Five haunting stories in time for Halloween

'Tis the season for spooky.

The trees have turned skeletal, the pumpkins have faces and something might just be rapping, rapping at your chamber door.

Get your ghost story fix with these eerie tales in time for Halloween. All of them are available to read online for free. (Disclaimer: Not all of them have ghosts — some of them have worse.)

1) "The Thing on the Doorstep" by H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft brings the horror in this tale of possession and the undead.

It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer. At first I shall be called a madman — madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium. Later some of my readers will weigh each statement, correlate it with the known facts, and ask themselves how I could have believed otherwise than as I did after facing the evidence of that horror — that thing on the doorstep.

2) "The Empty House" by Algernon Blackwood

Blackwood's name is not well-known today, but he's long been considered a master of the ghost story. His specialty: a haunted house.

Certain houses, like certain persons, manage somehow to proclaim at once their character for evil. In the case of the latter, no particular feature need betray them; they may boast an open countenance and an ingenuous smile; and yet a little of their company leaves the unalterable conviction that there is something radically amiss with their being: that they are evil. Willy nilly, they seem to communicate an atmosphere of secret and wicked thoughts which makes those in their immediate neighbourhood shrink from them as from a thing diseased.

3) "The Graveless Doll of Eric Mutis" by Karen Russell

Russell brings her eye for the absurd to this story about high school students who find themselves transfixed by a very lifelike doll.

The scarecrow that we found lashed to the pin oak in Friendship Park, New Jersey, was thousands of miles away from the yellow atolls of corn where you might expect to find a farmer's doll. Scarecrow country was the actual country, everybody knew that. Scarecrows belonged to countrymen and women. They lived in hick states, the "I" states, exotic to us: Iowa, Indiana. Scarecrows made fools of the birds, and smiled with lifeless humor. Their smiles were fakes, threads. (This idea appealed to me--I was a quiet kid myself, branded "mean," and I liked the idea of a mouth that nobody expected anything from, a mouth that was just red sewing.)

4) "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe was a master of the macabre. In "Pit" he takes readers deep into a torture chamber from the Spanish Inquisition.

I was sick — sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence — the dread sentence of death — was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution — perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill wheel. This only for a brief period; for presently I heard no more. Yet, for a while, I saw; but with how terrible an exaggeration! I saw the lips of the black-robed judge.

5) "The Lost Ghost" by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

Freeman was a prominent 19th-century author with a taste for haunting tales. In "The Lost Ghost," a little girl appears at a woman's door late at night. That's never a good sign.

Mrs. John Emerson, sitting with her needlework beside the window, looked out and saw Mrs. Rhoda Meserve coming down the street, and knew at once by the trend of her steps and the cant of her head that she meditated turning in at her gate. She also knew by a certain something about her general carriage — a thrusting forward of the neck, a bustling hitch of the shoulders — that she had important news.