“GHOST STORY”. When Barry Hannah, the late novelist of the American south, taught fiction workshops, he would begin by writing those two words on the blackboard. All stories, he’d say, are ghost stories. Something haunts the work and the reader turns the pages to find out what it is. As a student of Hannah’s back in the day, I took these words to heart. Literary ghosts didn’t have to scare; what they had to do was haunt. A ghost in literature could be the kind we meet in Hamlet, in other words, a spooky dead king seeking vengeance, but it also could be something subtler, something real, such as the absent mothers who emotionally haunt so many of Alice Munro’s protagonists.

“In literature,” says the writer Tabitha King, “the ghost is almost always a metaphor for the past.” This is true for literal ghosts who manifest in graveyards, and it’s true for figurative ghosts who are no more substantive than insistent memory. The ghosts I list here may not be what we usually think of when we hear the word “ghosts”. But these are the phantoms that kept me turning pages, the ones I never forgot when I finished the book. That means they are haunting me still, and really – what more can one ask of a ghost?

James Joyce, c1918. Photograph: Archive Photos/Getty Images

Michael Furey in James Joyce’s “The Dead”

It took me multiple readings to appreciate “The Dead”, and I’m still not sure readers without a profound and perhaps personal understanding of Irish history and Dublin can fully grasp the concerns of its many characters. But the famous epiphany at the novella’s end, when Gabriel Conroy realises his wife is haunted by her memory of Michael Furey, a boy who loved her, transcends cultural specificities and stays with anyone who has ever lost a love or taken a love for granted.

The highboy in Alison Lurie’s “The Highboy”

In 1994, Lurie published a collection of short stories aptly called Women and Ghosts. My favourite describes the response of an antique highboy on learning its owner is donating it to a museum. The moral of the story? Don’t make your possessed possessions angry.

Holiday in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones

Saoirse Ronan plays murdered school girl Susie Salmon in The Lovely Bones. Photograph: Linda Brownlee

When murder victim Susie Salmon, played by Saoirse Ronan in Peter Jackson’s film version, ascends to heaven, she spies a distant entity galloping towards her. The figure turns out to be Holiday, her long-deceased dog, joyfully greeting his newly deceased owner. Did I bawl like a baby on reading about this particular reunion of ghosts? You bet I did.

A missing child in Kevin Brockmeier’s The Truth About Celia

Celia, the young daughter of sci-fi writer Christopher Brooks, disappears one day without a trace. To cope with his grief, Christopher writes a series of stories, each one speculating about Celia’s fate. These stories range from realism to fabulism, but each is really about life forever haunted after losing a child.

Rebecca in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca

If, after I die, I feel the need to haunt some hapless living soul, I want to do it Rebecca-style. As anyone who has read this popular-novel-turned-popular-Hitchcock-movie knows, Rebecca has no need to drag chains and howl. She doesn’t even have to return to this earthly realm to scare the daylights out of someone. It is the force of who she was in life – and the insinuations of her evil minion, Mrs Danvers – that gets the job done. Rebecca is the lazy-girl’s ghost. Sign me up.

The parrot in Robert Olen Butler’s Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot

Why read a story when its title (a headline from an actual supermarket tabloid) reveals the plot? Because in Butler’s hands, that husband, trapped in the body of his wife’s pet parrot and forced to watch her happily continue life without him, is hysterically funny and achingly poignant. If Rebecca tops the list of ghosts I’d most want to be, this pitiful bird is at the bottom.

Maxine Hong Kingston in 2001. Photograph: Eric Risberg/AP

Americans like me in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior

Here is how Kingston, channelling her child-immigrant self, saw the citizenry of her new country: “Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts ... Once upon a time the world was so thick with ghosts, I could hardly breathe; I could hardly walk, limping my way around the White Ghosts and their cars.” This frightened child’s experience of being a stranger in a strange land not only touched me, but also triggered memories of moments in my privileged life when I failed to be generous in thought or deed to others. Double ghosts haunting me here, then: Kingston’s ghosts and my own.

The Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

From the moment an unpleasant grandmother and her obnoxious family drive off on vacation, we know they’re going to run into the Misfit, a killer on the loose. Getting to the point in the story where their paths cross is half the fun. The other half is watching the Misfit and the grandmother interact as she tries to save her life and he manages to save her soul. The Misfit is a living man – we think – but he haunts this story from start to finish as effectively as any visitor from the grave.

Beloved in Toni Morrison’s Beloved

The ghost in Beloved is the most conventional ghost I’ve listed, and yet Morrison writes in a manner that makes us see ghosts and a familiar world of unfathomable suffering as if we’ve never seen them before. A fictional horror story based on a historical horror story (a desperate act of matricide caused by the more horrific institution of American slavery), the book also illustrates King’s point: Morrison’s ghosts are manifestations of her character’s past choices.

Any of the demons in Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons

In this collection of literary comic strips, Barry summons the ghosts of childhood. We meet stuffed toys, once precious, later discarded. We meet the best friend we outgrew when we turned 13. (“We were ghosts to each other,” Barry writes of her friendship). At the book’s end, Barry urges us to conjure up our own ghosts and demons and honour our own haunted and haunting pasts. In other words, she exhorts us all to write our stories.

• Judith Claire Mitchell’s A Reunion of Ghosts is published by 4th Estate.