometimes translated as The Haunted House. Another early account of a haunted place comes from an account by Pliny the Younger.

Pliny describes the haunting of a house in Athens by a ghost bound in chains, an archetype that would become familiar in later literature.

The One Thousand and One Nights, sometimes known as Arabian Nights, contains a number of ghost stories, often involving jinn, ghouls and corpses. In particular, the tale of “Ali the Cairene and the Haunted House in Baghdad” revolves around a house haunted by jinns. Other medieval Arabic literature, such as the Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity, also contain ghost stories.

Historian of the ghost story Jack Sullivan has noted that many literary critics argue a “Golden Age of the Ghost Story” existed between the decline of the Gothic novel in the 1830s and the start of the First World War. Sullivan argues that the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Sheridan Le Fanu inaugurated this “Golden Age”.

Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu was of the most influential writers of ghost stories.. Le Fanu’s collections, such as In a Glass Darkly (1872) and The Purcell Papers (1880), helped popularise the short story as a medium for ghost fiction. Charlotte Riddell, who wrote fiction as Mrs. J. H. Riddell, created ghost stories which were noted for adept use of the haunted house theme.

The “classic” ghost story arose during the Victorian period, and included authors such as M. R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu, Violet Hunt, and Henry James. Classic ghost stories were influenced by the gothic fiction tradition, and contain elements of folklore and psychology.

M. R. James summed up the essential elements of a ghost story as, “Malevolence and terror, the glare of evil faces, ‘the stony grin of unearthly malice’, pursuing forms in darkness, and ‘long-drawn, distant screams’, are all in place, and so is a modicum of blood, shed with deliberation and carefully husbanded…”.