This novel chronicles the ill-fated summer expedition of four individuals investigating the notorious Hill House. Rather than relying on overt spectral figures, Jackson’s horror is psychological and atmospheric.
The house is less a setting than a malevolent entity, an architectural predator that exploits the psychological frailties of its inhabitants, particularly the fragile Eleanor Vance.
The paranormal phenomena are maddeningly ambiguous, forcing both characters and readers to question whether the terror originates from the house’s walls or from within the human mind.
Aspiring writer Jack Torrance accepts a position as the winter caretaker at the remote Overlook Hotel, bringing his wife and son, Danny, with him. The hotel is a container for decades of malevolent psychic energy, and Danny’s latent psychic ability—the "shining"—makes him a beacon for its ghostly residents.
King masterfully charts the hotel’s supernatural influence as it preys on Jack’s personal demons, turning a story of a haunted place into a terrifying examination of addiction, abuse, and the disintegration of a family.
Years after escaping slavery, Sethe lives in a house haunted by the ghost of the infant daughter she killed to save from a life of bondage. The haunting transforms from a spiteful presence into a physical being when a mysterious young woman named Beloved appears.
In Morrison’s masterpiece, the paranormal is not merely a ghost story; it is the brutal, tangible embodiment of personal and collective trauma. Beloved represents the unbearable weight of memory and the horrors of slavery made flesh, forcing a confrontation with a past that refuses to stay buried.
A young, inexperienced governess is hired to care for two orphaned children at a secluded country estate. She soon becomes convinced that the children are being corrupted by the spectral visitations of two deceased former employees. James constructs a narrative of suffocating dread built on profound ambiguity.
The paranormal encounters are filtered entirely through the governess’s account, leaving the reader to decide whether she is a reliable witness to supernatural evil or an unstable narrator descending into madness.
In a modern-day San Francisco apartment, the vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac recounts his two-hundred-year existence to a young journalist. Rice revolutionized the vampire genre by shifting the focus from external monstrosity to internal torment.
Her vampires are not simple predators but complex, philosophical beings cursed with immortality and plagued by loneliness, existential despair, and a longing for their lost humanity. The paranormal becomes a lens through which to explore themes of morality, love, and the agony of eternal life.
When eleven-year-old Regan MacNeil begins exhibiting bizarre and violent behavior, her mother, Chris, exhausts every medical and psychiatric explanation. With nowhere left to turn, she seeks the help of two priests to perform an exorcism, believing her daughter is possessed by a demon.
The novel grounds its paranormal horror in a meticulously researched, realistic world, pitting modern science and secular skepticism against an ancient, undeniable evil. The demonic possession serves as the ultimate test of faith in a rational age.
Socialite Noemí Taboada travels to High Place, a decaying mansion in the Mexican countryside, to check on her recently married cousin, who has sent a disturbing, frantic letter. She finds a sinister, eugenics-obsessed English family and a house saturated with a creeping, parasitic horror.
Moreno-Garcia masterfully blends the tropes of gothic literature with postcolonial anxieties, rooting the supernatural in a sentient, hallucinogenic fungus that has a symbiotic relationship with the family. The paranormal is a tool of colonial decay, memory, and biological control.
Following the death of his beloved son, Willie, Abraham Lincoln visits his tomb in a Georgetown cemetery. The novel unfolds in the "bardo"—a transitional space from Tibetan Buddhism—where a chorus of ghosts, including young Willie, are trapped by their unresolved earthly attachments.
Saunders uses this paranormal plane to create a kaleidoscopic narrative of grief, empathy, and the human need for connection. The ghosts’ stories provide a poignant, tragic, and often humorous cross-section of American life, all tethered to the profound sorrow of the grieving president.
In post-WWII Warwickshire, Dr. Faraday becomes entangled with the Ayres family, the last inhabitants of the crumbling Hundreds Hall. As he treats the family, a subtle but increasingly malevolent presence begins to make itself known through strange markings, fires, and violent incidents.
Waters excels at creating an atmosphere of creeping dread where the paranormal is never explicitly confirmed. The "stranger" can be interpreted as a classic poltergeist, a manifestation of the characters’ repressed anxieties, or a metaphor for the toxic decay of the British class system.
The Silver family home at 29 Barton Road in Dover is no ordinary house; it has a consciousness, a memory, and a xenophobic streak. After her mother’s death, Miranda Silver develops pica—a disorder compelling her to eat inedible objects—and finds her life inextricably linked to the house’s paranormal sentience.
Oyeyemi weaves a complex literary narrative where the haunted house is a metaphor for lineage, mental illness, and inherited prejudice. The paranormal is inseparable from the characters' psychology, blurring the lines between haunting and heredity.
Carrie White is a friendless high school outcast tormented by her classmates and abused by her fanatically religious mother. What no one knows is that Carrie possesses latent telekinetic powers.
Pushed to her breaking point by a cruel prank at the senior prom, her suppressed rage and humiliation erupt in a horrifying display of supernatural destruction. King’s debut novel uses paranormal ability as a powerful and terrifying metaphor for the trauma of abuse and the explosive consequences of unchecked cruelty.
A family moves into a new home only to discover it is physically impossible—larger on the inside than on the outside, with a labyrinthine hallway that appears and disappears.
The story is presented as a found academic manuscript, complete with labyrinthine footnotes from a dubious editor and a second narrator who is slowly losing his mind while reading it. In this postmodern masterpiece, the paranormal is not just a haunted house but a textual one.
The book's very structure mimics the disorienting, terrifying experience of its characters, forcing the reader to navigate a narrative that is actively unstable and hostile.