Professional parapsychologists and “ghosts hunters”, such as Harry Price, active in the 1920s and 1930s, and Peter Underwood, active in the 1940s and 1950s, published accounts of their experiences with ostensibly true ghost stories such as Price's The Most Haunted House in England, and Underwood's Ghosts of Borley (both recounting experiences at Borley Rectory).

Children’s benevolent ghost stories became popular, such as Casper the Friendly Ghost, created in the 1930s and appearing in comics, animated cartoons, and eventually a 1995 feature film.

Noël Coward's play Blithe Spirit, later made into a film, places a more humorous slant on the phenomenon of haunting of individuals and specific locations.

With the advent of motion pictures and television, screen depictions of ghosts became common, and spanned a variety of genres; the works of Shakespeare, Dickens and Wilde have all been made into cinematic versions. Novel-length tales have been difficult to adapt to cinema, although that of The Haunting of Hill House to The Haunting in 1963 is an exception.^[81]

Sentimental depictions during this period were more popular in cinema than horror, and include the 1947 film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, which was later adapted to television with a successful 1968-70 TV series.^[81]Genuine psychological horror films from this period include 1944's The Uninvited, and 1945's Dead of Night.

The 1949 Mahal (Hindi: महल; Urdu: محل; English: The Mansion) was a groundbreaking Hindi language movie directed by Kamal Amrohi and starring Ashok Kumar and Madhubala, one of the earliest knownBollywood films dealing with reincarnation. Mahal became one of the biggest box office hits of 1949 in India.^[86] The movie paved the way for Indian gothic fiction.^[87]