The vitality of ghost stories

A friend of mine sent me this article from The New York Times about the strength of ghost stories in contemporary American literature. I thought I would share it for today's countdown to Halloween post. It talks specifically of American literature, but it could be said of any Western culture, really: in an age of rationalism, ghost stories are still thriving, even and especially in contemporary settings. It could be surprising, in an age when the hypothetical existence of the soul is at best challenged, at worst thwarted, by our knowledge of the human brain. However, phantoms in fiction reveal more about the living than the dead. Ghosts are often a mirror of human psyche, their guilt, fears, desires. You can read my own thoughts on ghosts in this post. But I would be curious to read in the comments what you think makes ghost stories so appealing.