The Hungry Stones
A tax collector takes lodgings in an abandoned marble palace built by a Mughal king beside a lonely river.
Ghost stories to read or listen to
These ghost stories range from quiet, unsettling hauntings to eerie encounters and darkly comic tales. Read Henry James’s *The Turn of the Screw* or Charles Dickens’s *A Christmas Carol*, or choose another story for a late-night listen; every story on Pagehush is free to read or listen to.
Count Magnus
Mr Wraxall, a travel writer, is staying in a Swedish village and grows curious about the cruel Count Magnus, who went on a Black Pilgrimage and came back with something.
The Turn of the Screw
A young governess takes charge of two beautiful, strangely good children at a lonely country house.
A Christmas Carol
On Christmas Eve, the miser Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his old partner Marley and by three spirits, who show him Christmases past, present and yet to…
The Red Room
A confident young man insists on spending a night alone in the castle's haunted red room.
The Judge’s House
Malcolm Malcolmson, a student cramming for his exams, rents an empty old house where nobody will disturb him: the house where a hanging judge once lived.
The Canterville Ghost
An American family buys an English castle, ghost included. But the Otises refuse to be frightened, and the poor ghost of Sir Simon, three hundred years in the…
The Signal-Man
A lonely railway signalman in a deep cutting tells a visitor about a figure that appears by the tunnel's red light, waving and calling out, each time before a…
Thrawn Janet
In the Scottish village of Balweary, the young minister Murdoch Soulis takes as his housekeeper old Janet McClour, whom the parish distrusts because she is said to…
Bengal Ghost Stories
Five ghost stories from Bengal: the ghost of a Brahman who helps a poor man, the Brahman who wished to be perfect, a ghost who takes a man's wife's shape, a…
Living or Dead?
Kadambini, a young widow, falls ill and seems to die. They carry her to the burning-ghat on a stormy night, and there she wakes.
Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad
On a golfing holiday on the empty Suffolk coast, a sceptical professor digs an old bronze whistle out of a ruined church.
The Boarded Window
In the forests near Cincinnati, in 1830, a lonely settler lived in a cabin with one window, always boarded up.
The Jolly Corner
Spencer Brydon comes home to New York after thirty-three years in Europe, and begins to stalk his own childhood house at night, hunting for the man he might have…
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Ichabod Crane, a lanky schoolteacher, courts the lovely Katrina in a sleepy Dutch village haunted by the Headless Horseman.
The Phantom 'Rickshaw
In Simla, a man who cruelly ended a love affair begins to see his dead lover’s yellow rickshaw on the Mall, and no one else can.
The Skeleton
When the narrator was a boy, a human skeleton hung in the room where he learned anatomy.
The Upper Berth
An old sailor tells why he will never again sail on the Kamtschatka: the passengers in cabin 105 all jump overboard, the porthole won't stay shut, and the upper berth…
Where can I read ghost stories for free?
You can read these ghost stories for free on Pagehush, with no ads. You can read on your phone or have any story read aloud in a natural voice.
Can I listen to these ghost stories?
Yes. Pagehush can read any story aloud in a natural voice, and listening is free with no ads.