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Nikolai Gogol The Nose and The OvercoatRead about the other nine entries on Washington's list.
These two stories are as far as one could get from the standard ghost story – not at all frightening but very, very disturbing: wild surreal satires of 19th century Russian bureaucracy in which a nose and an overcoat take on lives of their own and wreak havoc. Gogol's crazy comedy has a logic of its own which has never been bettered.
Related: Brad Leithauser's five best ghost tales and James Hynes' 10 Halloween stories.
--Marshal Zeringue