The most famous member of "the James gang"—no, not the Wild West one, the literary/intellectual one; brother William was the noted philosopher. Henry James, while best known for his realist fiction, wrote a number of ghost stories, including a couple of the more important works in the tradition; at the turn of the century, in the light of Freud's emerging theories of human psychology and the larger interest in the mind which those theories stimulated, James took the psychological ghost story to new heights, primarily by a masterful handling of ambiguity that places the stories' focus not on the external ghostly but on the perceiving consciousness. His masterwork in this regard is of course "The Turn of the Screw," a story that has to be considered one of the landmark texts of the Gothic tradition. Of course, James could also write a decent unambiguous ghost story, as in "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes" or "Sir Edmund Orme," and these are well worth reading, and in fact in my (classroom) experience usually find a much more receptive audience than "The Turn of the Screw."
