Since ancient times, tales of spirits who return from the dead to haunt the places they left behind have figured prominently in the folklore of many cultures. Ghost stories appear in classical works like the The Thousand and One Nights and The Tale of Genji, English literature from Shakespeare and Poe to Thorne Smith and Joyce Carol Oates, and Hollywood hits like The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Poltergeist, and Ghost. Last week, in anticipation of Halloween, we asked Red Room to tell a ghost story!

We had more than fifty wonderfully spooky entries. Three especially stood out:

• Member Sangay Glass shares an engrossing saga of family, unrequited love, and betrayal in Plains Indian storytelling fashion. "Stone Buffalo Man" is worth savoring.
• For his debut Red Room blog entry, member Bob Sanchez gives a petty thief a good fright in his vivid, grisly story "Nothing That Needed Eyes."
• A ghost or a guardian angel? A mother and baby sharing a Victorian house in Portsmouth, Virginia, with a haunting presence have evidence of both in author Danny Donovan's "The Clockwork Ghost."

These bloggers will win books by Red Room authors:

• In Stories in Stone New York: A Field Guide to New York City Cemeteries and Their Residents, Douglas Keister features some of the most fabulous cemeteries in New York City’s five boroughs and Westchester County, from Grant's Tomb to Sleepy Hollow!
• J.T. Ellison's detective Taylor Jackson returns for a spooky mystery, Where All The Dead Lie. Someone or something is coming after Taylor. But is she being haunted by the dead...or hunted by the living?
• In Detours, Jeffrey Ricker's debut novel, we meet Joel, who might finally have just met the man of his dreams! Before he can pursue true love, though, Joel has to drive his late mother's RV across the country—accompanied by her still-very-motherly ghost!

You can read all the ghost stories here. I hope you'll let the storytellers what you like about their boo-tiful stories in the comments. All of Red Room's past topics are here. Thanks as always for blogging!

–Huntington W. Sharp, Senior Editor, Red Room