Bonnie Jo Campbell Recommends Her Favorite Literary Ghost Stories

The author, Bonnie Jo Campbell, recalls being easily frightened as a child, growing up near a dark, swampy forest. Her mother sang a haunting folk song called The Unquiet Grave, where a woman begs her dead lover to speak to her. The song’s eerie effect left a lasting impression. Campbell later became a skeptic, believing real dangers come from living people, not ghosts. Despite this, she became a fiction writer, focusing on realistic stories about plausible characters and situations. Her latest novel, The Spirits (W.W. Norton, 2026), explores themes of guilt and memory, set during a Christmas Eve gathering on the ninth anniversary of a family tragedy.

Campbell initially resisted including supernatural elements in The Spirits, as she typically writes realistic fiction. The story follows Sister Whitby, a 21-year-old farmgirl, who feels responsible for her father’s violent death. Campbell struggled to resolve the story’s central mystery—what truly happened on the night of the tragedy—because the family’s conflicting memories left the event unclear. Despite her skepticism, Campbell realized the characters themselves were haunted by unresolved guilt and trauma, making the inclusion of ghostly elements inevitable to convey their emotional state.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the ghost of King Hamlet appears to demand revenge against his murderer, his brother Claudius, who has married Hamlet’s mother and taken the throne. The ghost’s demand sets the play’s central conflict in motion. Campbell notes that Shakespeare leaves it ambiguous whether the ghost is a real spirit or a psychological manifestation of Hamlet’s guilt. This ambiguity allows the story to work regardless of the reader’s belief, as the ghost’s demand reflects Hamlet’s internal struggle. Campbell uses this technique in The Spirits, where the family must collectively piece together the truth about the past to move forward.

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the ghost of Banquo—Macbeth’s murdered friend—appears only to Macbeth during a banquet. Unlike Hamlet’s ghost, Banquo does not speak or act but merely exists, triggering Macbeth’s guilt and paranoia. Campbell highlights how Banquo’s silent presence is more powerful than any verbal demand, as it exposes Macbeth’s unraveling conscience. This illustrates how ghosts in literature can serve as symbols of guilt or moral reckoning without needing to be active or communicative.

In Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), the ghost of Jacob Marley appears to warn Ebenezer Scrooge about the consequences of his miserly life. Marley is bound in chains, symbolizing his greed in life, but he delivers a clear moral message: Scrooge must change his ways to avoid eternal suffering. Campbell notes that Marley’s ghost is straightforward and truthful, unlike more ambiguous spirits. She compares her protagonist, Sister Whitby, to Scrooge, as both need redemption, but Campbell avoids a direct parallel to prevent her story from feeling overly moralistic.

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), the ghost of Sethe’s deceased daughter returns as a physical and psychological force. The ghost, also named Beloved, demands attention and nourishment, reflecting Sethe’s unresolved guilt over killing her child to save her from slavery. Campbell describes Beloved as an unsophisticated but powerful agent of revenge, who disrupts Sethe’s life and relationships. Unlike other ghosts, Beloved does not seek justice or truth but vengeance, making her one of the most unsettling literary ghosts due to her raw emotional intensity.

In Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart (1843), an unnamed narrator murders an old man and hides his body beneath the floorboards. The narrator hears a persistent thumping sound, which he interprets as the dead man’s ghost demanding justice. Campbell explains that Poe never reveals the source of the sound, leaving it ambiguous whether it is supernatural or a manifestation of the narrator’s guilt. This technique relies on psychological horror, where the ghost’s presence is implied rather than seen, amplifying the story’s tension.

George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) presents an afterlife (bardo) that is chaotic and confused, populated by spirits who do not realize they are dead. Campbell contrasts this with traditional ghost stories, where the afterlife is orderly and moral. In Saunders’s novel, the spirits are as muddled and miserable as they were in life, with some even unaware of their death. Campbell suggests that these unreliable ghosts cannot guide the living, highlighting Saunders’s unique take on the supernatural as a place of unresolved confusion rather than clarity.

Campbell revisits the folk song The Unquiet Grave, which her mother sang to her as a child. The song tells the story of a woman who sits on her lover’s grave for a year, begging him to speak to her. The ghost eventually tells her to move on and live her life, reversing the usual trope of the living haunting the dead. Campbell draws a parallel to her own story, The Spirits, where the living characters must confront their past to find resolution. The song’s twist—that the living are often the ones clinging to the dead—serves as a thematic anchor for Campbell’s novel.