Ghosts that plague the living are just as blood-curdling as the haunting ghosts of the dead.
Songs about ghosts aren’t just about ghoulish wisps of ancestral smoke; they peer into the cramped recesses of suppressed memory and the asphyxiating human experience, from the lingering phantasmal heartbreak that enshrouds a deceased romance, to the flood of ghosts that spawn from trauma, possessing every fragment of thought.
Our collection of songs about ghosts crosses the genres and eras of music to summon some nocturnal spirits in your playlist.
Songs About Ghosts
1. King Diamond – The Family Ghosts
King Diamond gives us the epitome of ghost music; a track haunted by comedic horror and a story of ancient, ghost-given curses.
This classic metal gem is fuelled by the story of an apparition – the family ghost – leading a man through a twisted cellar basement to the vault below his house, to gaze upon the coffin of his wife’s stillborn child, Abigail.
The ghost proclaims “The spirit of Abigail is inside your wife, and there’s only one way you can stop the rebirth of evil itself: You must take her life now!”
A tale of horror is played out against the foreboding landscape of a cold, black night, crafting a song doused in pure vintage horror. If you’ve never fallen down the strange wormhole of King Diamond’s trail-blazing work before, you’re in for a treat.
2. Blackbear – Me & Ur Ghost
Blackbear’s track metaphorises a ghost as the inescapable thought of your ex. Breakups are a type of death in themselves, making it only natural for Blackbear to equate his anger and grief with a phantom as if his ex had actually died.’
Nevertheless, her presence consumes his metaphysical space (on social media) although she’s become untouchable by him, out of his physical reality and out of contact, tying down his ghostly metaphor.
Even when he’s alone, the ceaseless thought of her torments his every movement; “I can’t even kick it with the homies that we both know, I can’t even f*** with any places that we used to go.”
3. Japan – Ghosts
There aren’t many songs like this one. Ghosts is hallowed with electric suspense, hued by a complex of sounds within its vacant, creeping ambience.
Blankets of synths are fragrant with predatory behaviour, flickering and wavering in and out of distinction.
Earthy wood tones are layered with charmingly nostalgic yet unsettling electronica that appears more extraterrestrial than earth-bound.
Japan’s story is tormented by phantoms of the past, their ghosts vague enough to symbolise any negative energy in your presence; “Just when I think I’m winning, when I’ve broken every door, the ghosts of my life blow wilder than before.”
As rich as the track may be, it feels overwhelmingly sparse and incomplete, like a spirit that can’t be anchored intro true reality.
4. My Chemical Romance – The Ghost Of You
This hit from My Chemical Romance’s second album is plush with melodic melancholy. Their lyrics imply a girlfriend who has passed away, leaving the boyfriend hopelessly suicidal, haunted by the memory of her alive and dying; the ghost that traces him everywhere.
The song’s war-torn music video gives a double edge to its razor and swiftly becomes about the ghosts of war, transferring the chorus’ sentiment to the death-struck heart of a military widow of WW2, “At the end of the world, or the last thing I see, you are never coming home, never coming home.”
5. Halsey – Ghost
Halsey’s Ghost is a vivid, bassy track about “searching for something I can’t reach.” The boy she chases disappears into thin air each sunrise to the arms of a different woman, but Halsey can’t stop herself trying to pin her wandering lover down.
Halsey suggests he’s transformed from the man she loved into someone distant, void of true human feelings; “I swear I hate you when you leave, but I like it anyway, my ghost, where’d you go? I can’t find you in the body sleeping next to me.”
6. Tupac Shakur – Ghost
2Pac’s track Ghost is about the ghosts of the ghettos many people are raised with; your inescapable past which wreaks havoc upon your future.
His struggles are ancestral: his mom smoked while she was pregnant while his dad was an addict, a “joke;” auguring events which pushed Tupac into street violence in a dire attempt to escape or appease his ghosts.
His bounty of murder references adds another layer to the ghost concept, as he makes ghosts out of the living because of the ghosts that plague his past.
7. Harry Styles – Two Ghosts
Harry Styles’ clever use of the ghost concept details the moment after love dies, the honeymoon phase passes and mutates a relationship into remote, unclear emptiness.
He scatters his lyrics with ghost metaphors to describe a dead-end romance, “We’re just two ghosts standing in the place of you and me, trying to remember how it feels to have a heartbeat.”
He discreetly implies the similarity of being dead for 100s of years and being condemned to stay with the same person, comparing the lifelessness of conversation that would ensue in your unending, unfulfilling relationship, “Tongue-tied like we’ve never known, telling those stories we already told.”
8. Cradle Of Filth – Her Ghost In The Fog
Her Ghost In The Fog sounds with a dense canopy of gothic ambience, riddled with the bewitching scenery of a winter’s ghost story.
Cradle of Filth’s extreme metal harbours poetry as morbidly enchanting as the “cruel portrait” of the moon illuminating the landscape.
Her Ghost In The Fog conjures a vision of a beautiful woman, murdered, her corpse left in the woods to be found by her lover, “Dawn discovered her there, beneath the cedar’s stare… I wept till tears crept back to prayer.”
Every verse is entwined with haunted woodland imagery and an ancient feeling of death, “The trees stank of sunset and camphor … they crept through the woods mesmerised.”
9. Coldplay – Ghost Story
Coldplay’s 2014 track Ghost Story is about feeling unheard, unseen like a ghost amongst the living.
Their indie pop track was made to mirror anyone who struggles to connect to others or who is cursed with the loneliness of a one-sided crush.
Its chorus echoes, “And every time I thought I’d walk through walls, it’s all becoming clear, what’s the point of feeling love for you when you don’t believe I’m here?”
Coldplay refuse to drown their bleak message in sonic sadness, instead it resonates with an airy sound that drifts and charms like a free spirit.