Barre with Justine

During the day, I don’t believe in ghosts. At night, I’m a little more open-minded.

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Ever since I was a little girl, scary stories have been some of my favourite things to read. As a child, I adored terrifying myself with books like Mary Downing Hahn’s Wait till Helen Comes, Betty Ren Wright’s Ghosts beneath our Feet and The Dollhouse Murders. Once upon a Dark November by Carol Beach York was another Scholastic book flyer choice, with some pretty heavy material (childhood trauma & murder) for elementary school! It wasn’t just books however, as my older sister introduced me to Unsolved Mysteries and eventually the X-Files entered into the scene and it became easier than ever to frighten myself out of sleep altogether!

First, a little bit of fun with Robert Stack (who terrified me as a child):

Back to books, I’ve continued to love reading scary stories ever since my childhood and would love to share some of my favourites here – my top 5 scariest reads!

My Top 5 Scariest Reads

1. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters: This is a one of my all-time favourite novels and one of the most unsettling books I’ve ever read. On its surface, it is a classic ghost story set in a crumbling English country house featuring all the typical elements of frightened servants, spooky sounds, and an unreliable narrator. Below the surface, however, Waters delves into the class system of Britain, the profound effects of the wars on the aristocracy, and the devastating loss of a child that has darkened Hundreds Hall, where the novel is set. I found the way that memories haunt every character in the book to be AS frightening as when the ghostly occurrences happen. There are memories of the golden days of Hundreds Hall, of the Ayres’ beautiful golden child Susan…trauma suffered by the eldest son, Roderick, in the war, and the narrator’s memories of his mother and her role at the estate. One scene in particular still haunts me – it takes place in the old nursery and involves a speaking tube (an old communication system for servants). I was trembling reading this part of the book!
2. Survive the Night by Riley Sager: An Instagram friend introduced me to this author and I’m so grateful! This book is set in the 1990s and begins with a grieving college student, Charlie, accepting a ride home from a stranger. This would be unsettling enough, however the campus is still reeling from another victim of the campus killer (who happened to Charlie’s roommate, Maddie). What follows takes place along the road, where Charlie needs to figure out if she can trust the man driving or if he is the campus killer. It’s definitely a book that’s almost impossible to put down once you have started!
3. “Louisa Please Come Home” by Shirley Jackson (short story). Shirley Jackson was so skilled at taking everyday situations and making them completely disturbing. Summer camps, comfortable suburban family homes, and even picturesque college for girls. One of the most interesting parts of Shirley Jackson’s life was how several of her stories were said to have been inspired by the real-life disappearance of college student Paula Welden in 1946. Paula was a student at Bennington College for girls, where Jackson’s husband was a professor. Jackson’s novel Hangsaman and the short stories, “The Missing Girl” and “Louisa Please Come Home” each have a theme of a girl who vanishes, without explanation and without a happy ending. Despite Jackson’s more famous stories such as “The Lottery”, this lesser known story left me deeply unsettled! In this story, a young girl runs away from her family and listens for several years to her mother’s pleas on the radio for her to come home…when she eventually does return, it isn’t at all like she expected. This story made me wonder if I ever disappeared, would people remember me the way I was, or how they imagined me in their mind?
4. In the Woods by Tana French: I had nearly forgotten about this book! I devoured this novel when it first came out, absorbed in the mystery that the book opens with….three children go into the woods one day but only one is ever found, with no memory of what happened to him or his friends who have vanished. Years later, the boy is a detective on the murder squad and must confront his past when a girl is murdered in the same woods. This book is an excellent and frightening read.
5. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro: This is not a ghost story but it is a devastating imagining of a future where some people just exist for the benefit of others, despite being human and sharing all the same emotions and desires. It has been years since I read this book (it was published in 2005) and I’m not sure I could read it again. It was deeply unsettling to me at the time, even before I had children. It’s reminiscent of Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper, which raises the question of who decides if one life has more value than another?

Honourable Mentions:

1. This House is Haunted by John Boyne: A classic Gothic novel featuring two creepy children, a lonely governess and a stately home. This book is very atmospheric and lots of fun to read.
2. Those Across the River by Christopher Buehlman: A frightening Southern Gothic-inspired novel about a Southern town with very dark secrets. The main character returns to a family home (across the river from his ancestral plantation) and begins to experience horrifying occurrences in the town. When ‘those across the river’ are revealed, the tension and horror ramp up. While I didn’t love the main character in this novel, the crumbling plantation and the extremely unsettling scenes really kept me hooked. Definitely not a book to read on your own!
3. The Ghosts of Gwent by Alan Roderick: On a trip to visit relatives in Wales during my childhood, we picked up a copy of this (likely out-of-print) title from a local shop. I am the only person in my family NOT born in Wales but we did make many trips there over the years. It is a beautiful country, truly steeped in history and folklore. The book of ghost stories included the tale of the ghost of a monk, who was said to haunt the Llanwern Steelworks (where my father worked) and stories about The Skirrid Inn (one of the oldest pubs in Wales and said to be the most haunted). Beyond the ghost stories in the book, Wales is also a country that is haunted by the history of coal mining. One of the books that I mentioned above, Ghosts beneath our Feet, was on the top of my mind when we did a tour of The Big Pit mine on one of our trips to Wales. I raised my hand and asked about “knackers” which I learned from the book were the ghosts of miners still trapped underground. I think the tour guide smiled a bit but he didn’t shut down the question. One of the plaques at the mine captured the memories of a man who had worked 12 hour days as a child (of maybe 9 years old); his job had been to open and close the doors for the coal carts and he recalled a moment when his miner’s lamp went out and he was in the dark on his own for hours “I cried,” he said. Imagining being all alone in the dark depths of a coal mine was a horrifying thought for a coddled child of the 1980s!
4. The Only One Left by Riley Sager
5. The Broken Girls by Simone St. James
6. Such Pretty Flowers by K.L.Cerra (*Gillian Flynn’s [Gone Girl] recommendation!)
7. The Night Strangers by Chris Bohjalian