In recent work within Spectrality Studies, critics such as Esther Peeren and David Coughlan have turned their attention to figurative spectrality, conceptualising the ghost as a metaphorical figure of enormous significance (culturally and politically) and (re)formulating a critical vocabulary that seeks to describe the figurative spectre in its specific instantiations. More than any other writer of the American post-war period, the work of Shirley Jackson is particularly responsive to such a figurative spectral reading because she understands femininity as inescapably haunted. Through a reading of Jackson’s second novel Hangsaman (1951), this chapter argues that her narratives of fragmented femininity necessarily invite a reconsideration of the form and focus of the ghost story. By channelling the literary possibility afforded by figurative spectrality, Jackson writes the ghost story into numerous—sometimes surprising—shapes, and reading her work with an eye to its figuration of the ghostly/ghosted woman simultaneously opens up alternative possible readings of ghost stories themselves.