Most Read Haunted House Books

Jack Torrance takes a job as winter caretaker at the isolated Overlook Hotel, hoping the solitude will help him finish his writing and hold together a family strained by his history of drinking and a violent temper. He brings his wife Wendy and their five-year-old son Danny, who possesses a psychic gift the hotel's cook calls "the shining" — and who senses, before anyone else, that the Overlook is not empty at all. Snowed in for the winter with no way out, the family is cut off just as the hotel's malevolent influence begins to close in on Jack, working on his insecurities, his temper, and his thirst for a drink he's tried to give up. As the Overlook's ghosts grow bolder and Jack's grip on himself slips, Danny's shining may be the only thing standing between his family and whatever wants them to stay forever. Stephen King's breakthrough novel is a claustrophobic haunted-house story that is as much about addiction and the violence passed from father to son as it is about supernatural horror, and it remains one of the most influential haunted-hotel stories ever written.

Eve Palmer and her girlfriend Charlie are house flippers who have just bought a fixer-upper in the Pacific Northwest. Then, one evening, a family of five appears on the doorstep. The father, Thomas Faust, warm and insistent, explains that he grew up in this house — and asks whether he might show his wife and children around, just for a few minutes. Against her better judgment, and fighting her own anxiety, Eve lets them in. The visit does not end. As the strangers settle deeper into the house, small wrongnesses accumulate: a child goes missing, a presence stirs in the basement, doors and rooms stop behaving the way they should. Charlie disappears, Eve's sense of what is real begins to fray, and the line between her anxiety disorder and genuine dread dissolves. Interleaved with Eve's account are documents exploring the "Old House" — a conspiracy theory that certain houses are portals linking alternate realities, and that visitors can become permanently trapped inside. Marcus Kliewer's debut is a claustrophobic, reality-bending horror novel about intrusion, gaslighting, and the terror of not being believed.

• unreliable narrator

After a frantic letter from her newly married cousin Catalina, Mexico City socialite Noemí Taboada is sent into the mountains to find out what has become of her. What she finds is High Place: the mouldering mansion of the Doyles, an English family whose silver fortune ran out long ago and whose grip on the surrounding town has not.

• forced proximity
• survival
• morally grey

Twenty-five years ago, the Holt family fled Baneberry Hall in the middle of the night and never returned. Maggie's father, Ewan, turned their brief stay into "House of Horrors," a wildly successful memoir about the malevolent presence that supposedly drove them out — a book that made the family famous and that Maggie, who was only five at the time, has never believed a word of. Now an adult and a house-restorer by trade, Maggie inherits Baneberry Hall after her father's death and returns to renovate and sell it, determined to prove the "true story" was a fabrication. But as she works through the old Victorian's rooms, she begins to find that details from her father's book are eerily accurate — and that the townspeople, and perhaps the house itself, are hiding something about what really happened during those long-ago weeks. Riley Sager builds the novel as a book-within-a-book, alternating Maggie's present-day investigation with chapters from her father's haunted-house memoir. The result is a twisty, atmospheric blend of ghost story and psychological mystery that keeps the reader guessing whether the danger at Baneberry Hall is supernatural, human, or something in between.

• dual timeline
• unreliable narrator

Retired soldier Alex Easton travels to the crumbling Usher estate in the remote countryside of Ruravia after a letter warns that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying. What Alex finds is worse than illness: a black tarn that shouldn't ripple the way it does, hares that move all wrong, and a house furred with strange fungus, where Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in a voice not her own while her brother Roderick unravels. With the help of a plainspoken American doctor and an English mycologist fascinated by the estate's impossible fungi, Easton tries to understand what is happening to the Ushers before it claims them all. T. Kingfisher's atmospheric gothic novella reimagines Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" as a creeping, fungal body-horror, sharp and eerie and laced with dry wit.

• mystery box
• survival

Something is wrong at Orsk, the sprawling Scandinavian furniture superstore on the edge of Cleveland. Every morning the staff arrive to find the showroom vandalized overnight: shelves toppled, glassware smashed, a foul smell in the air the cleaning crew can't place. The security cameras record nothing. With sales sinking and corporate breathing down their necks, three employees agree to work a secret nine-hour shift through the night to catch whoever is responsible. Amy is a cynical twenty-something clock-watcher who just wants a transfer and a bigger paycheck. Her relentlessly upbeat manager Basil sees the overnight patrol as a chance to prove himself, and kindly veteran clerk Ruth Anne comes along for the company. But the store they think they know so well becomes a labyrinth after dark, and the thing haunting its identical model rooms has been waiting a long time for visitors. Grady Hendrix's Horrorstör is designed to look like a mail-order furniture catalog, complete with product illustrations that curdle from cheerful to horrifying as the night goes on. Equal parts genuine haunted-house novel and razor-sharp satire of consumer culture and soul-deadening retail work, it's a fast, funny, and surprisingly frightening read about the horrors of the modern workplace.

When their parents are killed in a car accident, Louise Joyner and her estranged brother Mark return to Charleston to clear out the family home — and find it packed with their late mother's handmade puppets and dolls. One of them, a clown named Pupkin, has plans of its own for the family. Grady Hendrix's horror novel about grief, sibling rivalry and inherited trauma, told in five parts named for the five stages of grief.

Stylist and influencer Clio Barnes has a picture-perfect life and a secret: she grew up in a house her mother swore was possessed by a demon. When the house passes to Clio and her sisters after their mother's death, Clio turns its renovation into content — and begins uncovering evidence that her mother's claims weren't just illness, as something in the house stirs. Rachel Harrison's clever haunted-house novel filters supernatural dread through inherited family trauma.

• unreliable narrator
• dual timeline

Anna Pace, her family's designated black sheep, joins the clan for a holiday at a rented villa in Tuscany—where the locals flinch at the house's name, a tower is never to be opened, and something in the walls has taken an interest in her. Jennifer Marie Thorne's Diavola is a gothic haunted-house novel that doubles as a razor-sharp satire of the toxic family vacation.

Orphaned Signa Farrow is sent to live with her wealthy, estranged family at the unsettling Thorn Grove estate. When her guardian dies under mysterious circumstances, Signa is drawn into a dangerous investigation. She must uncover the truth before she becomes the next victim, all while grappling with an intense attraction to Death himself.

• forbidden love
• fish out of water
• morally grey

Margaret loves her house—a grand, improbably cheap Victorian on Hawthorn Street—and she is not leaving it, no matter what it does. And every September, it does a great deal: the walls weep blood, the ghosts of former residents wander the halls, and all of them are terrified of whatever lives in the basement. Margaret has learned to cope. Her husband Hal could not, and one day he simply disappeared. When their estranged daughter Katherine arrives to search for her missing father—knowing nothing of the hauntings—the timing could not be worse: September has just begun, and every step toward finding Hal makes the house's horrors worse, because there are secrets it needs to keep. Carissa Orlando's The September House is a haunted-house novel with a darkly funny, deeply unsettling unreliable narrator, and a mystery about what really happened to Hal.

• unreliable narrator

In the turbulent aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence, Beatriz has lost everything: her father executed, her home destroyed, her mother's family unwilling to take her in. So when the wealthy Don Rodolfo Solórzano proposes marriage, she accepts, choosing security over caution and ignoring the whispers about how his first wife died. But Hacienda San Isidro, Rodolfo's remote country estate, is no refuge. The moment her husband returns to the capital, the house turns against Beatriz — cold spots, voices, red eyes in the dark, and dreams that leave marks. Isolated and disbelieved, she turns to Padre Andrés, a young local priest who carries a dangerous secret of his own: an inherited gift for witchcraft that the Church would see him burn for. Together they must confront whatever malevolence has taken root in San Isidro before it consumes them. Isabel Cañas's atmospheric debut braids gothic horror, slow-burning romance, and the real violence of colonial-era Mexico into a haunted-house story told in two voices, as unsettling as it is romantic.

• multiple povs
• forbidden love
• slow burn

Four years after his wife's death, a famous author is haunted by writer's block and strange visions at his isolated lake house. He finds himself drawn into a local mystery involving a young woman and a child, as the past refuses to stay buried. This story explores grief and the supernatural.

• slow burn
• mystery box
• family saga
• sacrifice

When their father inherits an old house in the town of Dark Falls, Amanda and Josh are thrilled — a new town, a new house, a fresh start. That excitement curdles fast: the neighborhood kids are strangely cold, the house creaks with sounds that shouldn't be there, and Amanda starts to suspect that Dark Falls, and the house itself, are hiding something that doesn't want them to leave. The first entry in R.L. Stine's "Goosebumps" series, "Welcome to Dead House" set the template for the franchise — a mystery-driven haunted-house plot pitched at middle-grade readers, building creeping dread without graphic content, and landing on a twist ending.

Twenty-two, nearly broke, and grieving her mother, Adrienne has nowhere to turn when a solicitor tells her that a distant relative she never knew existed — Edith Ashburn — has left her a house. With only twenty dollars and her cat Wolfgang for company, she arrives at Ashburn House: a tall, leaning, three-story home on the edge of the small town of Ipson. The house is old but oddly well kept, full of antique furniture and fine china. It is also full of warnings. Every mirror has been removed, and cryptic messages are carved into its walls and furniture: NO MIRRORS. LIGHT THE CANDLE. Locals whisper that the entire Ashburn family was murdered here long ago, and that every Friday after dark a single light appears in the highest window. As night falls and the townspeople keep their distance, Adrienne begins to realize she may not be alone in the house. Darcy Coates delivers a classic, atmospheric haunted-house story in The Haunting of Ashburn House — a creeping, page-turning standalone about grief, inheritance, and a family secret that refuses to stay buried.

The dead plot against the living, the darkness closes in on Keyhouse, and a woman is shattered beyond repair, in the third storyline of the Eisner-nominated series, Locke & Key! Dodge continues his relentless quest to find the key to the black door, and raises an army of shadows to wipe out anyone who might get in his way. Surrounded and outnumbered, the Locke children find themselves fighting a desperate battle, all alone, in a world where the night itself has become their enemy.

• coming of age
• survival

A dying, wealthy publisher offers a hefty sum to a physicist and two mediums to prove life after death. Their investigation leads them to the infamous Belasco House, abandoned for decades after a history of depravity. As they spend a night within its sealed walls, they uncover the chilling truth behind its local moniker: Hell House.

On a split of land cut off by the Gulf, three Victorian summer houses stand against the encroaching sand. Two of the houses at Beldame are still used. The third house, filling with sand, is empty...except for the vicious horror which is shaping nightmares from the nothingness that hangs in the dank, fetid air. The McCrays and Savages, two fine Mobile families allied by marriage, have been coming to Beldame for years. This summer, with a terrible funeral behind them and a messy divorce coming up, even Luker McCray and little India down from New York are looking forward to being alone at Beldame. But they won't be alone. For something there, something they don't like to think about, is thinking about them...and about all the ways to make them die.