Ghost stories

found: Baldick, C. Oxford dictionary of literary terms, c2008(Ghost story: a modern form of short story designed to provoke dread and unease in its readers by bringing about a crisis in which fictional characters are confronted terrifyingly by spirits of the returning dead. The ghost story may be distinguished from its apparent near neighbor the Gothic tale (derived from the longer Gothic novel) in one of two ways: it often employs settings that distinctly non-Gothic in their apparently rational modernity' and it must exhibit a ghost, which need not actually appear in a Gothic tale.)

found: Cuddon, J. A dictionary of literary terms and literary theory, c1998(Ghost story: a fictional narrative ... in which the spirit of a person (or the spirits of persons), no longer bound by natural laws, manifests itself, or seems to do so (either embodied in some form or disembodied), and 'haunts' a place, person or thing as a kind of 'presence'. As a genre the ghost story proper does not include demonic pacts, doppelgangers, vampires, werewolves, succubi, poltergeists et al. Nor as a rule does it involve witchcraft and the prolepses of magic, or occult practices associated with such activities as Cumberlandism, exorcism, spiritualism, telekinesis, hylomancy and so forth.)

found: GSAFD, 2000(Ghost stories. Use for fiction which features ghosts, spirits and other supernatural phenomena, written to prey upon the fears of the reader)