Halloween Songs About Love: Ghost Lovers, Spells and Vampires

Halloween Songs About Love: Ghost Lovers, Spells and Vampires

The best Halloween songs about love are the ones where love crosses a supernatural line: a ghost who returns for a promise, a lover who works like a spell, a vampire who has waited centuries. This list gives 17, from ghost ballads printed in the 1700s to a 2015 pop single, each with a checked year and a one-line summary in our own words.

Love is also what people open most on SubhSandesh: the "I love you" page alone draws 29.7% of all page views (17,093 of 57,456). And 48.3% of shared pages are opened on a phone, so a spooky love song you send will usually play through a phone speaker.

What counts as a Halloween love song?

A Halloween love song is a love song whose subject is supernatural or deathly: a returning ghost, a spell, a vampire, a phantom. A song merely played in October, like a monster dance number, does not count; the love has to be the story.

That leaves three old subjects. The ghost lover runs from Scottish and English ballads to Kate Bush, love as witchcraft runs through Broadway and 1950s rhythm and blues, and immortal love is the youngest strand, carried by musicals and vampire films from 1986 onwards.

5 public-domain ghost-lover ballads (Child Ballads 39 to 272)

Francis James Child printed the surviving English and Scottish folk ballads in five volumes between 1882 and 1898, and every text below is free to read on Project Gutenberg. Because these words are in the public domain, short lines can be quoted, which no modern song on this page allows.

1. Tam Lin (Child 39)

Janet learns her lover is held by the Queen of Fairies and can only be won back by pulling him from the fairy procession at Miles Cross. Child's A text, communicated by Robert Burns and printed in Johnson's Museum in 1792, names the night: "But the night is Halloween, lady, / The morn is Hallowday" (Child, volume 1). It is the one ballad here where the woman rescues the man.

2. Sweet William's Ghost (Child 77)

A ghost knocks at Margret's door and asks her to release him from his promise of marriage, admitting "I am no earthly man". His bones, he says, lie in a churchyard over the sea. Child's A text comes from Allan Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany of 1740 (Child, volume 2).

3. The Unquiet Grave (Child 78)

A young man mourns at his true love's grave for "a twelvemonth and a day", until the dead woman speaks and asks to be left in peace. Child's A text was taken down from a girl in Sussex and printed in the Folk-Lore Record in 1868. The ghost refuses his kiss because it would cost him his life.

4. James Harris, or The Dæmon Lover (Child 243)

A woman promised to a sailor marries a carpenter, and years later the sailor returns, really a spirit, to carry her off to sea. Child's A text is a broadside from Samuel Pepys's collection, "A Warning for Married Women"; the version titled "The Dæmon Lover" appears in Walter Scott's Minstrelsy in 1812 (Child, volume 4).

5. The Suffolk Miracle (Child 272)

A farmer's daughter is sent forty miles away to forget her lover, who dies; a month later he rides up at midnight to fetch her home. She binds her handkerchief round his aching head and finds him cold as clay, as Child summarises it (Child, volume 5). The ballad was in print by 1723, in Old Ballads.

12 recorded spooky love songs, 1940 to 2015

We confirmed each date in October 2026 using MusicBrainz entries and the film or stage history. The one-line summaries are ours, and no lyric is quoted.

Love as a spell: 3 songs (1940–2015)

• "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered", Rodgers and Hart, from the 1940 Broadway musical Pal Joey: an older woman admits a younger man has put her under a spell she cannot shake.
• "That Old Black Magic", Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, 1942; Glenn Miller's 1943 recording reached number one: love as a dark enchantment the singer has stopped resisting.
• "Black Magic", Little Mix, released May 2015: friends sharing a secret potion to win the person they want, which the group described as a metaphor for confidence.

Ghost lovers and lost love: 6 songs (1959–2010)

• "Teen Angel", Mark Dinning, released October 1959: a teenager talks to the girlfriend he lost in an accident as if she were already an angel.
• "Lag Jaa Gale", Lata Mangeshkar, music by Madan Mohan, from the 1964 Hindi mystery Woh Kaun Thi?: a mysterious woman in white asks to be held, because they may not meet again in this lifetime.
• "Mera Saaya Saath Hoga", Lata Mangeshkar, from Mera Saaya (1966): a wife promises her shadow will follow her husband everywhere, in a film about a woman who seems to return from the dead.
• "Wuthering Heights", Kate Bush, released 20 January 1978: Catherine Earnshaw's ghost at Heathcliff's window, begging to be let in, drawn from Emily Brontë's 1847 novel.
• "My Immortal", Evanescence, from Fallen (2003): a piano ballad about a presence that will not leave someone who is grieving.
• "Haunted", Taylor Swift, from Speak Now (2010): the dread after a relationship falls apart, set to gothic rock strings.

Vampires, phantoms and stitched-together sweethearts: 3 songs (1986–2011)

• "The Phantom of the Opera", Sarah Brightman and Steve Harley, a 1986 UK hit before the musical opened: a masked figure draws a young singer into his world beneath the opera house.
• "Sally's Song", Catherine O'Hara, from The Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack (12 October 1993): a ragdoll quietly in love with the Pumpkin King, sure it will end badly.
• "A Thousand Years", Christina Perri, released 18 October 2011 for Breaking Dawn – Part 1: written for Bella and Edward, a love that has waited a very long time.

Spooky love songs compared by theme

Here the four strands sit side by side, using only the 17 songs above. Match the theme to the person, not to a party.

The spell songs are the safest flirt, because nobody dies in them. The ghost songs carry the most feeling and the most risk.

Why do dark love songs feel good?

Psychologists have studied this puzzle, and sad music rarely makes listeners simply sad. In an online survey of 772 Western and Eastern listeners (Taruffi and Koelsch, PLOS ONE, 2014), nostalgia was the emotion most often nominated (76% of nominations), ahead of sadness (44.9%), with peacefulness (57.5%) and tenderness (51.6%) close behind. One of the four rewards the authors list is that the sadness has no real-life consequences.

A larger study of memorable experiences with sad music (Eerola and Peltola, PLOS ONE, 2016), with samples of 1,577, 445 and 414 people, found two pleasant types of sadness, Comforting Sorrow and Sweet Sorrow, and one painful type, Grief-Stricken Sorrow. That last type was rated frequent or very frequent by 10–22% of participants, while about a third reported a positive change in mood.

That is the argument for a ghost-lover song on Halloween: the separation is fictional, so the listener gets the tenderness without the loss. It is also the warning in the last section.

Sending one spooky love song to one person

A song lands harder inside your own words. The interactive Halloween card is roughly a 5-minute build: it plays the audio of any YouTube track you link, from a start point you choose, alongside a letter and as many as six photos, once they have knocked three times. Because its No button scurries off a few times before it can be tapped, keep it for a partner who is already yours.

For the song to carry the big moment, the cinematic Halloween page with your voice note is roughly a 10-minute build. Its big question is timed to the chorus of your track, it holds a voice recording of up to a minute and a dozen photos, and an optional unlock time keeps it sealed until the hour you pick; when a YouTube track refuses to play elsewhere, a built-in melody covers.

Because 48.3% of shared pages open on a phone, pick a recording whose first 30 seconds survive a small speaker. Privacy matters too, since 38.5% of creators lock their page with a password. Away from Halloween, the song dedication radio show lets them drag a needle through static to your station and hear you announce the track, with no pumpkins involved.

Who should not get a spooky love song?

Skip the ghost strand for anyone recently bereaved. "The Unquiet Grave", "My Immortal" and "Teen Angel" are about the dead, and some US radio stations banned "Teen Angel" on its 1959 release as too sad; the 10–22% Grief-Stricken Sorrow figure is the reaction to plan for.

"Haunted" is about a relationship's aftermath, so it makes an odd anniversary song. These pages are also one-person greetings with English-only screens: a party room needs a playlist and a speaker, not a link.

Sources

• Taruffi, L. and Koelsch, S. "The paradox of music-evoked sadness: an online survey." PLOS ONE, 20 October 2014.
• Eerola, T. and Peltola, H.-R. "Memorable Experiences with Sad Music." PLOS ONE, 14 June 2016.
• Child, F. J. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, volumes 1, 2, 4 and 5 (1882–1898), Project Gutenberg.