Ten Halloween Poems: Haunted Verse Beyond Poe and Shelley

Ten poems by writers not known for gothic verse deliver this Halloween's chills, according to a new reading list that reaches beyond Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The selection spans erasures, pantoums and prose poems. Several describe hauntings from the ghost's own point of view; others confront real-life horrors. The takeaway in plain words: fear lives in ordinary language, not only in castles.

What does a ghost sound like in its own voice?

Cynthia Huntington's "Ghost" gives the spirit the microphone. The apparition describes itself: "I was a shape moving rapidly, nervous / at the edge of your vision." It knows the reader felt it: "You must have felt me / watching you." The unease, the list notes, comes from never learning whether the ghost's motives are good or evil.

Holly Lyn Walrath builds "We Have Always Lived" as an erasure poem cut from Shirley Jackson's novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The blackout poem opens, "they were all dead," and repeats phrases such as "their bodies" and "had always been there." It closes, "I must live on" — isolating Jackson's two sisters in a single surviving voice.

Charles Simic, who fled his native Serbia as a child during World War II, crowds "Ghosts" with apparitions, including a man carrying "a huge carp / In a bloodstained newspaper" and "looking much better / Than he did in the morgue." The speaker confesses, "I don't believe any of it, / And still I'm scared stiff." Simic leaves the ghosts' purpose unresolved.

How do these poets stage real-world dread?

Joy Harjo's "Day of the Dead," from In Mad Love and War, opens, "This is a witching season." Set on Día de los Muertos, it watches "Spirits play crack-the-whip in the abyss" while mourning an absence: "I have needed to talk but you are insanely absent and I have become insanely mute." Harjo writes that "love changes molecular structure… The Day of the Dead marks skeletal transition and flowers bloom in the snow."

Eve L. Ewing's "Horror Movie Pitch" uses genre tropes and dark humor to surface the racism and sexism Black women face in the U.S. The imagined film makes "all the black women turn invisible, / all of them // just overnight." Its vengeance plot includes "the girl you passed up for the promotion / she could be in your car." Unlike the other poems here, the list notes, this one celebrates a triumph.

Zefyr Lisowski's "Remembering Is a Kind of Work Too" opens, "In the ghost story I don't write, / the girl meets the ghost, the end." Asked why she didn't leave a dangerous place, the speaker answers, "I did leave and nothing changed," and later: "Even after I got out, even after, / it followed." Lisowski, author of the essay collection Uncanny Valley Girls, folds in images from The Ring and The Shining.

Rachel McKibbens, a slam poet and activist, begins her pantoum-inspired "Poem for Three Dead Girls of Last Summer": "My sweetheart says I can no longer watch the news. / You worry too much. And he is right." A mother of three girls imagines hiding her "dear little Gretels" while "Men line up like ants to take them away, to carry them home." The list calls its stark reality the source of its fear.

Which poems work through form itself?

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal's "Corpse Flower" borrows its imagery from the titan arum, the plant notorious for its rotting-flesh odor. The speaker assembles a Frankenstein creature: "I gathered up your spine / and built you on a dark day. You are still missing / some parts." The materials include "cardinal's yolk, live seawater, / my trenza, a piece of my son's umbilical cord" — yet "still you don't return."

Victoria Chang's "Edward Hopper's Office at Night" runs as one unpunctuated, unending sentence, pulling the reader along with the panicking speaker from office tension — "the boss might eat her the boss / wants her but the boss wants money more" — into first-person dread: "a piece of paper cannot take care of anyone I / cannot take care of everyone." The closing homophone seals it: "this year I dye my hair so I won't have to die." The poem comes from OBIT, Chang's collection of poetic obituaries for her mother.

Louise Glück's "All Hallows" makes the landscape itself the haunted character: "Even now this landscape is assembling. / The hills darken." The land holds "the barrenness / of harvest or pestilence" — neither abundance nor ruin, just emptiness. Glück ends: "And the soul creeps out of the tree." For readers planning seasonal lists, these ten poems suggest the strongest horror this Halloween comes from contemporary voices, not the canonical dead.