Guides · Reading Guides
The Best Haunted House Stories: 18 Classics and Originals
The haunted house is the oldest set-up in the ghost story, and the most flexible. The house can be a castle, a lodging house, a liner’s cabin or a duplex with a shared wall. The haunting can be a figure on the stairs, a sound in the next room or a slow change in the person who lives there. What the stories have in common is a place that remembers something and someone who has to sleep in it.
These are eighteen of the best on Daily Creepypasta, arranged by type rather than by date. Lengths and reading times come from the site, and none of the descriptions give away an ending. The Haunted Houses tag lists every haunted-house story in the archive.
The vigil: one night, on a dare
The simplest form: someone agrees to spend the night in the room nobody will sleep in.
A confident young man insists on sitting up in a castle’s notorious red room, despite three grotesque old custodians who will not go near it. H. G. Wells wrote it in 1896, and the story is mostly candles, going out one at a time. Its last page names what actually haunts the room, and readers have argued ever since about whether that’s a letdown or the point.
Four friends take a dare to spend a night in an old toll-house where no tenant has survived a night. W. W. Jacobs was a comic writer, and the banter in the first half is genuinely funny. It goes quiet in stages, and the staircase scene near the end is one of the most suspenseful in the archive.
An American in Paris is offered a night alone in a house whose last owner was said to be a sorceress. Ralph Adams Cram, who later became America’s leading Gothic Revival architect, wrote it in his early thirties, and it has one of the nastiest climaxes of any vigil story.
The Haunted and the Haunters; or, The House and the Brain
A gentleman, his servant and his dog spend a night in a London house that no tenant can endure. First published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1859, it’s the great Victorian original of the investigator-in-a-haunted-house story, and the first half is still frightening. The second half becomes a long theory of the occult, so read it for the night itself.
The lodging: you have to live there
Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street
Two medical students take cheap rooms in an old Dublin house that once belonged to a notorious hanging judge, and they begin to dream badly. Le Fanu’s 1853 story is the best pure haunting on the site. Its slow, heavy footstep coming down the attic stairs at night has been copied endlessly but rarely improved on.
A Danish hotel has no room 13, so why can the guest in room 12 hear someone in it every night? M. R. James’s story is about a hotel room that exists only some of the time, and the guest’s attempts to account for it are as funny as they are uneasy.
A struggling writer finds unusually cheap rooms in London, and begins to sense that someone is always on the other side of the wall. Algernon Blackwood tells it as a diary, and the rooms’ history comes out slowly.
A struggling novelist rents rooms in a shabby old house, and his work begins to flow. Then he begins to resent anyone who interrupts him. Oliver Onions’s 1911 novella is the longest story in this list and arguably the best. It’s a haunting in which almost nothing visible happens and everything changes.
The family house
The Fall of the House of Usher
The house and the family are the same thing, and both are cracking. Poe’s 1839 story is the template for the Gothic family seat, with its tarn and fungus and fissure and the last of an old line. It’s short enough to read twice, and it’s worth it.
An American couple buy an old house in Dorset and are told it has a ghost, but nobody knows it was one until “long, long afterward.” Edith Wharton writes a haunting the way she writes a marriage: patiently, through what isn’t said.
Ordered to rest in a rented country house, a young wife starts studying the pattern of her bedroom’s wallpaper. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 story is usually read as a story about the medical treatment of women, and it is that. It’s also one of the most frightening haunted-room stories ever written, told in a journal.
A man returns to New York after thirty-three years abroad and begins prowling the empty rooms of his childhood home at night, hunting the man he might have been. Henry James’s prose takes patience. The confrontation in the hall is worth it.
New houses: stories by Pastada
The originals in this genre, all written by AI under the name Pastada, tend to arrive as documents: notes, reports and lists left in or about a house. They’re all short.
A summer sublet comes with a typed page of notes from the tenant, taped inside a kitchen cabinet. Most of them are about the radiator. It’s the shortest haunted house on the site and a good introduction to Rules Horror horror.
The other half of a duplex has been empty for eleven years. Every night, through the bedroom wall, a couple in there rehearses the conversation the narrator and the narrator’s wife will have the next day.
Home Inspection Report, 18 Tamarack Lane
A pre-purchase inspection of a 1962 Cape in coastal Maine. The roof needs work, the water heater is near the end of its life, and the basement stairs have fourteen steps going down and thirteen coming up. It is written entirely as an inspection report.
An estate liquidator’s inventory for a Vermont farmhouse in which everything came in pairs, one for the man who lived there and one for someone else. Lot 64 is not for sale.
The audio tour of a historic house museum preserved as the family left it in 1891. Collect a headset and enter the number posted in each room. It’s a haunted house story narrated by the house’s own guide.
A robot vacuum maps a six-room house with a laser and finds seven rooms. Every night at 2 a.m. it spends forty minutes cleaning the one that isn’t there. It’s the most modern house in the list and one of the most unsettling.
Further rooms
If you’ve read all eighteen, Benson’s The Room in the Tower has a recurring dream of a house that turns out to be real, Stoker’s The Judge's House pits a student against a portrait and a great many rats, Crawford’s The Upper Berth moves the haunted room onto a transatlantic liner, and Blackwood’s The Empty House is a vigil with a formidable aunt. Among Pastada’s stories, Minutes, Regular Meeting has a house that isn’t on the plat and Continue Watching has a house that is watching itself on TV. For a shorter selection for October, see the Halloween Reading List.
AI was involved in writing this article.