Ghost stories are particularly good in an area where there is local legend of some creepy thing. Example: in a very wooded area near where I grew up there was a legend of an insane asylum that was up in the woods. One particularly bad winter the snow was so bad that access to the asylum was cut off. When the roads were finally cleared they got up there and the asylum was empty. No indication of where any of the patients went, nor the doctor/staff. (Fact for clarification: there was actually an old asylum up in the woods.) So the story went that the descendants of the patients were still living up in the woods. They were called Melonheads by the kids.
You could craft that story any way you wanted and make it appropriate for whatever setting you were in. But it was always better if you were near where the asylum actually was. An interesting thing was that all the kids would make it a rite of passage to take “newbies” out there at night (in a car) to look for Melonheads. And almost every time you went out there, there was some strange event that couldn’t be explained. Might be a loud bang on your car when there was nothing that could have banged it on the road. It might be a scraping sound on the car. Might be odd lights off in the woods that would disappear if you stopped to get a better look.