The Haunted: Ghost Stories in Literature

Ghosts are all around us. They exist in folkloric depictions, in popular entertainment, and in literature. Why are ghosts so omnipresent in our storytelling? What do ghost stories reveal about us—our preoccupations, our fears, our desires? In this class, we’ll examine some ghosts in fiction, looking to discover what they illuminate about the human psyche, whether it be fear of mortality or needing to keep the past alive. We’ll discuss texts that reveal the various ways the spectral holds sway over our imaginations, including Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot, Jessamyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, and selections from The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories: From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce.

Janice Obuchowski’s debut story collection, THE WOODS, is the 2022 winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Prize through the Iowa Short Fiction Award Series. Her fiction has twice received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthologies and has appeared in Crazyhorse, Alaska Quarterly Review, Story, Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions online, LitHub, and elsewhere. She served as a fiction editor for the New England Review./