ghost story

ghost story, a tale about ghosts. More generally, the phrase may refer to a tale based on imagination rather than fact. Ghost stories exist in all kinds of literature, from folktales to religious works to modern horror stories, and in most cultures. They can be used as isolated episodes or interpolated stories within a larger narrative, as in Lucius Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and many Renaissance plays and gothic novels, or they can be the main focus of a work, such as the stories of Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly, Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw, and Kingsley Amis’s novel The Green Man.