13 Unsettling Spooky Supernatural Books for Halloween

Not all nightmares come from sleep. Some come from #1 New York Times bestselling author Jeneva Rose.

Three horror stories.

A dinner party. A quiet house. A roadside stop.

You’ll recognize the setup.

You won’t recognize what comes next.

Never Kill the Medium
A thirtieth birthday dinner turns deadly after someone hires a medium for a playful séance. When the ritual spirals out of control and the medium dies, the guests cover it up—unaware that leaving the séance unfinished has allowed something dark to cross over.

The Nightmare House
The Dalton family moves into what they believe is their forever home, in the quiet town of Tillington—until the house whispers, the neighbors watch, and no one believes the one person who knows something is wrong. Newly postpartum, Kristin Dalton soon uncovers a horrifying every family who has lived in this house has died or disappeared.

All Curses Are Final
On the way to a remote winter cabin, a group of friends stops at a roadside store with a hand-painted “All items cursed. Curse lifted at time of sale.” They laugh it off—until one of them discovers an item in her bag she never paid for. As the storm traps them inside the cabin and bodies start to pile up, paranoia takes hold, and suspicion turns inward.

Follow the Rites…

Nothing less than the survival of humanity is at stake.

EXCITING OPPORTUNITY:
Caretaker urgently needed. Three days of work. Competitive pay. Serious applicants ONLY.

Macy Mullins can’t say why the job posting grabbed her attention—it had the pull of a fisherman’s lure, barbed hook and all—vaguely ominous. But after an endless string of failed job interviews, she’s not exactly in the position to be picky. She has rent to pay, groceries to buy, and a younger sister to provide for.

Besides, it’s only three days’ work…

Three days, cooped up in a stranger’s house, surrounded by Oregon Coast wilderness.

What starts as a peculiar side gig soon becomes a waking nightmare. An incomprehensible evil may dwell on this property—and Macy Mullins might just be the only thing standing between it, and the rest of humanity.

Follow the Rites…

Follow the Rites…

Follow the Rites…

A chilling debut gothic mystery in the vein of Jason Rekulak and Stacy Willingham about a house with dark secrets beneath its floorboards.

It seems like divine intervention when newly pregnant and freshly unemployed Elinor unexpectedly inherits Wildwood, her family’s estate. She convinces her husband to move to the sprawling wilderness of rural Vermont to make a home and raise their baby.

Estranged from her extended family since childhood, Wildwood is a mystery to Elinor—she’s an outsider to the townsfolk and to the prominent Brook family who control the town and its history. Knowing little of the house or its past, save for snapshots of childhood memories, she becomes entranced by an eerie nineteenth-century mural in the primary bedroom she calls “the Forest of the Dead.”

But instead of growing more settled in her new home, Elinor feels increasingly isolated and uneasy. She begins to have dreams that feel like memories, phantasmagorical visions of something terrible that happened long ago. Haunted by the mystery of why her family fell apart, she’s determined to uncover the secrets of her ancestry buried deep in the past and even deeper in the woods . . . secrets kept by powerful forces within the house and within the town.

Obsessed with finding the truth, Elinor knows she must answer when “the Forest of the Dead” calls her. Someone wants her to know they were there first, and someone else is trying to get in. As the nightmares creep into her waking hours, Elinor embarks on a journey that takes her back and forth in time, to the dark recesses of memories, to the streets of modern Salem, and to the haunted corners of this otherworldly house.

The Forest of the Dead is calling. Can you hear the whispers?

When a young woman clears out her deceased grandmother’s home in rural North Carolina, she finds long-hidden secrets about a strange colony of beings in the woods.

When Mouse’s dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother’s house, she says yes. After all, how bad could it be?

Answer: pretty bad. Grandma was a hoarder, and her house is stuffed with useless rubbish. That would be horrific enough, but there’s more—Mouse stumbles across her step-grandfather’s journal, which at first seems to be filled with nonsensical rants…until Mouse encounters some of the terrifying things he described for herself.

Alone in the woods with her dog, Mouse finds herself face to face with a series of impossible terrors—because sometimes the things that go bump in the night are real, and they’re looking for you. And if she doesn’t face them head on, she might not survive to tell the tale.

An edgy and haunting debut novel about a group of friends who reunite after one of them has returned from a mysterious two-year disappearance.

Julie is missing, and the missing don’t often return. But Elise knows Julie better than anyone, and she feels in her bones that her best friend is out there, and that one day she’ll come back. She’s right. Two years to the day after Julie went missing, she reappears with no memory of where she’s been or what happened to her.

In 1924, a young mother, Hattie Breckenridge, is hanged from a tree in her yard by the town mob, accused of a crime that was actually committed by her daughter. Nearly a century later, a young married couple, Helen and Nate, abandon the comforts of suburbia to begin the ultimate, aspirational do-it-yourself project: building the house of their dreams on the same forty-four acres of rural land where Hattie once lived. When they discover that this charming property has a dark and violent past, Helen, a former history teacher, becomes consumed by Hattie’s story and the tragic legend of her descendants, three generations of “Breckenridge women,” each of whom died amid suspicion, and who seem to still be seeking something elusive and dangerous in the present day.

“The dead are restless here…”

Remy is a tour guide for Carrow House, a notoriously haunted building. When she’s asked to host seven guests for a week-long stay to research Carrow’s phenomena, she hopes to finally experience some of the sightings that made the house famous.

At first, it’s everything they hoped for. Then a storm moves in, cutting off their contact with the outside world, and things quickly become twisted. Doors open on their own. Seances go disastrously wrong. Red liquid seeps from behind the wallpaper. Their spirit medium wanders through the house during the night, seemingly in a trance.

Then one of the guests dies under strange circumstances, and Remy is forced to consider the possibility that the ghost of the house’s original owner, a twisted serial killer, still walks the halls.

But by then, it’s too late to escape.

Fade to Black is the newest hit ghost-hunting reality TV show. Led by husband and wife team Matt and Claire Kirklin, it delivers weekly hauntings investigated by a dedicated team of ghost hunting experts.

Episode Thirteen takes them to every ghost hunter’s holy grail: the Paranormal Research Foundation. This brooding, derelict mansion holds secrets and clues about bizarre experiments that took place there in the 1970s. It’s also famously haunted, and the team hopes their scientific techniques and high-tech gear will prove it. But as the house begins to reveal itself to them, proof of an afterlife might not be everything Matt dreamed of.

A story told in broken pieces, in tapes, journals, and correspondence, this is the story of Episode Thirteen — and how everything went terribly, horribly wrong.

A woman must confront the evil that has been terrorizing her street since she was a child in this gripping haunted house novel, perfect for fans of The Last House on Needless Street and Tell Me I’m Worthless.

On an otherwise ordinary street in Chicago, there is a house. An abandoned house where, once upon a time, terrible things happened. The children who live on this block are told by their parents to stay away from that house. But of course, children don’t listen. Children think it’s fun to be scared, to dare each other to go inside.

Jessie Campanelli did what many older sisters do and dared her little brother Paul. But unlike all the other kids who went inside that abandoned house, Paul didn’t return. His two friends, Jake and Richie, said that the house ate Paul. Of course adults didn’t believe that. Adults never believe what kids say. They thought someone kidnapped Paul, or otherwise hurt him. They thought Paul had disappeared in a way that was ordinary, explainable.

The disappearance of her little brother broke Jessie’s family apart in ways that would never be repaired. Jessie grew up, had a child of her own, kept living on the same street where the house that ate her brother sat, crouched and waiting. And darkness seemed to spread out from that house, a darkness that was alive—alive and hungry.

From Dead Eleven author Jimmy Juliano, a twisty, edge-of-your-seat novel about a unique haunting in the early 2000s.

Piper Lowery, a public library clerk in charge of liaising with the local middle school, can tell right away there’s something strange about the new girl in eighth grade. Avery Wallace won’t touch any kind of technology, not even the computers at the library, and her mother comes to school with her every day, refusing to leave her side—not even when Avery uses the restroom.

And then there are the rumors, the whispers Piper hears from kids in the hallway and parents around Avery’s mother is a witch. Her sister and father were killed by something supernatural. A strange virus killed them.

Seeing how isolated and lonely Avery is, Piper befriends her but quickly realizes it might just be the worst decision she’s ever made. Because there’s something dark inside Avery Wallace, and it’s spreading…

Sixteen-year-old Minerva has spent her whole life in the slums of the capital city of an unnamed country that resembles colonial Mexico. Though she lives in the shadow of constant government turmoil, her empty belly and her father’s brutality don’t leave time for politics—especially since her older brothers ran away. Minerva can’t take another beating or miss another meal, so she steals and flees to a wealthy loyalist neighborhood to win a job as a lady’s maid to an elderly widow.

Minerva and Encarnación del Valle—the proud and acerbic widow—form an unlikely duo. They are both survivors in their own ways, stubborn and used to being underestimated. For a time, Minerva is happy. She has food and safety in a house lit and warmed by magical chispa. Why should she care who runs the country or how her employer affords the magic?

But when the viceroy sweeps back into power on a wave of horrific bloodshed that sweeps away any hope Minerva had of seeing her brothers again, Encarnación retreats to the del Valle’s mountainside estate, the Casa de las Gardenias. Minerva finds herself surrounded by dozens of more experienced servants and the cruel, scheming younger del Valles, but the living are the least of anyone’s worries at the Casa de las Gardenias, and soon Minerva discovers that this ancient estate is home to forces far older and more bloodthirsty than the fascist del Valles or the liberal guerrillas amassing in the surrounding wilderness.

Moll, Redd, Agnes, and Ossie are powerful — and dangerous. But they don’t want people to fear them. They’ve spent their lives trying to understand and control their supernatural gifts, trying to help people instead of hurt them.

That’s why they offer paranormal investigative services to anyone who needs them. But when the case of a missing young woman brings them to an old (and potentially haunted) Victorian mansion, soon it’s the four teens who are in the greatest danger. The secrets they uncover about the paranormal forces inhabiting the house may shed light on the darkness that exists at the edge of their powers and finally help them gain control — if they can make it out alive.