There's a simple explanation for how the Ouija board works: it's not ghosts, but how you feel about them.

Is there anything scarier than a door in a horror game? I submit that there is not.

Out twenty five years ago next month, the second entry in the handheld Mario spin-off series was significant for a number of reasons, but perhaps none as timely as its Halloween world.

This story didn't happen to me. Not really. But some nights, it felt like it could have.

The overlap of horror movie lovers and video game lovers is undoubtedly substantial, so it's no surprise that filmmakers have repeatedly tried to appeal to that demographic. The results often range from hilariously wrong to mildly insulting, to the point where you're not sure the creators even know what video games are.

I am scared of many things in video games. Sharks mostly, but there's other stuff. Nothing has ever scared me, though, as much as 1992's Alone in the Dark.

Some horror games are best played alone at midnight. Other ones are meant to be played in a room full of friends with a six pack of beer. Here's a few of the latter kind.

The back page of Alex Hall's economics textbook was filled with scribbles. Diagrams, notes, story beats, a web that formed an outline for his next update. By day, Hall was a student at St. Louis University, but after class he was writing what would become one of the most infamous internet ghost stories: Ben Drowned, a chilling tale of a haunted Zelda cartridge.

It's Spooky Week, and what better time to look back at Parasect, one of the most unsettling Pocket Monsters to date.

The Golden Age of survival horror games began in the mid-'90s and ran for about a decade. Despite their often rudimentary graphics and dodgy gameplay, series such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill explored B-movies and psychological horror in ways previously unfamiliar to gamers. Pick any "all-time best horror games" list, and chances are more than a few titles from this era will be cited. This may have been the Golden Age, but if current titles are any indication, we may be on the brink of another.

Resident Evil is the zombie horror game, but its shambling corpses are slow and easy to avoid. To reinvigorate the series, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis created an unpredictable nightmare man who attacked with terrifying speed. It robbed players of their sense of control, and in doing so created one of gaming's scariest monsters.

Horror games strike a balance between player control and dread. Getting chased by a murderer with giant scissors or dealing with legions of zombies is pretty scary. Thankfully, brave speedrunners are here to tackle them for us.

I hated maths as a child, so my parents bought me a computer game to help me enjoy maths. It was called Super Solvers: Outnumbered! This game took me from hating maths to fearing maths.

From Pac-Man's eternal pursuers all the way up to F.E.A.R.'s terrifying Alma Wade, games have always been full of ghosts, phantasms, phantoms and other assorted ethereal fiends. In celebration of Kotaku Spooky Week, I consulted the Kotaku staff and we put together this definitive ranking of the scariest ghosts ever to materialise into pixels.