11 Witch-Filled Horror Novels
Do you like your horror stories with a pinch of witches?
There are stories and legends of witches in most cultures throughout the world.
The very idea of being able to tap into magic sounds fantastic. Imagine being able to influence the world around you just by waving your hands and chanting or mixing things together.
But good things always come at a cost and it’s that cost that makes for a great story.
Some of the scariest horror stories involve witches with grudges. And who wouldn’t want revenge when you’ve been tortured and murdered for being different.
When a witch wants revenge, watch out. You don’t want to find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Halloween’s a time for witches so here, for your enjoyment, are eleven horror stories involving terrifying witches.
Contents
1. All Hallows Eve (2020)
By Michael Penning
“Alice Jacobs stood at the edge of the wharf and stared at the sea in horror. Thousands of bones were washing ashore. They flooded the great expanse of Salem Sound with skulls and spines and fragments of skeleton that rolled and tumbled in the surf.”
All Hallows Eve is a supernatural horror story and is the first in the Book of Shadows trilogy.
Alice’s husband disappears while investigating a series of strange incidents in the bustling seaport of Salem. Alice is forced to bring her young daughter, Abigail, along from Boston while she searches for him. But she soon learns of a terrible curse that has the entire town bracing for nightfall: one hundred years after the infamous witch trials, the vengeful spirit of a woman hanged for witchcraft will rise from hell to claim the souls of Salem’s children.
Alice dismisses the old legend as foolish superstition until Abigail is snatched from her bed by a sinister woman made of smoke and mist.
Desperate to find her daughter before the sun rises and she is lost forever, Alice races against time on a spine-chilling adventure that takes her from forgotten dungeons and gloomy cemeteries to the haunted forests of Gallows Hill. Along with a roguish sailor searching for his own missing child, she battles deadly supernatural forces and uncovers a dark secret that may be the key to saving Abigail’s soul, if only she can survive the night.
Average Star Rating out of 5
Average: 4.12 | Amazon: 4.50 | Goodreads: 4.37 | LibraryThing: 3.50
2. The Witch (2021)
By Fred Anderson
“The ancient man teaching the Sunday School class really had a thing for hell, Ryan Campbell thought, stifling a yawn with his fist. He’d been going on about it for what felt like three hours. Three long hours.”
The Witch is a supernatural horror story.
When tragedy strikes during a visit with their grandmother, Ryan Campbell and his sister Emily find themselves preparing for a trip to the hospital with their mother Lisa instead of returning home. Desperate to avoid reliving the traumatic memories of his father’s death, Ryan begs for a way out.
Fortunately, Grandma Wendy’s best friend Dot offers to keep the siblings for the afternoon. Despite her misgivings, Lisa agrees to let the old woman take them. But as they soon discover, Dot isn’t the sweet lady she appears to be. She’s bent on revenge for her own traumatic memories, and has all the powers of hell at her command to get it.
Average Star Rating out of 5
Average: 4.06 | Amazon: 4.10 | Goodreads: 4.01
3. The Lighthouse Witches (2021)
By C.J. Cooke
“The lighthouse was called the Longing. Pitched amidst tessellations of rock black asa coal, thrashed for ove a hundred years by disconsolate squalls, it needled upward, spine-straight, a white bolt locking earth, sky, and ocean together.”
The Lighthouse Witches is a supernatural thriller horror story.
When single mother Liv is commissioned to paint a mural in a 100-year-old lighthouse on a remote Scottish island, it’s an opportunity to start over with her three daughters: Luna, Sapphire, and Clover.
After two of her daughters go missing, she learns that the cave beneath the lighthouse was once a prison for women accused of witchcraft. The locals warn her about wildlings: supernatural beings who mimic human children, created by witches for revenge. Liv is told wildlings are dangerous and must be killed.
Twenty-two years later, Luna is still searching for her missing sisters and mother. When her youngest sister is found, Luna worries that what they’ve found is a wildling because Clover is still seven years old, the age she was when she disappeared.
Luna doesn’t remember much about her time on the island, but she’ll have to return to find the truth of what happened to her family. She doesn’t realize just how much the truth will change her.
Average Star Rating out of 5
Average: 4.02 | Amazon: 4.30 | Goodreads: 3.98 | LibraryThing: 3.77
4. Hour of the Witch (2022)
By Chris Bohjalian
“It was always possible that the Devil was present.
Certainly, God was watching. And their Savior.
And so they were never completely alone.”
Hour of the Witch is a historical supernatural horror story.
Boston, 1662. Mary Deerfield is twenty-four-years-old and beautiful. In England she might have had many suitors. But here in this Puritan New World, Mary is the second wife of Thomas Deerfield, a man as cruel as he is powerful. When Thomas, prone to drunken rage, drives a fork into the back of Mary’s hand, she decides that she must divorce him to save her life.
In a world where every neighbor is watching for signs of the devil, Mary soon becomes an object of suspicion and rumor. When tainted objects are discovered buried in Mary’s garden, when a boy she has treated with herbs dies, and when their servant girl runs screaming in fright from her home, Mary must fight to not only escape her marriage, but also the gallows.
Average Star Rating out of 5
Average: 3.98 | Amazon: 4.30 | Goodreads: 3.85 | LibraryThing: 3.78
5. The Witch of Willow Hall (2018)
By Hester Fox
“Sitting bolt upright, I hold my breath as [the noise] comes again. It’s a slow moan, a keening wail. The sound is so wretched that it’s the culmination of every lost soul and groan of cold wind that has ever swept the earth.”
The Witch of Willow Hall is a supernatural horror story.
New Oldbury, 1821. Something has awakened in Willow Hall. Eighteen-year-old Lydia Montrose can feel it, but she has no idea what it is.
Rocked by rumor and scandal, Lydia, her parents, and her two sisters, fled their sparkling life in Boston for the sleepy country estate. But bone-chilling noises in the night convince Lydia their idyllic new home wasn’t exactly vacant when they arrived.
The Salem witch trials cast a long shadow over the Montrose family as the heat of the Massachusetts summer mingles with something sinister in the air. The sprawling history of Willow Hall is no stranger to secrets, and its dark past soon calls to Lydia, igniting ancient magic she never knew she possessed.
With menacing forces unwilling to rest, threatening to tear her family apart, Lydia must learn to harness her newly discovered power or risk losing everyone she holds dear.
Average Star Rating out of 5
Average: 3.91 | Amazon: 4.20 | Goodreads: 3.71 | LibraryThing: 3.82
6. Witch (2021)
By Mark Brownless
“The house was built in the style of a Victorian boat house, with imposing stonework on this gable end and the roof protruding out over the deck with ornate wooden supports. The ground floor was all stone walls, but the upstairs was built into the triangular roof with more modern Velux windows and lightboxes.”
Witch is a supernatural horror story.
Gabe and Victoria Hooper buy a magnificent house on a lake in rural West Wales, hoping to restart their lives following a tragedy.
But they awaken the witch, a vengeful ghost who haunts their new home and their dreams. As the woman in white escalates her terrifying campaign, Gabe fights to save his family from the horrors of the witch, the witch’s disciples, and the temptation to change the past.
Average Star Rating out of 5
Average: 3.83 | Amazon: 3.80 | Goodreads: 3.85
7. The Witch of Halloween House (2017)
By Jeff DeGordick
“By the time the police chief arrived on the scene, word of the child’s disappearance spread like wildfire through the town, creating a panic.”
The Witch of Halloween House is a supernatural horror story and is the first in the two-book Halloween of Horrors series.
There’s an old house on a hill in the woods that the kids call “Halloween House”. They accused the mysterious old woman who lived there of being a witch until the rumors got out of hand and the panicked townspeople burned her house down with her in it one Halloween. All she said before she died was: “A curse on all of you!”
Three years later, Halloween approaches again, and Carmen is in charge of taking her little brother trick-or-treating.
But children are going missing and the only clue to their disappearance is a gingerbread man left on their windowsill. Carmen needs to make sure her brother doesn’t become the next victim as the townspeople descend into insanity all around them.
Riddled with fear, they have no one to pin the kidnappings and strange occurrences on … because the witch is already dead.
Average Star Rating out of 5
Average: 3.82 | Amazon: 4.30 | Goodreads: 3.66 | LibraryThing: 3.50
8. The Witch's Trinity (2008)
By Erika Mailman
“We did all manner of things to change our fortune. We prayed in the way that the priest asked us to, with the Lord’s Prayer, raising our eyes to heaven as we spake of the daily loaf God might grant us … And we also did what the priest asked us not to do. Facing to the west, where the sun sets, we slaughtered beasts and poured the blood onto the soil.”
The Witch’s Trinity is a supernatural historical horror story.
In 1507, when a severe famine strikes a small town in Germany, a friar arrives from a large city, claiming that the town is under the spell of witches in league with the devil. He brings with him a book called the Malleus Maleficarum, a guide to gaining confessions of witchcraft. He promises to identify the guilty woman who has brought God’s anger upon the town, burn her, and restore bounty.
Güde Müller suffers frightening visions and recently she’s seen things that defy explanation. No one in the village knows about her visions, but she has become an object of scorn and a burden to her son’s wife. In these desperate times her daughter-in-law would prefer one less hungry mouth at the family table. As the friar turns his eye on each member of the tiny community, Güde dreads what her daughter-in-law might say to win his favor.
Then one night, Güde follows an unearthly voice and the scent of charred meat into the snow-filled woods. Come morning, she no longer knows if the horror she witnessed was real or imagined. She only knows that if the friar hears of it, she may be damned in this life as well as the next.
Average Star Rating out of 5
Average: 3.81 | Amazon: 4.20 | Goodreads: 3.58 | LibraryThing: 3.64
9. The Woman in the Woods (2022)
By Lisa Hall
“I walk past the village sign that proudly denotes Pluckley as the most haunted village in England, a gossamer thin cobweb hanging from one corner, blowing in the slight early summer breeze. A ripple of unease runs down my spine.”
The Woman in the Woods is a supernatural horror story.
When Allie moves to a quaint old cottage with her husband, it’s their dream home. Nestled in the village of Pluckley, it seems a perfect place in which to raise their two children. But Pluckley has a reputation. It’s known as England’s most haunted village. And not long after the birth of their new son, Allie begins to notice strange things.
What’s the flash of white she sees moving quickly through the woods to the back of their house? And what’s the strange scratching noise coming from the chimney?
As Allie discovers more about the history of their new home, she uncovers a story of witchcraft and superstition, which casts a long shadow into the present day. And not everything is as it seems. Her family might well be in danger, but it’s a danger none of them could have foreseen.
Average Star Rating out of 5
Average: 3.65 | Amazon: 4.30 | Goodreads: 3.64 | LibraryThing: 3.00
10. The Banished (2019)
By Ron Gabriel
“Travis trailed his parents up the ancient stone steps, ill at ease and wary of the spell they’d crafted to empower him without killing a soul.”
The Banished is a supernatural horror story and is the first in the two-book The Bucharest Witches series.
An orphaned witch. A high school clique. An ancient spell linked to the Devil.
Travis believes he is superior to other witches in the coven because his magic doesn’t kill. To replenish depleted power, he feeds on human fear. The horrors he conjures are wiped from victims’ memories, so what’s the harm?
A trio of teens leaving for college finds itself under attack as Travis discovers the magic he needs to avenge his parents is diabolical.
But Travis cannot stop. The Bucharest witches hunting him have tracked his whereabouts, and he must refuel to fight them the only way he can: feeding off the terror of townspeople.
Average Star Rating out of 5
Average: 3.51 | Amazon: 4.10 | Goodreads: 3.42 | LibraryThing: 4.00
11. Witch 13 (2022)
By Patrick Delaney
“A witch.
That was seven-year-old Madelyn Lamprey’s first thought when she saw the woman standing there in front of the tree, still as a statue. In fact, Madelyn thought she was a statue initially, like an old Halloween decoration someone left out, maybe to try and scare her.”
Witch 13 is a supernatural horror story.
On the eve of her resignation, Sheriff Sterling Marsh prepares for a bleak winter in Drybell, Connecticut, after a string of bad decisions leaves her life in shambles. Two weeks before Christmas and expecting a long night of paperwork and quiet celebration with friends, she’s surprised when an unnerving stranger appears in the form of a witch.
A silent, menacing figure, the witch appears to be ripped straight out of a fairytale, complete with a tall, pointed hat, and black clothing. But when strange things begin happening all over town, Sterling begins to suspect that there may be more to the witch than meets the eye.
As she works to maintain order while the world crumbles around her, the witch’s presence throws Sterling’s world into a frenzy, threatening to send the sleepy town spiralling into the darkest night it’s ever known.
Average Star Rating out of 5
Average: 3.51 | Amazon: 3.60 | Goodreads: 3.42
Published: 18 October 2022
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