The Uninhabited House

The 1764 novel that started gothic fiction. A giant helmet falls from the sky, portraits walk out of their frames, and the castle itself seems determined to punish the family that stole it.

Horace Walpole

A young peasant volunteers to spend three nights in the sealed east wing of Lovel Castle, where groans and a ghostly armored figure point to a buried crime. One of the first gothic novels, written in 1778 as a reply to Otranto.

Clara Reeve

A decaying New England mansion carries a curse laid by a man hanged for witchcraft, and every generation of the Pyncheon family pays for it. Hawthorne's classic about a house that remembers its sins.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

A Venetian palace is turned into a luxury hotel, and the guests in one room start having terrible dreams. Wilkie Collins builds a ghost story around a death that nobody can explain.

Wilkie Collins

A governess at the isolated country estate of Bly becomes convinced that two ghosts are after the children in her care. Henry James never tells you if she is right, which is why the story still unsettles readers.

Henry James