This book traces the historical development of the American ghost story from its Indigenous, Puritan and Enlightenment origins to its heyday in the nineteenth century and continued vibrancy in modern literary and visual culture.

Scott Brewster is Associate Professor (Reader) of English at the University of Lincoln, UK, and is an Editorial Board member for Gothic Nature. He holds a PhD from the University of Stirling. He is co-author, with Lucie Armitt, of Gothic Travel through Haunted Landscapes: Climates of Fear (2022), and co-editor, with Luke Thurston, of The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story (2017). Among his other books are Lyric and Irish Literature Since 1990. Scott has written widely on the Gothic and the ghost story, including an essay on Dickens for The Victorian Ghost Story: An Edinburgh Companion (2024) and a chapter on the Victorian ghost story for The Cambridge History of the Gothic Volume 2 (2020).

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is Professor of English at Central Michigan University, associate editor in charge of horror for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the founder and president of the Society for the Study of the American Gothic. He is the author or editor of 29 books including Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety (2023), The Monster Theory Reader (2020), The Cambridge Companion to the American Gothic (2017), The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema (2012), Charles Brockden Brown (2011), Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women (2008), and Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination (2004). Visit him at JeffreyAndrewWeinstock.com.

1 The Pre-History of the American Ghost Story; 2 The Birth of the Literary Ghost Story: The Long Nineteenth Century; 3 Ghosts of the Long Twentieth Century, Part 1; 4 Ghosts of the Long Twentieth Century, Part 2; 5 Ghosts in Film and Television; 6 Digital Ghosts