The Canterville Ghost

Sir Simon has been rattling chains and staining carpets with fake blood for three centuries, and it has always worked — until the aggressively practical Otis family moves in, hands him a stain remover for the blood, and refuses to be frightened by anything he tries. What starts as a comedy about a ghost losing his touch turns, in Wilde's hands, into something unexpectedly tender about loneliness, death, and what it actually takes to finally rest.

Oscar Wilde's only ghost story, and one of the earliest to play the haunted-house premise for comedy — before turning it, in its final pages, into something genuinely moving.