Something Wicked This Way Comes: 10 Poems to Read This Halloween

Most poetry-lovers know classic horror poems by writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson and Percy Bysshe Shelley. But there are also many eerie poems written by poets who aren’t known specifically for their gothic or horror writing. Some of the poems on this list describe hauntings (from both the living and the dead’s perspective). Others are based on more tangible real-life horrors. And some capture the troubling slipstream feeling that things aren’t as they should be. Grab a cozy blanket, light a crackling fire, and perhaps don’t read these poems alone.

Cynthia Huntington, “Ghost”

The speaker of “Ghost” by poet and memoirist Cynthia Huntington is a spirit. This ghost describes itself just as many of us imagine (or have seen) apparitions:

I was a shape moving rapidly, nervous
at the edge of your vision […]

I made myself present, though never distinct.

This ghost tells the reader, “You must have felt me / watching you,” knowing how their presence would’ve surely alarmed their audience. In “Ghost,” part of the unease comes from not knowing if the ghost’s motives are good… or evil. 

Holly Lyn Walrath, “We Have Always Lived”

With “We Have Always Lived,” writer, editor, publisher and poet Holly Lyn Walrath creates an erasure/blackout poem from the text of horror icon Shirley Jackson’s book We Have Always Lived in the Castle. This source material is about two isolated sisters with a bleak family history, who are loathed by their neighbors and must contend with the arrival of a mysterious cousin.

Walrath slices down to the terror at the heart of this story by turning some of the words from this novel into a poem, which begins, “they were all dead.” She repeats certain phrases—like “their bodies,” and most frightening, “had always been there”—to create a sense of unease. The poem ends “I must live on,” highlighting the isolation of the sisters from Jackson’s original story: While “they were all dead,” this speaker must continue to live on, alone.

Joy Harjo, “Day of the Dead”

With “Day of the Dead,” performer and writer Joy Harjo has written a love poem of sorts. The poem from her collection In Mad Love and War takes place on Día de Los Muertos, a time to celebrate the lives of loved ones lost and welcome their spirits back. As she says in the opening of this prose poem, “This is a witching season.” Alongside the depictions of this autumnal holiday (“Spirits play crack-the-whip in the abyss”), she also mourns a separation from someone she addresses the poem to: “I have needed to talk but you are insanely absent and I have become insanely mute.”

In comparing the transformational aspects of both love and the Day of the Dead, Harjo reminds readers that “love changes molecular structure… The Day of the Dead marks skeletal transition and flowers bloom in the snow.” What is love in an uncertain season but the possibility of flowers blooming in the snow?

Eve L. Ewing, “Horror Movie Pitch”

Scholar, writer and cultural organizer Eve L. Ewing’s poem “Horror Movie Pitch” uses horror movie tropes and dark humor to surface the very real racism and sexism that Black women face in the U.S. The speaker dreams up a scary movie where “all the black women turn invisible, / all of them // just overnight.”

The speaker imagines these Black women balancing the scales of justice in a very true-to-life horror film:

the girl you passed up for the promotion
she could be in your car
ready to yank your head back
right when you’re at a busy intersection

Unlike some of the other poems on this list, “Horror Movie Pitch” celebrates a triumph. After all, this is a movie about revenge.

Zefyr Lisowski, “Remembering Is a Kind of Work Too”

In Zefyr Lisowski’s “Remembering Is a Kind of Work Too,” the most frightening thing of all is everything staying exactly as it is. She begins this poem: “In the ghost story I don’t write, / the girl meets the ghost, the end.” But what about the ghost story she does write: this poem? The speaker is constantly trying to change her life and to escape. When asked why she didn’t leave a dangerous place, she replies, “I did leave and nothing changed.” When she does manage to escape, she says: “Even after I got out, even after, / it followed.”

Lisowski (who has written widely about horror movies, the supernatural and trans life in her essay collection Uncanny Valley Girls) also conjures up classic horror movies as she writes about a girl crawling through a hole (The Ring) and a drunken father with a flushed face (The Shining).

Charles Simic, “Ghosts”

Poet Charles Simic grew up in Europe during World War II, with his family being forced to flee their native Serbia. His poetry often contends with the darker parts of life. In “Ghosts,” a variety of apparitions visit the speaker, including a man who’s brought with him “a huge carp / In a bloodstained newspaper.” The speaker notes that this man is “looking much better / Than he did in the morgue.” As more of these ghosts show up, the speaker says, “I don’t believe any of it, / And still I’m scared stiff.” He addresses them directly, saying,

Dear specters, I don’t even believe
You are here, so how is it
You’re making me comprehend
Things I would rather not know just yet?

It’s the way you stare past me
At what must already be my own ghost,
Before taking your leave

Are these ghosts here to portend the speaker’s own end? Or is there another reason for their unsettling visit? Simic doesn’t provide answers and instead leaves us with these eerie questions.

Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, “Corpse Flower”

The titan arum—more colloquially known as the corpse flower—is infamous for its horrendous odor and meaty internal color, which echo the smell and look of a decaying body. In this poem, poet and magic-realism scholar Vanessa Angélica Villarreal uses imagery from the eponymous flower to imagine cobbling together a kind of Frankenstein creature:

I gathered up your spine

and built you on a dark day. You are still missing

some parts.

She describes the building materials she uses to coax this creature back to life: “cardinal’s yolk, live seawater, / my trenza, a piece of my son’s umbilical cord.” But even after pouring all those wet and bloody items into her creation, she sorrowfully acknowledges, “still you don’t return.”

Victoria Chang, “Edward Hopper’s Office at Night”

Victoria Chang’s poetry collection OBIT is made up of poetic obituaries she wrote about her mother’s death. Her poem “Edward Hopper’s Office at Night” is divided into stanzas, but it’s written like one unending sentence without any punctuation. The reader is spun into this frantic poem without a chance to escape, just like the speaker. The speaker descends into panic as she goes from imagining a tense workplace (“the boss might eat her the boss / wants her but the boss wants money more just a little bit”) to switching into the first person as she starts to drown in her existential anxiety:

who will take care of my children later who will take care
____of my father the will will take care

of no one a piece of paper cannot take care of anyone I
____cannot take care of everyone

The ending of this poem uses a homophone pair to fully illustrate how little say people have over their own dates: “this year I dye my hair so I won’t have to die.”

Rachel McKibbens, “Poem for Three Dead Girls of Last Summer”

“My sweetheart says I can no longer watch the news. / You worry too much. And he is right.” is how slam poet legend and activist Rachel McKibbens’s pantoum-inspired “Poem for Three Dead Girls of Last Summer” begins. The speaker (a mother of three girls) is terrified by the boundless dangers that exist in this world, and how many of these dangers threaten girls and women specifically. The speaker imagines herself as a kind of mother witch (à la Hansel and Gretel), who hides her “dear little Gretels” when “Men line up like ants to take them away, to carry them home.” The stark reality of this poem is what makes it so frightening.

Louise Glück, “All Hallows”

Louise Glück also has a poem that immerses reader in seasonal dread. “All Hallows” begins urgently: “Even now this landscape is assembling. / The hills darken.” The idea of the landscape itself as a character in this haunted poem lends it an even more intense feeling of foreboding. In this poem, “the toothed moon rises,” and the land “is the barrenness / of harvest or pestilence”—so there is nothing there. Not a cornucopia of crops; not destroyed fields. Simply “barrenness.” To double-down on this terrifying emptiness, Glück ends the poem, “And the soul creeps out of the tree.”