These are books about ghosts, but not all of them are really scary. For books where there are pretend ghosts, like in Scooby-Doo, see Pseudo-Ghost Stories.
Scary
Among the Ghosts (2010)
A girl named Noh is spending the summer with her aunt at the boarding school where she teaches. She discovers that an old, burned dormitory is haunted and that the ghosts there need her help. By Amber Benson.
The dolls in an old dollhouse seem to be reenacting the unsolved murder of Amy’s grandparents years ago.
Down a Dark Hall (1974)
A young adult gothic horror novel about girls at a haunted boarding school who channel the spirits of famous people to complete their unfinished works. By Lois Duncan.
When Sarah and her family move into an old house that belongs to her great aunt, they awaken a ghost from her aunt’s past.
Jane-Emily (1969)
A young woman takes her niece to visit her grandmother and uncovers the disturbing truth about the niece’s other aunt, Emily.
Who Knew There’d Be Ghosts? (1985)
A group of friends help ghosts to save their home. By Bill Brittain.
Series
Blossom Culp and her friend Alexander are both psychic and have supernatural adventures in their small town during the early 1900s. By Richard Peck.
Goosebumps Books
Popular scary stories series from the 1990s. Some individual books connect to each other, but most don’t. Some of them have ghosts, although others are about monsters. By R. L. Stine.
Not-So-Scary Ghosts
Gone Away (1979)
A farm girl in 1930s England attends school for the first time, boarding in a house in town that is haunted. By Ruth Tomalin.
Tryst (1939)
A 17-year-old girl falls in love with the ghost of a man when her family rents his former home, and she encounters his spirit through his old library. By Elswyth Thane.
This one is a young-adult tear-jerker, but some people have nostalgic memories about it. Some reviewers have pointed out how poignant the story is when you consider that it was published on the eve of WWII, when the deaths of many young people separated them from the people they loved.
Mystery
The Headless Cupid (1971)
The Stanleys move into an old house that may be haunted by a poltergeist. By Zilpha Keatley Snyder.
The Mystery of the Haunted Trail
When Brian visits his pen pal in Hawaii for the summer, he confronts a ghostly mystery based on Hawaiian legends. By Janet Lorimer.
A couple of American children visiting Ireland seek a hidden treasure with the help of a gypsy boy and learn a little about Irish history and legend. By Elizabeth Baldwin Hazelton.
Series
Kathy is a twelve-year-old girl who can see ghosts and sometimes gets visions through the drawings she makes. By Norma Lehr.
Short Story Collections
In a Dark, Dark Room (1984)
A collection of classic scary stories based on folktales from around the world.
Series
A series of books of scary stories for children, best known for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. 1981-1991.
Ghosts and Time Travel
Charlotte Sometimes (1969)
Charlotte begins life at boarding school, but every night, when she goes to sleep in her school bed, she switches places with another girl who was a student at the school back in 1918, Clare. Charlotte doesn’t know why this is happening, but she and Clare begin sharing their lives, living in each other’s place on alternating days. Charlotte worries about getting trapped in the past and becoming Clare permanently, losing her identity as Charlotte. By Penelope Farmer.
This is the third and best-known book in the The Aviary Hall Trilogy. You don’t need to read the other books in the series to understand it.
The Court of the Stone Children (1973)
A lonely girl who loves museums encounters a ghost who needs her help to learn the truth about the past. The ghost in this story isn’t scary at all. It’s not that the girl from modern times goes back in time, but the ghost girl from the past is aware of modern times and that she is talking to a modern girl, asking for her help to learn more about what happened to her father in the past.
When Alison and her father travel from Canada to Wales in order to see the house that they’ve inherited from a distant relative, Alison finds herself caught up in a ghostly mystery from the past. Somehow, she must prevent another young girl from making the worst mistake of her life while considering the choices she is making in her own life.
A Pattern of Roses (1972, 1975)
A boy whose parents are renovating an old cottage in England begins learning about the history of the house and another boy who once lived there and died under mysterious circumstances years ago and left behind a tin box full of his drawings. As the modern boy investigates the mystery, he finds that events from this past boy’s life are strangely also beginning to happen to him as well, and the two of them have some odd things in common. The US edition of this British book is called So Once Was I. By K. M. Peyton.
The Time of the Ghost (1981)
The ghost of a teenage girl struggles to remember who she is and how she died. At first, all she knows is that she is one of four sisters (she’s not completely sure which one) who live at a boarding school owned by their parents and that she was in a terrible accident of some kind. It turns out that her spirit has traveled back in time several years to her youth, when she did something that set up her accident later … and her “accident” wasn’t really an accident. Does she still have time to change things and save her own life? By Diana Wynne Jones.
Picture Books
Series
Gus is a friendly ghost who lives in an old house that has been turned into a museum along with his friends, a mouse, a cat, and Mr. Frizzle, who manages the museum. By Jane Thayer.
Jestress's Forgotten Books and Stories 