8 of the Best Haunted House Stories To Make You Shiver

You can’t talk about haunted house stories without mentioning The Haunting of Hill House. This creepy gothic horror story is a classic for a reason. Shirley Jackson is the master of making the domestic world feel unsettling. The four characters — Dr. Montague, Eleanor, Theodora, and Luke — stay in Hill House to try to find evidence of a haunting, but the house soon affects them in ways they weren’t prepared for, leading to an unforgettable conclusion.

If you love The Haunting of Hill House, you have to pick up its official sequel, published in 2023: A Haunting On the Hill. In this story, a new group of characters arrive at Hill House decades after the events of the first book. They’re in this dilapidated mansion to rehearse Holly’s play, but the actors butt heads over their roles, including Holly’s girlfriend. Soon, their interpersonal conflicts are nothing compared to the plans the house has for them. Elizabeth Hand does a great job of capturing the mood and style of the original in this new take on one of the most infamous haunted houses in literary history.

Another classic haunted house story, The Shining, follows a writer and his family as they stay at the Overlook Hotel in the off-season. Jack Torrence has plenty of time to work on his novel while serving as caretaker of the hotel. This could even be an opportunity to repair his relationship with his wife and young son. As they are snowed in, though, the claustrophobia and the supernatural forces that haunt the hotel make for a deadly combination.

There are plenty of modern haunted house stories that give the classics a run for their money, starting with The Good House. When Angela lived in her grandmother’s house for a summer years ago, a tragedy upended her world. Now, she’s ready to return and face her past, but she finds that her hometown has been wracked with tragedies since she has been gone. Angela discovers that something awoke in the house that summer, and she is determined to solve the puzzle of how to end this cycle for good.

Stephen Graham Jones is one of the best horror authors writing today, known for The Only Good Indians and the Indian Lake Trilogy, but he also has written an unsettling haunted house novella! In Mapping the Interior, a 15-year-old boy sees the ghost of his father in his home. He races to follow the figure, but he soon finds himself lost. He spends the next few nights trying to map the strange dimensions of this house, but when his obsession puts his little brother in danger, he’ll risk everything to save him.

Jade is spending the summer in Vietnam with her estranged father. All she has to do is seem like the perfect (straight) Vietnamese American daughter so she can leave with the college money he promised. But as she spends more time at the French colonial house her father is renovating, she becomes more certain that the house hates them. Jade teams up with a delinquent girl to prove to her family that this house will destroy them if they let it.

If you’re looking for a haunted house story that blends horror and humor, Grady Hendrix is the author for you. Louise and Mark are siblings forced to work together to sell their family home after their parents die. The house will take some time to fix up because it’s crammed full of their parents’ things…including their mother’s extensive doll and puppet collection. Unsurprisingly, the creepy puppet house is haunted, and it doesn’t want to be sold.

A new classic in the haunted house stories subgenre is Mexican Gothic. When Noemí receives a letter from her cousin begging for help, she sets off to the Mexican countryside to save her cousin from her life with her new husband. There, she finds her cousin’s husband’s family is menacing, her cousin is mysteriously ill, and Noemí has violent dreams while at their estate. As she investigates, she finds a dark history of how this family accumulated their wealth. As the title suggests, this is a gothic horror story that slowly builds unease until the reader feels the same claustrophobic terror that Noemí does.