Kat McAdaragh

There is a reason women write ghost stories. And there’s a reason we return to them, again and again, not just to be frightened—but to feel seen.

Because beneath every haunted house, every flicker of movement in a dark hallway, every sudden chill—there’s something older than fear. Something deeper. Something repressed.

When I think about the stories that have clung to me over the years—not just the entertaining but the unsettling—they’re almost always stories written by women and about women. And the ghosts? They’re not the villains. They are the truth.

The House Knows

I first read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House on a rainy weekend in October. I was in my room, alone, and I remember the strange, prickling awareness that crept up my spine as I read. Not from fear, but from recognition.

Eleanor, the lonely, awkward protagonist, arrives at Hill House desperate for connection. She has no real home. No real identity. And no one who sees her. She is quiet and overlooked. And as the story unfolds, it becomes clear:the house is responding to her. Or maybe she is responding to the house.

“Hill House, not sane, stood by itself…holding darkness within.”

What Jackson does so brilliantly is blur the lines between mind and matter. Hill House is Eleanor. It echoes her fears. It amplifies her isolation. It makes physical what women are so often forced to internalize—the slow, suffocating ache of being unwanted, unrooted, and unheard.

I’ve lived in that kind of house. Not the literal kind but the psychological one. The body that didn’t feel like mine. The silence that echoed louder than words. The feeling that something terrible would happen if I let myself really feel what I was feeling.

Jackson doesn’t give us easy answers, and there’s no neat resolution. No clear ghosts. Just a woman disappearing into the space that reflects her back in all her unspeakable ache.

Possession as Reclamation

If Shirley Jackson gave us the haunted houses, Toni Morrison gave us the haunted mother.

When I read Beloved for the first time, I cried for an hour after finishing it. Not soft, sentimental tears, but ugly sobbing. Because Morrison doesn’t write hauntings as a metaphor alone. She writes them as memory. As a body’s refusal to forget.

Sethe is haunted by her dead daughter. But she’s also haunted by slavery. By choice. By survival. By love so fierce it becomes destructive. Beloved isn’t just about ghosts. It’s about the past breaking into the present and demanding to be reckoned with.

“Some things you forget. Other things you never do.”

Possession, in Morrison’s world, isn’t just demonic—it’s emotional. It’s historical. It’s inherited. And for Black women especially, Morrison shows how that haunting is often not supernatural at all, but a lived, generational reality.

Reading Beloved made me look at my own life differently. The things I carry from my mother. The things she carried from hers. What parts of ourselves did we let die to survive? And what might return if we let them?

The Body as a Haunted House

No one writes embodied horror quite like Carmen Maria Machado. Her work, especially Her Body and Other Parties, feels like a whispered truth we’ve all known but couldn’t quite name.

In “The Husband Stitch,” Machado reimagines the urban legend of the girl with the ribbon around her neck—a ribbon she tells her husband never to untie. He agrees, at first. But of course, eventually, he unravels it. And she unravels with it.

“If you love me,” she says, “you’ll let me keep it.”

But he doesn’t. And that’s the horror.

This story wrecked me. Not because it was violent, but because it was familiar. How many times have women asked for one thing—just one thing—to be ours? A thought. A boundary. A mystery. And how often has that been denied?

My ribbon was my solitude. My voice. My choice to write instead of explain. And for years, I felt like I was being asked to give it up to be lovable, understandable, normal.

Machado’s greatness comes with showing that what haunts us isn’t always external. Sometimes, it’s the slow erosion of the self under the weight of love, expectation, and desire. Sometimes, it’s the stories we inherit about what it means to be a “good” woman and what we lose in trying to live up to them.

Why Women Keep Writing Ghost Stories

The uncanny, Feud said, is the return of the repressed. Which means that women—who have been historically silenced, restrained, and erased— live in uncanny territory all the time. We are taught to forget. To repress. To shrink. And when we don’t? We’re called hysterical. Or worse—dangerous.

So what do we do?

We write ghosts. We write haunted houses, and strange doubles, and rooms that should stay locked. We write women who unravel, not because they’re weak but because the truth has become unbearable to contain.

We write to name the things that have no name.

I have been haunted in many seasons of my life. By perfectionism. By shame. By the desire to be both invisible and admired. By the contradiction of wanting freedom and fearing what it might cost. But I’ve also been freed by those hauntings. Because every time I let one rise, and speak, and be heard—I become more whole.

What Haunts You

Ghost stories aren’t just escapism. They’re memories. They’re metaphors. They’re forms of resistance.

They remind us that what has been buried will not stay buried. That every woman has a ribbon, a room, a voice—something she’s been told to hide. And that the most terrifying thing might not be what waits in the shadows, but what we’ve been taught to fear about ourselves.

So my dearest, what haunts you? What have you locked away? What might happen if you let it return?

Because I believe in ghosts. But more than that, I believe in women who survived them.

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Are you haunted, too? I’d love to hear your ghost stories! Comment and share your stories below.