Why Are The Ghosts Always White?

You know the ghost.

She floats through the hallway in a nightgown, backlit by lightning. Her face is pale, her voice a whisper. Maybe she died of grief. Maybe she fell down the stairs. She’s tragic. Sad. Beautiful.

She’s also white.

Almost always.

In horror movies, haunted house tours, true crime podcasts, and even old Southern legends—the ghost is almost always a white woman. Sometimes a little girl. Sometimes a Civil War soldier. But the story stays the same: the ghost is here because something happened to them—something personal, something regrettable, something you can light a candle for.

But what about the ghosts of people who weren’t allowed to haunt?

• What about the enslaved woman buried under the foundation?

• The Indigenous child taken from her home and never returned?

• The man whose bones are in the walls not because of a curse—but because of history.

Why don’t we see them?

Not as jump scares.

Not as background lore.

But as the central haunting?

And here’s the real question—why does nobody seem to notice they’re missing?

When we see a ghost in white lace, we hear her whispered apology. When grief drips from her silhouette, we nod and ache with her. But when a Black or Indigenous spirit emerges, the story often shifts. The mood sours. The narrative edges toward curse or caricature. Their grief is seldom poetic—it’s threatening. Their voices? Too full of truth to fit the pale, whispery genre.

This isn’t a “gotcha.” I’m not here to ruin your favorite horror film. I love a good haunting as much as anyone. But once you see the pattern, it’s hard to unsee: horror keeps returning to the same kinds of ghosts, because it’s afraid of the ones that might actually indict us.

What if we’ve been telling ghost stories to protect ourselves from the truth? Not from the dead, but from what we did to them.

Ghosts as a Cultural Mirror

Ghost stories aren’t neutral. They reflect what a culture chooses to mourn and what it refuses to acknowledge. Think of white brides frozen in death, Confederate soldiers drifting on moonlit battlefields, or children lost in wells. They sit in our tales, sanctioned and sentimental.

But there are spirits we don’t see:

The unnamed formerly enslaved woman who died in childbirth, the Indigenous elder buried in unmarked ground, the migrant laborer whose bones rest in unrecognized soil.

These aren’t ghosts. We hide them. We make their deaths inaccessible. Safe haunting is a Victorian invention.

Spiritualism’s Feminine Facade

In the 19th century, séances became a powerful stage for white women’s grief. Spiritualism promised to bridge the living and the dead, especially in the lonely parlors of bereaved wives and mothers. Victorian mediums, mostly women, were both spectacle and solace. Marie Curie attended séances. Mark Twain and President Lincoln’s wife sought comfort through spirit communication.

But these spiritual sessions rarely summoned Black or Indigenous souls (well, most of them, but I’ll get to Sarah Winchester later). The dead who entered those rooms were sons and husbands. White sons and husbands. The enterprise was one of emotional consumerism, not deep reckoning.

Women like Leonora Piper (who channeled “Aunt Kate” for William James’s family) sustained this trend: they brought us ghosts we could mourn, not indict. Their spirits were palatable.

Victorian and Edwardian literature often filtered ghosts through white, middle-class anxiety: class hierarchy, marriage, inheritance. Take Lettice Galbraith’s “New Ghost Stories” (1893), which featured gentle tragedies like longing brides and elderly aunts. These stories affirmed social norms even in spectral form. But when the ghost was a Black field hand or murdered Indigenous child, the narrative refuses nuance. They became tropes: curses, warnings, “ethnic” oddities, not full people with echoes worth retelling.

Christianity’s Ghost Gatekeeping

In Southern Christian lore, spirits fall neatly into binaries: benign lingering souls or malevolent demons. A ghost of love? Fine. But a spirit of systemic violence? That must be “unclean,” demonic, or cursed—and promptly exorcised, not listened to.

Thus:

• White sorrow = delicate hauntings

• Black or Indigenous suffering = demonization, not empathy

Haunting became Christian comfort, not reckoning.

The Ghosts Who Aren’t White & What Happens to Them

There are ghost stories where the spirit isn’t white. But they’re rare. And when they do appear, something interesting—and often disturbing—tends to happen.

Candyman (1992, 2021)

A Black ghost who was lynched for loving a white woman returns as a vengeful spirit. On the surface, it’s about racial violence. But in both versions, his grief is only legible through fear—his trauma is so horrific that he becomes myth, monster, warning.

Candyman isn’t mourned. He’s not given peace. He’s summoned like a curse and banished like one, too. Even in the 2021 reboot, which tries to reclaim his narrative, the haunting still feels transactional: his pain exists to teach a lesson, to make white characters squirm, to make Black viewers remember.

We’re not invited to grieve with him. We’re told to survive him.

The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020)

T’Nia Miller’s performance as Hannah Grose, the housekeeper, is the emotional heart of Bly Manor—and yet her character is quietly marginalized. We learn halfway through the series that Hannah is already dead, a ghost who doesn’t know she’s a ghost. She continues working, praying, and caring for others as if nothing has changed.

While other spirits in the show are unmoored—violent, grief-stricken, desperate—Hannah’s haunting is subdued. She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t demand. She stays put.

Even in death, she remains composed, maternal, and restrained.

In a show where white ghosts are granted full emotional arcs (love stories, vengeance, redemption) Hannah is mostly defined by her quiet dignity and self-denial. Her grief is inward. Her story is spiritualized. She dies forgotten. She dies forgotten and continues to serve.

It’s a subtle but telling example of how even modern horror, when it includes Black ghosts, often robs them of complexity. Rage, romance, and resolution are reserved for others. Hannah’s haunting is beautiful—but it’s also bound.

Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

This is the exception that proves the rule. Beloved is the ghost of a baby girl killed by her mother to save her from slavery. She is not sentimental. She is not quiet. She is feral, invasive, erotic, violent, grieving—and real.

Morrison doesn’t write a ghost story. She writes a reckoning. And because of that, Beloved was dismissed by some critics at the time as “confusing” or “too emotional.” Not because it wasn’t brilliant, but because it broke the rules of what kind of haunting a Black body is allowed.

Beloved doesn’t ask to be pitied. She demands to be accounted for.

American Horror Story: Coven (2013)

Set in New Orleans, this season introduces real historical figures like Marie Laveau (a Black voodoo queen) and Delphine LaLaurie (a white enslaver). But while Delphine is given multiple episodes of character development and a “redemption” arc, Marie Laveau’s story is flattened into magic and rage.

The Black spirits in Coven are powerful, but not complicated. They aren’t allowed the slow sadness or soft longing that white ghosts are. They’re there to terrify or teach. Not to mourn.

When Ghosts Aren’t White, They’re Rarely Allowed to Linger Quietly

If white ghosts are tragic figures, nonwhite ghosts are often:

• Villainized (the angry spirit)

• Mythologized (the curse or legend)

• Erased (background lore, no lines, no face)

• Exoticized (mystical, cultural “other”)

They aren’t given the full arc. They aren’t allowed to be soft. They aren’t treated like people. They’re symbols of something. And when they’re not useful to the white characters’ growth, they’re removed.

The Winchester Mystery House: Haunted by Colonial Guns

Then there’s Sarah Winchester, an anomaly in our sanitized canon. She built a labyrinthine mansion after allegedly consulting a Boston psychic—often named Adam Coons—who warned her she was haunted by Indigenous people and Civil War dead killed by Winchester rifles.

Here were not white brides. These spirits were violent reminders of weaponized colonialism. Yet the story’s origins are tenuous. No Boston directory lists an “Adam Coons,” nor do séance records or the period’s Spiritualist journals mention him. The narrative likely stems from Susy Smith’s speculative 1967 Prominent American Ghosts.

Even this anarchic haunting was folded back under white framing: Sarah is recast as mad widow, endlessly building, rather than guilt-wracked ancestor reckoning with genocide.

The Indigenous ghosts? Still silent. Still unnamed. Still peripheral.

Literary Reckoning and Ghostly Reparations

Modern writers, from Toni Morrison to Jesmyn Ward, have called forth marginalized ghosts in ways that refuse comfort. They insist on naming what white tales omit. By reclaiming buried stories, they interrupt the aesthetic of safe haunting.

Morrison’s Beloved, with its terrifying unnamed spirit, forces readers into violation, not apology.

That is the spirit I’m hungry to learn about—not the ghost who begs to be saved, but the one who demands we look.

Why Does This Matter?

Because ghost stories are not just entertainment. They’re maps. They show us where a culture keeps its grief, and where it won’t go.

When every haunting centers a white face, we aren’t just telling stories, we’re reinforcing a worldview. One where white suffering is legible, mourned, and resolved, while Black and Indigenous suffering is either omitted or transformed into threat.

We keep aestheticizing grief that feels familiar, and exorcising the kind that doesn’t. We let white ghosts linger as metaphors. But we erase the ones who never left, because their deaths were too brutal, too political, too unresolved.

If we believe ghost stories are how the past speaks to the present, then we have to ask:

“Whose past are we listening to?”

And what does it say when the only spirits we allow to whisper are the ones who died gently?

What We Can Choose to Do

1. Reclaim the forgotten dead.

Start by naming them. Literally. In writing, in oral history, in art. Use their real names if they’re known. Invent space for them if they’re not. A ghost without a name is easier to silence. Don’t let them stay silent.

2. Stop romanticizing hauntings that flatten violence.

A plantation tour is not a fairytale. A white woman in a corset is not the only tragedy that land remembers. We can challenge these narratives with our money, our language, and our art.

3. Elevate storytellers who are already doing this work.

Read authors like Toni Morrison, Tiya Miles, Jesmyn Ward, and Kiese Laymon. Watch creators who interrogate trauma without aestheticizing it. Listen to Gullah storytellers, Indigenous historians, and descendants of the disappeared. Let them guide what gets centered.

4. Redefine haunting.

Make room for rage. For rot. For ghosts that don’t want peace. Understand that justice doesn’t always look like closure. Some spirits don’t want to be freed—they want to be heard.

5. Change what you build.

If you’re an artist, writer, filmmaker, educator—stop reproducing sanitized horror. Use your work to hold memory. Not just mood. Let your haunted house fall apart for a reason.

Let it scream.