Horror stories have a fascinating character - it can arouse fear of people, but also it attracts people because of so. Fear is a negative emotion, like disgust, anxiety and depression. We will not intentionally make ourselves feel disgusted, but we will pay money to buy horror stories. It is an interesting phenomenon worth studying; however, little attention was paid in Chinese academia about why horror stories are so fascinating and how they attract the readers. This article is divided into mainly two parts. Firstly, by applying Noël Carroll's explanation of ＂Paradox of Horror＂ we can find that most of the horror stories we come across easily fit his explanation. However, maybe because Carroll's researches are heavily based on classics in horror stories, we discover that his explanation has limitation in studying the ghost stories in popular culture. The second part of this article uses theories from Gestalt psychology to explain why such ghost stories can induce so much fear among the readers. Also, this article discovers that ghost stories in popular culture usually have left an unfinished event in their endings. Ending the stories in this way seems to create a psychological response: ＂spreading the horror in reality＂. This response is validated by the findings from a survey.