10 Scariest Movie Ghosts EVER

The ghoul that haunts the house in James Wan’s The Conjuring is the spirit of Bathsheba Sherman, a woman who had hung herself in the garden of the home after indulging in nefarious witchcraftery.

During most of The Conjuring, the source of the house’s spooky goings-on remains unseen, and Wan only shows us the full image of Bathsheba a handful of times. The ghost is revealed to be a typical Hag-like apparition - long tatty hair, grubby white gown, and witchy, grotesque features.

It’s a nasty enough look for the movie’s evil spirit, but Bathsheba’s design all feels rather bog-standard Internet Screamer Face (see: The Woman In Black or the bride from Insidious).

Bizarrely, the movie’s scariest spirit is a pair of hands.

In The Conjuring’s best scene, matriarch Carolyn (Lili Taylor) follows the sound of handclaps from the top floor of the house down into the pitch-black basement. Anyone that has ever seen a horror movie knows a scare is coming…

When Carolyn lights a match we likely expect to see some gruesome face pop up from the gloom, but instead we get two hands appear behind her and clap. Writing it out it sounds utterly un-scary. But often in horror movies simplicity is what leads to the most effective scares. A pair of hands is scarier than a face because our imagination remains left to its own dark devices.