Library things that go bump in the night

September 24, 2025

Need a break from studying, work, and the wider world to get lost in frightful tales of fiction and artifacts of lore, magic, and the occult?

We’ve got you covered with these otherworldly autumnal delights to explore from wherever you are. 

Scary films

Participate in our annual International Studies Horror Filmfest on Halloween, screening frightening foreign-language movies from around the world.

Stream horror films at your leisure in Kanopy. You’ll need your U-M login credentials to access. Watch at your own peril!

Spooky reads 

Grab a flashlight and dive under the covers with our collections of dark tales for dark nights, horror, witchy stories, and tales from the crypt.

Use your U-M credentials to borrow from this selection of ebooks and audiobooks through OverDrive, or with the Libby app.

Creepy tunes

You can also log in with your U-M credentials to stream playlists of some pretty scary and discordant music. We’re not gonna lie — we got chills listening to György Ligeti's Atmosphères.

Special things  

No need to stray from the place where you’ve cast your protective enchantments — you can view and learn about these rare, unique, and curious items online. 

• From Atlas Obscura, read about one person’s quest to inform people of the mysterious wallpapers that were poisoning people around the globe, and then go check your walls for any signs of trouble. (We have a copy of Shadows from the Walls of Death in our special collections!)
• Discover how people in the ancient world used magic amulets and stones for healing.
• Settle in with a full-text scan of William T. Stead’s collected Real Ghost Stories, a book from our special collections that purportedly contains true accounts of people’s contact with the deceased. Stead, an English newspaper editor who died with the sinking of the Titanic, had believed the dead communicated with the living through spirit mediums.
• And finally, zoom in close to a page from the Book of the Dead, an ancient Egyptian funerary text. The scene is a decorated vignette with an offering being presented to the deity Ra-Horakhty. It includes two columns of spells, the first being one for "opening the mouth of a man for himself in the necropolis."