A ghost story may be any piece of fiction, or drama, or an account of an experience, that includes a ghost, or simply takes as a premise the possibility of ghosts or characters' belief in them. Colloquially, the term can refer to any kind of scary story. In a narrower sense, the ghost story has been developed as a short story format, within genre fiction. It is a form of supernatural fiction and specifically of weird fiction, and is often a horror story. While ghost stories are often explicitly meant to be scary, they have been written to serve all sorts of purposes, from comedy to morality tales. Ghosts often appear in the narrative as sentinels or prophets of things to come. Whatever their uses, the ghost story is in some format present in all cultures around the world, and may be passed down orally or in written form.
Historian of the ghost story Jack Sullivan has noted that many literary critics argue a "Golden Age of the Ghost Story" existed between the decline of the Gothic novel in the 1830s and the start of the First World War. Sullivan argues the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Sheridan Le Fanu inaugurated the "Golden Age".
Other articles related to "ghost story, story, ghost":
... Hamish Hamilton 1973 Penguin Paperback 1974 The Woman in Black - A Ghost Story, Hamish Hamilton Penguin Paperback 1983 Mandarin Paperback 1989 ... Dolly A Ghost Story, 2012 ...
... James story Casting The Runes for Yorkshire Television's Playhouse, first broadcast on ITV on 24 April 1979 ... Adapted by Clive Exton, it re-imagined the events of James' story taking place in a contemporary television studio ... play from Nigel Kneale for which the writer penned an original ghost story, The Stone Tape, broadcast on Christmas Day 1972 ...
... The "Vikram and Betal" is a collection of ghost stories narrated by the ghost, "Betal" ...
... going to kiss you goodnight" and starts on a "ghost story" ... before she finishes with "Wasn't that a good ghost story!" Miriam forces Annabel to confront her own fear of entering the tennis court, and when Annabel tries to return indoors, she finds a ... Miriam then forces a now hugely stressed Annabel to tell her own "ghost story" of her marriage, insisting she needs to know now ...
... A Ghost Story for Christmas is a strand of annual British short television films originally broadcast on BBC One from 1971 to 1978, and later revived in 2005 on BBC Four ... The remit behind the series was to provide a television adaptation of a classic ghost story referencing the oral tradition of telling supernatural tales at Christmas ... Each instalment is a separate adaptation of a short story, ranging from 30 to 50 minutes in duration and each featuring well-known British actors such as ...
Famous quotes containing the words story and/or ghost:
“Saving one human life is better than building a seven story pagoda to the Buddha.”
—Chinese proverb.
“Unhand me, gentlemen.
By heaven, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)