Supernatural advisory ... Rebecca Evans in Benjamin Britten's opera version of The Turn of the Screw. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
The ghost story flourished especially between 1880 and 1930 when the fashion for spiritualism was at its height with its promise of communion with the dead. This was also the period when the short story reached its peak as a literary genre, so although there are fine novels about ghosts, it was in the short story that they came into their own.
Many people think ghost stories are meant to be terrifying and nothing more, but the best are much subtler and more varied, and the best of all are concerned with the predicaments of the living rather than the return of the dead, which is the starting-point of such stories, not their subject.
Haunting is a complex phenomenon which can involve many different causes: not only spirits but also memories, things, ideas and places. The stories in my list all send chills down the spine: at the same time they combine entertainment value with high literary quality.