Haunted town map ideas for a Halloween story

By Brenn and Lindsay, the two writers who built Inkling

A haunted town story is mostly geography. Where the graveyard sits, how many roads lead out, how far the walk home is when the light goes. Get the map right and the dread arrives before the ghost does. Here are a dozen haunted town and village ideas with a story hook in each, how a map sets up fear, and how to build yours in an evening.

Every good haunted town has the same bones. It is cut off, it is old, and it is small enough that you cannot avoid the bad places. Those are all decisions you make on a map, and you can make them before you write a single creaking floorboard. Halloween is three weeks away, which is plenty of time to draw a town and write something terrible happening in it.

How a map sets up dread

Isolation first. A haunted town needs to be hard to leave. A marsh on three sides and a river on the fourth. A valley with snow coming. A single bridge that floods. Draw the geography that keeps people in, and every scene that follows is tighter, because the reader knows there is nowhere to run.

One road in. This is the oldest trick and the best. If there is one road, someone can block it, something can wait on it, and every arrival is an event. Put the road on the map before anything else, and count how long it takes to walk.

Landmarks become scenes. Each place you put on a haunted town map is a set piece waiting to happen: the graveyard, the well, the jail, the tower at the edge of the woods. Place them so the characters have to pass the frightening places on the way to the safe ones. A child who walks past the graveyard to get to school is already a story.

Daylight is distance. Horror runs on the walk home. Once you know the town's layout, you know how long it takes to get from the inn to the church, and you know exactly when the sun goes down halfway there.

Leave the edge blank. What lies past the last street, beyond the trees, under the reservoir, should stay unmapped. Readers fill blank space with their own worst ideas, which are always better than yours.

Twelve haunted town map ideas

1. The graveyard on the hill. The oldest graveyard sits above the town, and every well in the valley draws the water that runs down from it. This autumn the water tastes different.
2. The drowned village under the reservoir. A whole village was flooded for a dam fifty years ago. In a dry October the church steeple breaks the surface, and the bell starts ringing on its own.
3. The street that is only there at night. A lane between the bakery and the jail that does not exist in daylight. After dark it is lit, and there are houses on it, and one of them has your character's name on the door.
4. The lighthouse that lights for no ship. The harbor closed years ago and the keeper is long dead, but the lamp still burns on stormy nights. Ships that follow it do not come back.
5. The bridge you do not cross after dark. The only way out of town is over one old bridge, and the locals will not cross it after sunset. Your outsider has a train to catch at nine.
6. The wizard's tower nobody built. A crooked tower on the edge of town that appears on no deed and in no record. Everyone agrees it has always been there. The oldest woman in town says it has not.
7. The ruin where the old town stood. In the woods outside the town are the walls of an earlier town on the same site, abandoned overnight. The street plan is identical, down to the last well.
8. The apothecary that never closes. The window glows green at three in the morning and the bell over the door rings when no one goes in. The townsfolk buy their cures there anyway.
9. The marsh village with lantern paths. The only safe paths through the marsh are marked with lanterns on poles. One night, someone moves a lantern.
10. The town the wolves ring in winter. Every winter the wolves come down from the hills and circle the town at a fixed distance, never closer. This year they have come closer by one street.
11. The empty gibbet. A cage still hangs from the arm of the old jail, and the town keeps it empty and clean. Nobody will say what it is waiting for.
12. The small town today, clock stopped. A present-day town with a diner, a church, a school and a clock tower whose clock stopped at the same minute decades ago. Today it started again, and it is counting down.

Want more to choose from? Our list of 50 fantasy map ideas has a whole section of haunted and wintry ones, and plenty that turn dark with one small change.

How to build a haunted town in Inkling

The town itself. Start a city map from the real streets of an old town, a river town with its bridges or a hill town of steep lanes, with every name stripped off so the streets become yours. For a story set in the past, flip the Fantasy town switch, then stamp in a graveyard (crypt, crooked stones, a dead tree and its bats), a ruin, a temple, a jail with its swinging cage, an apothecary with its green smoke, a lone watchtower, a wizard's tower, a well in the square and a bridge over the river. For a story set now, stay on Today and use the church, the clock tower, the school, the library, a restaurant you can call the diner, and the bridge.

The land around it. For the wider view, start a world map. The Marshlands layout (black water and reeds) is made for this, or paint marsh and forest by hand onto any layout. Add willows and cypresses at the water's edge, set a wolf in the woods, a serpent coiled in the lake and, if your story runs to it, a dragon in the hills. A ruin, a graveyard, standing stones or a shipwreck on the rocks all sit happily on a world map too. Draw the one road in, and the map maker will route it around the water on its own.

The look. Copperplate gives you an engraved, old-atlas plate, which suits a map that looks like it was found in an attic. Gilded Night, with a Map Pass, puts the whole town on ink-blue paper with cream line and gold, which is about as close to a map by moonlight as you can get.

The story. Name every place your scenes visit and put a note on each one: what happens here, who lives here, what it smells like. Notes are only for you. When the map is ready, press Write a story here and Inkling starts a new story with the places you named already in its notes, so the graveyard and the bridge are waiting for you on page one. The map stays a click away from the draft for every scene after that.

Try it before the 31st

The map maker is free to start: keep two maps and download two, no card. If your town grows into a whole haunted county, a Map Pass is $29 a year and keeps every map you make. See the map maker, or read our guide on how to make a fantasy map for your book. And if the Halloween story turns out to be the start of something longer, the November novel challenge starts the day after.