Ghost Stories

Free illustrated audiobooks and picture books of Ghost Stories books: Kwaidan and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Each one is retold in pictures and narrated page by page, with the original text free to read alongside.

Illustration from Kwaidan: More than seven hundred years ago, at Dan-no-ura, the Heiké clan perished utterly in their last sea battle, with their women, children and their infant emperor.

Kwaidan Lafcadio Hearn JapaneseAges 10+ 114 pages · 28 min

Illustration from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Not far from Tarry Town, where the Hudson widens into the broad Tappan Zee, there lay a little valley among high hills, one of the quietest places in the whole world.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Washington Irving AmericanAll ages 32 pages · 9 min

About Ghost Stories

Ghost stories are among the oldest tales people tell, and the best of them are more eerie than gruesome. This shelf holds two classics from opposite sides of the world: Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan, a collection of Japanese legends of spirits, snow women and the restless dead, and Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, with its Headless Horseman riding through a sleepy Dutch valley in New York.

Both are retold as illustrated picture books with audiobook narration, good for reading aloud on a dark evening.