A murderer's guilty conscience gets the better of him, driving him to confess his crime. 'The Tell-Tale Heart' by Edgar Allan Poe (1843)įrom the master of the morbid imagination, this gem of a story blurs the edges between horror and ghost fiction. I see the influence of all three traditions in my own books – though The Winter Ghosts is my first pure ghost story – but in the end, as with the choices that follow, what matters is that each has what the great Edith Wharton called 'the fun of the shudder'.' 1. Like their traditional counterparts, they draw on old mythologies and folklore, but are rooted in realism and the sense of the ordinary disrupted or made extraordinary. Finally, there's the antiquarian ghost story which is associated with a certain sort of Edwardian Englishness. These stories implicitly, sometimes explicitly, question the reliability and sanity of the heroine or hero, and often reference social or political issues of the day. In the psychological ghost story, the emphasis is on the mental state of the victim rather than the actions – the existence, even – of the ghost or poltergeist. 'The traditional ghost story is often inspired by folklore and a sense of decaying history, and is similar in tone to the Gothic novels that came before it. But what makes a ghost story? Though purists might quibble, I'd say there are three distinct types of ghost story – as opposed to tales of horror, which have a different dynamic and purpose, or novels that have ghosts in them, such as Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or Ben Okri's The Famished Road. Their habitat is ancient woods, ruined abbeys, isolated old houses and crumbling monasteries. 'Spirits and apparitions, headless monks and white ladies, the traditional ghost story still exerts a hold on our imaginations.

The winter ghosts by kate mosse