The best classic Halloween poems are Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee” and “Ulalume,” Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman,” Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” John Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” Below are 18 haunted, eerie and gothic poems, all in the public domain, each with a sample of the text, a note on why it works for Halloween and a link to the full poem with its summary and analysis.
Few of these poems mention Halloween. What makes them frightening is not a witch or a pumpkin but grief, guilt and desire that refuse to die, which is why they still work more than a century later.
Quick Picks
- Most famous
- The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe (1845)
- Set in October
- Ulalume by Edgar Allan Poe (1847)
- Best ghost story
- The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes (1906)
- Best to read aloud
- The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe (1849)
- Shortest
- Design by Robert Frost (14 lines)
- Longest
- Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti (567 lines)
- Scariest
- Darkness by Lord Byron (1816)
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Poe · Ghosts · Goblins and Curses · Short Poems · FAQ
Edgar Allan Poe’s Haunted Poems
No poet owns Halloween like Poe. His poems are full of lost women, dark rooms and voices that will not stop, and they are built to be read aloud: the rhythm does half the haunting.
1. The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe (1845)
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
A grieving student is visited at midnight by a raven that can say only one word, and every question he asks it about his dead love Lenore gets the same answer. It is the most famous Halloween poem in English because the horror is psychological: the bird never threatens him, he tortures himself.
Read The Raven, with summary and analysis ›
2. Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe (1849)
And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
Poe’s last complete poem tells of a love so strong that jealous angels killed the girl, and it ends with the speaker lying down each night beside her tomb by the sea. It sounds like a nursery rhyme and reads like a confession.
Read Annabel Lee, with summary and analysis ›
3. Ulalume by Edgar Allan Poe (1847)
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year;
On an October night the speaker wanders through a misty wood, led on by a bright star, until he finds himself at the door of a tomb and realizes whose it is. It is the only great poem literally set on a dark night in October, and it is Poe at his most hypnotic.
Read Ulalume, with summary and analysis ›
4. The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe (1849)
Hear the tolling of the bells—
Iron Bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
Four kinds of bells, from silver sleigh bells to iron funeral bells, take the reader from childhood to the grave. The sound effects are the point, and the last section, with its bell-ringing ghouls in the steeple, is pure Halloween.
Read The Bells, with summary and analysis ›
5. The Haunted Palace by Edgar Allan Poe (1839)
And travellers now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
A bright, happy palace is overrun by “evil things, in robes of sorrow,” and now only nightmare shapes move behind its windows. Poe placed the poem inside The Fall of the House of Usher, where it doubles as a picture of a mind going mad.
Read The Haunted Palace, with summary and analysis ›
6. A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe (1849)
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
In two short stanzas the speaker watches grains of sand slip through his fingers and wonders whether anything is real. There are no ghosts here, only the creeping fear that life itself is an illusion.
Read A Dream Within a Dream, with summary and analysis ›
Ghosts and the Restless Dead
These poems are about the dead who will not stay put: a highwayman who still rides, coffins rattled by gunfire, a house where only the ghosts remain.
7. The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes (1906)
And still of a winter’s night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
A robber and the landlord’s daughter who dies to save him are betrayed by a jealous stable hand. The final stanzas replay the opening, and the lovers are still meeting at the inn as ghosts. It is one of the best poems in English for reading aloud on a dark night.
Read The Highwayman, with summary and analysis ›
8. Ghost House by Robert Frost (1913)
I dwell in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
The speaker lives in a house that burned down long ago, among cellar walls, wild raspberries and “mute folk” who share the place with him. Frost’s ghosts are gentle, which somehow makes them lonelier.
Read Ghost House, with summary and analysis ›
9. Channel Firing by Thomas Hardy (1914)
That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
Naval gunnery practice wakes the dead in a country churchyard, who sit up thinking it is Judgment Day. God tells them to lie back down. Hardy wrote it months before the First World War, and the joke turns grim.
Read Channel Firing, with summary and analysis ›
10. Darkness by Lord Byron (1816)
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish’d,
Written in 1816, the “year without a summer,” when volcanic ash darkened European skies, Byron’s poem imagines the sun going out and humanity burning everything it owns for light. It is the bleakest poem on this list.
Read Darkness, with summary and analysis ›
Goblins, Enchantresses and Curses
Fairy-tale horror: forbidden fruit, a lady cursed to look only in a mirror, and a woman who leaves knights pale and dying on a cold hillside.
11. Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti (1862)
Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, hear goblin merchants selling magical fruit. Laura eats it and begins to waste away, and Lizzie must face the goblins to save her. It is sensual, strange and genuinely frightening.
Read Goblin Market, with summary and analysis ›
12. La Belle Dame sans Merci by John Keats (1819)
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
A knight meets a beautiful fairy woman, is lulled to sleep in her “elfin grot,” and dreams of pale kings and warriors she has already destroyed. He wakes alone on a cold hillside where “no birds sing.”
Read La Belle Dame sans Merci, with summary and analysis ›
13. The Lady of Shalott by Alfred Tennyson (1832)
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
A lady trapped in a tower weaves the world as she sees it in a mirror, until she looks out at Sir Lancelot and the curse falls. She floats down the river to Camelot, singing, and arrives dead.
Read The Lady of Shalott, with summary and analysis ›
14. Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1816)
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Coleridge said the poem came to him in an opium dream and broke off when a visitor interrupted him. Its “savage place” is haunted “by woman wailing for her demon-lover,” and its ending turns the poet himself into something to be feared.
Read Kubla Khan, with summary and analysis ›
Short Spooky Poems About Death
Four short poems, all under 30 lines, that make death feel close. They are ideal for a class, a card or a quick reading.
15. I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died by Emily Dickinson (written about 1862)
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –
The speaker describes her own deathbed, the mourners waiting for something grand, and the only thing that arrives is a buzzing fly. Dickinson makes the moment of death both ordinary and terrifying.
Read I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died, with summary and analysis ›
16. Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson (written about 1862)
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
Death arrives as a polite gentleman caller and takes the speaker on a slow carriage ride past a school, fields of grain and a house that is really a grave. The courtesy is what chills.
Read Because I Could Not Stop for Death, with summary and analysis ›
17. There’s a Certain Slant of Light by Emily Dickinson (written about 1861)
There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
A particular slant of winter light brings on a heavy, unexplainable despair, “the look of Death.” It is the perfect poem for the early dark of late October.
Read There’s a Certain Slant of Light, with summary and analysis ›
18. Design by Robert Frost (1922)
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.
Frost finds a white spider on a white flower holding a dead white moth, and asks what dark design brought them together. It is a sonnet about a tiny scene that ends with a large and unsettling question.
Read Design, with summary and analysis ›
Frequently Asked Questions
These are the questions readers ask most often about Halloween poems.
What is the most famous Halloween poem?
“The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1845, is the most famous Halloween poem in English. Its midnight setting, grieving narrator and talking bird that answers only “Nevermore” have made it a fixture of Halloween readings for more than 180 years.
Who is the best poet to read on Halloween?
Edgar Allan Poe is the best-known poet to read on Halloween. “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” “Ulalume” and “The Bells” are all built to be read aloud, and “Ulalume” is set on a dark night in October.
What are some short Halloween poems?
Good short Halloween poems include Emily Dickinson’s “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died” (16 lines), Robert Frost’s “Design” (14 lines) and Poe’s “A Dream Within a Dream” (24 lines). Each can be read aloud in under two minutes.
What Halloween poems are good for kids?
For children, “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes and “The Bells” by Edgar Allan Poe work well because of their strong rhythm and sound effects. Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” is eerie without being gruesome, which suits older children.
Did Robert Burns write a Halloween poem?
Yes. Robert Burns wrote “Halloween” in 1785. It describes the fortune-telling games Scottish country people played on Halloween night and is written largely in Scots.