Discussion: How To Write A Good Ghost Story

As a person who believes in ghosts and has had paranormal experiences, I thought I’d make this thread lol.
I haven’t actually written a lot of ghost stories, so this is mainly from the perspective of a reader of ghost stories, as a believer and as a person who has had experiences.

I think that what makes a good ghost story is how much it scares you. And I think the way to do this is to make it seem real- even if you don’t believe in ghosts. Suspending the reader’s disbelief and putting them in the protagonist’s shoes- unable to “help” the protagonist I think will make people afraid.
The stories where I’ve been afraid were the ones that had characters in circumstances where they couldn’t escape the places they were in. The author made the place seem dark and gloomy before the bad things started to happen.
I also think having a good amount of suspense is great too.

For the ghost part- make sure to write other things the ghost does, not just what it looks like. That alone won’t scare the reader. Ghosts do other things besides looking like sheets and scaring people that way lol. Usually in ghost stories they have malicious intentions, which makes them scary. You can have the ghost do a lot of things, like move things, set things on fire even possession. Have it start small then eventually lead to creepier things, hearing a bunch of shouts suddenly in the night. Show how it affects the characters gradually.

That’s all there is from me rn. What do you guys think?

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I think a good aspect of horror is taking advantage of different fears, probably easiest being fear of the unknown. Putting a character in a completely unique situation can create good tension and fear. Ghost stories can get real cliche real fast, so having a good setup is key. I honestly feel like the moving things around and doing all kinds of other spooky’ things is really overdone.

I good ghost story I read a while back on NoSleep was about a girl who was getting an adoptive sister. When she met the girl she thought was her new sister, the girl led her to where her old house that got burned down was, but the girl gets kidnapped and her sister helps her escape. By the end of the story it turned out that her adoptive sister was actually a ghost that died when her house burned down. It wasn’t scary per say, but it was chilling.

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I think that ghost stories need to have the right levels of suspense and control of information about the story, because they can be really hard to pull off well.

@Writers, do you have any tips for writing a good ghost story?

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No…

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With a ghost? Sorry, I actually think of something later

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Okay… let’s think… uh…

  • Choose a ghost or monster of the story
  • Change up the setting, it’s doesn’t have to be the stereotypically “spooky” set. Like the cold, dark, and eerie haunted house
  • Set writing rules before you start, like, goals or what the ghost or monster does when encountered.
  • RESEARCH! Know what you’re talking about before you write it.
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I think that something you should always consider when writing a ghost story is suspense. Try to build the suspense gradually instead of jumping right into the scariest bits.

Hello @anon68003072, my horror-fanatic friend, do you agree with the tips suggested above on this thread? Are there any you wish to add of your own?

Done, done and done.

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How so?

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I wrote to short ghost stories. Well, one is actually a haunted tv show disk.

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A haunted tv show disk?

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Yes. Like a movie disk, except with a tv show on it. I can get it if you want to read. Both of them.

Oooooh… Like a DVD?

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Yes! Exactly.

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Oooooh. Cool.

Alot of what scares me in Japanese and Indonesian folklore is that the situations are pretty much inescapable. One moment you could be walking down the street and the next you could be ambushed by some ghost and while some adaptations of the stories do have a “way out” there are many iterations that don’t which can make you unsure. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, playing on the idea of the lack of control humans have towards their own fate is scary to many people.


A couple of other things:

  • The ghost or haunting could begin after the character does something which most people do daily. In my short story I described turning off a tap at night and all the scary thoughts that can come with that. It’s not my best work but it was an attempt at making something people need to do from time to time into something more sinister sounding.

  • Usually when the ghost is descibed to make a sound, keep it vague, if people are jumpy afterwards because they don’t know exactly what that sounds like then you’ve done something right.

  • Play up to the irrational human mind, people may not believe in ghosts but if you can leave them thinking “what if?” Then you’ve left an impact.

  • If you want the ghost to do something gruesome to the character make sure you’ve properly built up to that, you can build up tension only to completely ruin it by saying then the ghost ate her face. I personally prefer when it’s not shown or told what the ghost does, it’s just implied. Usually people go missing or turn up dead. That’s not the scary part, the scary part is the stuff leading up to it, not what the ghost will actually do once it gets you.

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