These 11 Books Deliver Chillingly True Ghost Stories

From the Empire State Building to Seneca Hill, New York is full of ghosts. Cheri Revai hunts down the dark corners of the state and shines a light to reveal the spirits lurking all around. These stories include everything from specters lurking around Pulpit Rock to a Manhattan Bistro haunted by an apparition with a penchant for throwing objects off the tables. There is no shortage of terrifying tales guaranteed to keep you up all night long.

Are there ghosts lurking around our national monuments, historical houses, and museums? Paranormal expert Hans Holzer says yes, and the spiritual apparitions may be figures you know. In Famous Ghosts, Holzer tracks down dead presidents, starlets, national heroes, and literary greats. Each encounter is a fascinating look at how some of the famous—and infamous—are spending the afterlife.

It should come as no surprise that Florida has its fair share of ghosts. Explorers and pirates ventured to the peninsula seeking fame, fortune, and freedom. This book dives into what happened to them afterward, and there’s no one better than the Queen of Haunts to introduce you to the wandering dead. This short novella shows you murder victims, doomed pirates, and lost sea captains, all roaming the coast to this day.

The Carolinas have a long history in the United States. Part of the original 13 colonies, there are countless horrors buried in its past. Ghosts of the Carolinas takes you through 18 stories based on actual events.

No matter what, we’re all destined for the cemetery. Maybe that’s why they hold our fascinations—and our deepest fears. Katherine Ramsland wants to dispel the myths and take you into the ins and outs of our final resting place. From mortuary assistants to gravediggers, embalming, and tombstones, Cemetery Stories will tell you everything you need to know about the business of the dead.

In one of the buildings on the University of Kentucky campus, basketball coach Adolph Rupp is rumored to have once had a conversation with biology professor Dr. Funkhouser—after he was dead. Spanning from rural towns to urban populations, McCormick and Wyatt take the reader through the vibrant, spooky, and downright chilling ghost stories that linger throughout the Bluegrass State.

All along the Rio Grande, ghosts persist. From a murdered student pacing the locker room where she met her untimely end to the tormented patients of an insane asylum, David Bowles explores the haunted hotels, chapels, hospitals, and homes of the area, hoping to understand why some souls remain and others don’t.

Vermont has a long history filled with folklore, legends, and ghost stories. Citro explores the entire area, from New York to Quebec, documenting these stories while peppering strange-but-true facts into his book. This is the largest collection of tales ever assembled about Vermont and the surrounding areas.

When Joshua Warren set out to write this book, he had three rules. All the stories had to be true. They had to be short. And they had to be spine-tingling scary. Now you can read his findings. These short stories reveal facets of the uncanny, ranging from ghosts to aliens to cryptids and beyond. Warren adds his own insights to these strange stories, creating a chilling collection of mysterious tales.

Hanz Holzer spent his life hunting ghosts, and this book shares those supernatural encounters with you. With the help of reputable psychics, Holzer reopened his files to present 20 fascinating cases of ordinary people encountering the extraordinary. Some of these occurrences were friendly, others were not. But they’re all instances that simply cannot be explained as anything other than uncanny.

This fully illustrated, comprehensive collection of riveting ghost stories is guaranteed to delight any lover of the strange and mysterious. Across the US, Austin has included not just a spine-tingling collection of supernatural tales, but notes, websites, and addresses for places open to the public. See the paranormal world through witnesses' eyes and visit schools, saloons, graveyards, and more, from sea to shining sea.