Book picks similar to
Haunting Tales of Old New Orleans, Volume One: History, Legends and Lore by Alyne Pustanio
spooky-time
urban-legends
gothic
mythology-folklore-fairytales
The Russell House
Donna Foley Mabry - 2016
The young military widow leaves dozens of messages for her father but receives no response. Looking for a copy of her mother’s obituary, Roxie reads an article in the newspaper and discovers her entire life is a web of lies, secrets, and deceit. The story sends her off in search of the truth about the man she idolized. She drives to her father’s birthplace—Manhattan, Kansas—and moves into her grandmother’s huge, three-story, hundred-and-fifty-year-old house. It’s been vacant for decades, but Roxie begins to believe she’s not the only occupant. She doesn’t know if there’s an intruder or if the spirit of her grandmother is watching over her. In only a matter of days, someone has made several attempts on her life. She calls in her best friend, Janice Tallchief—retired on a disability from the Kansas City Police Department—to act as her bodyguard. Can Jan and Roxie unravel the mystery before the killer succeeds?
The Unsuitable
Molly Pohlig - 2020
She is awkward, plain, and most pertinently, believes that her mother, who died in childbirth, lives in the scar on her neck. Iseult’s father parades a host of unsuitable candidates before her, the majority of whom Iseult wastes no time frightening away. When at last her father finds a suitor desperate enough to take Iseult off his hands—a man whose medical treatments have turned his skin silver—a true comedy of errors ensues. As history’s least conventional courtship progresses into talk of marriage, Iseult’s mother becomes increasingly volatile and uncontrollable, and Iseult is forced to resort to extreme, often violent, measures to keep her in check. As the day of the wedding nears, Iseult must decide whether (and how) to set the course of her life, with increasing interference from both her mother and father, tipping her ever closer to madness, and to an inevitable, devastating final act.
The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall
Katie Alender - 2015
Long ago, it was the Piven Institute for the Care and Correction of Troubled Females—an insane asylum nicknamed “Hysteria Hall.” However, many of the inmates were not insane, just defiant and strong willed. Kind of like Delia herself.But the house still wants to keep “troubled” girls locked away. So, in the most horrifying way, Delia gets trapped.And that’s when she learns that the house is also haunted.Ghost girls wander the halls in their old-fashioned nightgowns. A handsome ghost boy named Theo roams the grounds. Delia finds that all the spirits are unsettled and full of dark secrets. The house, as well, harbors shocking truths within its walls—truths that only Delia can uncover, and that may set her free.But she’ll need to act quickly, before the house’s power overtakes everything she loves.From master of suspense Katie Alender comes a riveting tale of twisted memories and betrayals, and the meaning of madness.
The Blackstone Chronicles
John Saul - 1997
John Saul, the master of supernatural suspense, John Saul, brings to chilling life the small New England town of Blackstone--and the secrets and sins that lay buried there. . . . — From atop Blackstone's highest hill, the old Asylum casts its shadow over the village. Built in the 1890s to house the insane, the Asylum has stood vacant for decades. But now, the wrecker's ball is about to strike--and unleash an ominous evil. Strange gifts begin to appear on the doorsteps of Blackstone's finest citizens.Each bears a mysterious history.Each brings a horrifying power to harm.Each reveals another thread in the suspensefully woven web of . . .THE BLACKSTONE CHRONICLESPart I--An Eye for an Eye: The DollPart II--Twist of Fate: The LocketPart III--Ashes to Ashes: The Dragon's FlamePart IV--In the Shadow of Evil: The HandkerchiefPart V--Day of Reckoning: The StereoscopePart VI--Asylum
The Girl from the Well
Rin Chupeco - 2014
But my state of being has nothing to do with the curiosity toward my own species, if we can be called such. We do not go gentle, as your poet encourages, into that good night. A dead girl walks the streets.She hunts murderers. Child killers, much like the man who threw her body down a well three hundred years ago.And when a strange boy bearing stranger tattoos moves into the neighborhood so, she discovers, does something else. And soon both will be drawn into the world of eerie doll rituals and dark Shinto exorcisms that will take them from American suburbia to the remote valleys and shrines of Aomori, Japan.Because the boy has a terrifying secret - one that would just kill to get out. The Girl from the Well is A YA Horror novel pitched as "Dexter" meets "The Grudge", based on a well-loved Japanese ghost story.
A Drop of Night
Stefan Bachmann - 2016
Built in the 1780's to hide an aristocratic family and a mad duke during the French Revolution, the palace has lain hidden and forgotten ever since. Anouk, along with several other gifted teenagers, will be the first to set foot in it in over two centuries.Or so she thought.But nothing is as it seems, and the teens soon find themselves embroiled in a game far more sinister, and dangerous, than they could possibly have imagined. An evil spanning centuries is waiting for them in the depths. . .
The Uninvited
Dorothy Macardle - 1942
They are drawn to the suspiciously inexpensive Cliff End, feared amongst locals as a place of disturbance and ill omen. Gradually, the Fitzgeralds learn of the mysterious deaths of Mary Meredith and another strange young woman. Together, they must unravel the mystery of Cliff End's uncanny past - and keep the troubled young Stella, who was raised in the house as a baby, from returning to the nursery where something waits to tuck her in at night... The second in Tramp's Recovered Voices series, this strange, bone-chilling story was first published in 1942, and was adapted for the screen as one of Hollywood's most successful ghost stories, The Uninvited, in 1944.
The Necromancer
Douglas Clegg - 2003
Not for the faint of heart!The man who created Harrow had a secret history.In The Necromancer, Douglas Clegg explores the story of Justin Gravesend's youth and his induction into the organization known as the Chymera Magick. From a Welsh village to the back alleys of London, university student Justin meets his destiny in the underworld known as The Pandemonium.
Fiendish
Brenna Yovanoff - 2014
Now she’s out and determined to uncover who put her in that cellar and why. When Clementine was a child, dangerous and inexplicable things started happening in New South Bend. The townsfolk blamed the fiendish people out in the Willows and burned their homes to the ground. But magic kept Clementine alive, walled up in the cellar for ten years, until a boy named Fisher sets her free. Back in the world, Clementine sets out to discover what happened all those years ago. But the truth gets muddled in her dangerous attraction to Fisher, the politics of New South Bend, and the Hollow, a fickle and terrifying place that seems increasingly temperamental ever since Clementine reemerged.
The Grin of the Dark
Ramsey Campbell - 2007
But almost nothing of his silent movies has survived, and now Thackeray is little more than a grace note in film history.Disgraced film critic Simon is determined to restore Tubby's reputation and his own. A commercially successful biography of Tubby will convince Simon's girlfriend -- and her parents -- that Simon is worthy of her. Uncovering the truth about Tubby isn't easy. Newspapers of the time contain mysterious, truncated accounts of disturbing events at Tubby's performances and at screenings of his films. The few seconds of film Simon finds of Tubby in action are profoundly disquieting; Tubby seems more demon than comedian. Tubby's leering, laughing clown's face haunts Simon. Everywhere he turns, he sees the clown's sardonic grin; his faintly glowing white costume; or his long, oddly jointed limbs.Tubby Thackeray is dead. But the evil that was Tubby Thackeray lives, and Simon's investigations have roused its hunger.
Alone
Cyn Balog - 2017
The grounds are beautiful and it’s fun to explore the sprawling house with its creepy rooms and secret passages. Except now her mom wants to renovate, rather than sell the estate—which means they're not going back to the city…or Seda's friends and school. As the days grow shorter, Seda is filled with dread. They’re about to be cut off from the outside world, and she’s not sure she can handle the solitude or the darkness it brings out in her.Then a group of teens get stranded near the mansion during a blizzard. Seda has no choice but to offer them shelter, even though she knows danger lurks in the dilapidated mansion—and in herself. And as the snow continues to fall, what Seda fears most is about to become her reality…
When the Reckoning Comes
LaTanya McQueen - 2021
With every mile she traveled, she distanced herself from her past: from her best friend Celine, mocked by their town as the only white girl with black friends; from her old neighborhood; from the eerie Woodsman plantation rumored to be haunted by the spirits of slaves; from the terrifying memory of a ghost she saw that terrible day when a dare-gone-wrong almost got Jesse—the boy she secretly loved—arrested for murder.But now Mira is back in Kipsen to attend Celine’s wedding at the plantation, which has been transformed into a lush vacation resort. Mira hopes to reconnect with her friends, and especially, Jesse, to finally tell him the truth about her feelings and the events of that devastating long-ago day.But for all its fancy renovations, the Woodsman remains a monument to its oppressive racist history. The bar serves antebellum drinks, entertainments include horrifying reenactments, and the service staff is nearly all black. Yet the darkest elements of the plantation’s past have been carefully erased—rumors that slaves were tortured mercilessly and that ghosts roam the lands, seeking vengeance on the descendants of those who tormented them, which includes most of the wedding guests. As the weekend unfolds, Mira, Jesse, and Celine are forced to acknowledge their history together, and to save themselves from what is to come.
Nyctophobia
Christopher Fowler - 2014
One, there's never been an actual authenticated haunted house. Two, it's not the house that's haunted, but the person.Callie is a young architectural student who marries Mateo, a wine importer, and moves to a grand old house in Southern Spain. Hyperion House is flooded with light, it also has a mute gardener, a sinister housekeeper and a sealed, dark servants' quarters that nobody has the keys for. And although initially happy, and taking care of Mateo's daughter, Callie can't help being drawn to the dark empty rooms at the back of the house, and becomes convinced that someone is living in there.Uncovering the house's history, she discovers the shocking truth. As Callie's fear of the darkness returns, she comes to understand the true nature of evil.
Dreaming Darkly
Caitlin Kittredge - 2019
But she isn’t. Myra Bloodgood was confusing mix of protective and abusive, a manipulative personality who never told the truth—about where she came from, who Ivy’s father was, or why they were living their lives on the run.Now that Ivy has been sent to Darkhaven, an island off the New England coast, to live with a rich uncle she didn’t know existed, she is forced to reckon with her mother’s past. Ivy can tell right away there are long-held family secrets buried within these walls, but when she wakes up from one of her nightmares covered in someone else’s blood, Ivy fears that whatever demons her mother battled while she was alive have come to roost in her own mind. Scared that she can no longer trust what she sees, Ivy seeks the help of a boy who thinks her episodes are connected to the sordid history of Darkhaven—but what they don’t know might kill them both.A moody and twisty gothic mystery with an impossible romance, Dreaming Darkly is an atmospheric, fast-paced page-turner written by comics veteran Caitlin Kittredge.
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
Laird Barron - 2013
Melding supernatural horror with hardboiled noir, espionage, and a scientific backbone, Barron’s stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year’s best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards.Barron returns with his third collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. Collecting interlinking tales of sublime cosmic horror, including “Blackwood’s Baby”, “The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven”, and “The Men from Porlock”, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All delivers enough spine-chilling horror to satisfy even the most jaded reader.