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A ghost story may be any piece of fiction, or drama, that includes a ghost, or simply takes as a premise the possibility of ghosts or the belief of some character(s) in them. In that sense The Tale of Genji contains ghost stories, and Shakespeare's Hamlet is a ghost story. Henry James used the ghost story premise. Stories involving ghosts are found in traditional cultures worldwide. Charles Dickens who wrote one of the most famous ghost stories, A Christmas Carol, in which a miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, is visited by three spirits on Christmas Eve. They show him how he has misused his life, and their influence changes him.

In a narrower sense, the ghost story has been developed as a short story format, within genre fiction. As such, it may be a relatively restrained form of supernatural fiction, compared with the excess of the horror story. The ghost stories of M. R. James, Charles Dickens, H. Russell Wakefield, and Sheridan Le Fanu are classic expressions, as is Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Two of the most important twentieth-century authors of ghost stories were Walter de la Mare and Robert Aickman, each a supreme stylist who genuinely believed in the supernatural. De la Mare often brought a poetic vision to his work, whereas Aickman explored the dark, nightmarish and occasionally erotic byways of the subconscious. However, what unites both writers, in addition to their perfection of individual style, is their reliance upon ambiguity as a medium for heightening effect.

Many ghost stories are passed down through the telling of them to family members and friends. However, there are often several versions due to personal changes to the story and forgetfulness.

Japan has a long and complex tradition of ghost stories (kaidan in Japanese), perhaps best-known from Lafcadio Hearn's book, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things.

Colloquially, the term also can refer to any kind of scary story.

In "Some Remarks on Ghost Stories"^[1] (1929), M. R. James identifies five key features of the English ghost story:

• The pretense of truth
• "A pleasing terror"
• No gratuitous bloodshed or sex
• No "explanation of the machinery"
• Setting: "those of the writer's (and reader's) own day"

There is an extensive critical analysis of the work of several English ghost story writers in Jack Sullivan's book Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (1978).

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• Felton, D. Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity, University of Texas Press, 1999.
• Medieval ghost stories : an anthology of miracles, marvels and prodigies / comp. and ed. by Andrew Joynes, Woodbridge: Boydell press, 2003.

The Best Ghost Stories, available at Project Gutenberg. - 1919

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