EERIE TALES

Ghosts in the White House? 10 Chilling Ghost Stories That Will Haunt Your Imagination

Published on February 4, 2024

Image: Cederic Vandenberghe

Told quietly around a campfire, or whispered before bedtime, stories of the supernatural have always been an important part of human culture, captivating our imaginations and sending shivers down our spines. From ancient folklore to modern tales of the unknown, ghost stories continue to intrigue and terrify us.

Join us on a chilling journey through some of the best ghost stories out there. But beware, some of these might linger in your thoughts long after reading this article.

The Gray Lady

Image: Sayan Ghosh

Hampton Court Palace in England boasts a chilling resident: the Gray Lady. Legend has it that she is the ghost of Sybil Penn, an English courtier who was a nurse and teacher to Edward VI of England and personal attendant of Elizabeth I of England. After her monument at St Mary's Church in Hampton was moved in 1829, several stories regarding her figure became popular in the area. It was said the noise of a spinning wheel was heard at Hampton Court, and that soon after a closed-up room with a spinning wheel was discovered. Visitors have reported glimpses of her ghostly figure, dressed in gray, wandering the hallways and even crossing the palace's famous Haunted Gallery.

The Bell Witch Haunting

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Originating in the early 19th century in Tennessee, the Bell Witch legend tells of a vengeful spirit tormenting the Bell family from 1817 to 1821. Mysterious noises, physical attacks, and eerie whispers plagued the household. According to the Bell family, the otherworldly entity was able to speak, shapeshift, and even be in more than one place at a time, akin to the poltergeists of German folklore. The haunting became so infamous that it is said that even President Andrew Jackson visited. After witnessing an excessively boastful "witch slayer" get beaten and humiliated by the entity, he allegedly exclaimed: "By the eternal, boys, I never saw so much fun in all my life. This beats fighting the British."

The Tower of London

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The legendary Tower of London is not just a fortress of stone and history—according to popular tradition, it is also home to several spectral inhabitants. Being a place with such a grisly history, its walls bearing witness to countless murders and executions, this should not come as a surprise. Guards and visitors have reported sightings of many ghostly apparitions that correspond with historical figures who suffered gory fates within the Tower, like a headless Anne Boleyn or the tortured screams of Guy Fawkes. Some claim these apparitions bring an ominous forewarning of impending tragedy.

Residual Energy at Gettysburg

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The Battle of Gettysburg was a turning point in the American Civil War, and its echoes reverberate beyond the pages of history. Many visitors have reported eerie occurrences—apparitions, phantom sounds of battle, and ghostly soldiers. Some believe the intense emotions of the battle left residual energy etched into the landscape. The bloodiest portions of the battlefield are said to be especially haunted, and spots like the macabrely named Slaughter Pen and Devil’s Den are mentioned again and again in stories about ghostly apparitions in the area.

The Brown Lady

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Raynham Hall in Norfolk, England, is home to the infamous Brown Lady, whose spectral figure has terrified onlookers for centuries. Legend has it that Lady Dorothy Walpole (sister of the first British Prime Minister), accused of infidelity and locked by her husband in the family home until her death, roams the halls to this day. In 1936, photographers allegedly captured her ghostly image descending the grand staircase, solidifying her bone-chilling legacy.

The Okiku Doll Curse

Image: Aimee Vogelsang

The Okiku doll, residing in the Mannenji temple in Japan, is not an ordinary children's toy, at least according to modern Japanese folklore. Legend has it that the spirit of the deceased original owner of the doll—a little girl also named Okiku—resides within it. The hair on the doll is said to grow mysteriously, and those who look into her eyes can get a glimpse of the girl’s tormented soul.

The Ghosts of Versailles

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The history of French royalty is ripe with macabre tales that delve into the darker side of human behavior. So, it should not come as a surprise that the opulent Palace of Versailles, once home to monarchs and courtesans, harbors more than just royalty gossip. Visitors and staff have reported ghostly encounters, from the restless spirits of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI to the spectral echoes of the French Revolution. There’s even a claim of time travel! In any case, the sumptuous halls of the palace hold far more secrets than they seem.

Spectral Presidents

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The White House, the epicenter of U.S. politics, is rumored to host more than just the living representatives of the American people. Past presidents and First Ladies have reported ghostly sightings, including Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and William McKinley. A particularly frightening case happened during the Taft administration when the ghost of an unidentified 15-year-old boy—called the "Thing"—instilled terror among the domestic staff. According to a military aide, the ghost often materialized as "a slight pressure on the shoulder, as if someone were leaning over your shoulder to see what you might be doing." Eventually, Taft himself intervened, threatening to fire anyone who repeated stories about the haunting.

The LaLaurie Mansion

Image: Martin Lostak

Considered one of the most haunted places in New Orleans, the LaLaurie Mansion has a dark past associated with Madame Delphine LaLaurie's gruesome crimes. Slaves and servants were tortured and killed within its walls, and historians suspect that she even abused and tortured her daughters. After the mansion was set ablaze in 1834, many of the atrocious crimes committed under its roof were revealed to the shock of the public, and Madame Delphine had to precipitously flee from the city.

The Crying Boy

Image: Annie Spratt

A seemingly innocent mass-produced painting, "The Crying Boy," gained notoriety in the 1980s, after an Essex firefighter claimed that copies of the painting were often found among the debris of incinerated houses, unscathed. Rumors of a curse soon spread, leading many to believe that the painting brought misfortune and personal tragedy to its owners. Others even maintained that the eyes of the crying child followed them as they moved.

Only time can tell

Some authors never knew: Literature classics that were flops initially

Published on February 4, 2024

Image: Natalya Gregory

Some of the most celebrated artists of history died without realizing the value of the work they’d left behind. Such was the fate of Vincent van Gogh, who sold, by most accounts, exactly one painting in his lifetime. Many of the authors we now call brilliant had similar experiences. Emily Dickinson made her sister promise she’d burn each of her 1,800 poems after she died; Fitzgerald thought The Great Gatsby had been a fluke, as did Melville of Moby-Dick. Here are 10 stories with bittersweet endings about authors who never knew the historical significance of their work.

Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville

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Moby-Dick hit shelves in 1851, but it sold roughly 3,000 copies in Melville's entire lifetime. Critics dismissed it as bloated and strange. Melville had been a literary star in his twenties, but this book baffled readers expecting another great sailor's tale.

Sales never recovered. He spent his last two decades as a customs inspector on the New York docks. He died in 1891, believing this book was a failure. It took until the 1920s, and a wave of scholars celebrating the centennial of his birth, for critics to declare Moby-Dick the great American novel.

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

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The final royalty check F. Scott Fitzgerald ever received for The Great Gatsby came to $13.13. When the novel about a mysterious millionaire chasing a lost love across Long Island's glittering parties appeared in 1925, it sold fewer than 25,000 copies and left unsold stock rotting in warehouses.

Fitzgerald died in 1940, convinced he'd been forgotten, unable even to find copies of his own books in Los Angeles stores. Then, in World War II, the government's Armed Services Editions program shipped 155,000 pocket-sized copies to soldiers overseas, and each one reportedly got passed around and read by roughly seven men. Its popularity rose. Today, Gatsby sells half a million copies a year and is one of the best-selling American novels ever written.

A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole

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A grieving mother, a stack of rejected pages, and one very reluctant novelist. That formula gave way to the funniest book of 1981. John Kennedy Toole wrote his sprawling New Orleans comedy in the early 1960s, only to have it rejected by Simon & Schuster after two years of revisions.

Crushed, he shelved it. In 1969, at 31, he took his own life. But his mother, Thelma, refused to let the manuscript die with him. For years, she pushed it toward publishers, finally cornering novelist Walker Percy, who initially refused… But he couldn't put the pages down. Louisiana State University Press published it in 1980, eleven years after Toole's death. It won the Pulitzer Prize the following year.

Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

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When Leaves of Grass appeared in 1855, self-published in Brooklyn with Walt Whitman’s name left off the cover, only around 800 copies existed, and just one American library bothered to buy one.

Critics called it obscene; one reviewer suggested throwing it in the fire. Whitman kept revising and expanding it for the rest of his life, eventually growing it from 12 poems to more than 400. Even his 1881 edition, praised by many, was effectively banned in Boston after a district attorney threatened obscenity charges over its treatment of sexuality. Whitman simply found a new publisher.

Though Whitman achieved notoriety towards the end of his life, he was not widely famous or commercially successful for most of his career. It took around a century for America to stop calling Leaves of Grass filthy and start calling it foundational.

Persuasion, by Jane Austen

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Today, Jane Austen is one of the English language's most beloved novelists, her evergreen books selling millions each year. But, during her lifetime, each of her novels was published anonymously, credited only to "A Lady" or "the author of Pride and Prejudice."

When Austen died in 1817 at just 41, most of the reading public had no idea who had written the books they loved. Persuasion, her last completed novel, was published six months after her death. It was only then, in a memorial notice her brother Henry attached to the edition, that the world learned Jane Austen's actual name.

At the Mountains of Madness, by H.P. Lovecraft

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H.P. Lovecraft finished one of his most ambitious stories, a chilling tale of an Antarctic expedition, and his own editor wouldn't even publish it. In 1931, he submitted At the Mountains of Madness to Weird Tales, the pulp magazine that had run most of his work, only to have editor Farnsworth Wright reject it for being too long.

Lovecraft was so stung he shelved the manuscript for four years, unwilling to even look at it. It finally appeared in 1936 in Astounding Stories, heavily and clumsily edited without his approval, earning him $315, the most money he ever made from a single story. A fully restored version of his original text wasn't published until 1985, nearly fifty years after his death. Today the novella is considered one of his finest works and a major influence on modern science fiction horror.

The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka

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Franz Kafka wrote the story of a man who wakes up transformed into a giant insect in just three weeks, then spent years anxious about how it would be received. When The Metamorphosis finally appeared in 1915, it was one of the very few works Kafka published during his lifetime; most of his fiction stayed in drawers or notebooks.

Reception was modest at best, confined to small German literary circles, who found it strange and difficult to categorize. Kafka was so protective of the story's ambiguity that he insisted the insect itself never be illustrated on the cover, worried an image would ruin the horror readers built in their own minds. He died in 1924, having no idea that Gregor Samsa's transformation would become one of the most analyzed openings in all of literature.

The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath

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Sylvia Plath was so unsure of her only novel that she published it under a fake name. The Bell Jar, a thinly veiled account of a young woman's breakdown during a summer internship in New York, appeared in London in January 1963 under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas", in a print run of just 2,000 copies.

Plath worried a poorly received novel might damage her standing as a poet. Weeks later, she died. The book's true authorship became public only after her death, and it wasn't published in the U.S. under her real name until 1971, once her reputation as a poet had already secured her a devoted readership. Today, it's considered one of the defining American novels about mental health and womanhood.

Emily Dickinson's 1,800 poems

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Emily Dickinson wrote nearly 1,800 poems. She saw fewer than a dozen printed in her lifetime, and even those were published anonymously, likely without her full consent.

She lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, sewing her poems into small hand-bound booklets and tucking them into a bureau drawer. When she died in 1886, her sister Lavinia discovered the stash and, instead of burning it as she'd once promised, resolved to share it with the world.

She turned to writer and editor Mabel Loomis Todd, who happened to be having a long affair with Emily's brother Austin, and scholar Thomas Wentworth Higginson to prepare the poems for print. Their edited version appeared in 1890 and became an immediate sensation.

The Millennium trilogy, by Stieg Larsson

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Stieg Larsson never got to hold a single copy of any of his three bestselling novels. The Swedish journalist wrote The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels in his spare time, mostly for his own satisfaction, and only shopped them to a publisher shortly before his death.

In November 2004, months after turning in all three manuscripts, he suffered a fatal heart attack at 50, reportedly after climbing several flights of stairs when his office elevator broke down. The books were published starting in 2005 and went on to sell more than 60 million copies worldwide, spawning multiple film adaptations and making its heroine, Lisbeth Salander, a global icon.