This introductory article serves to present the key themes, around which the special issue on ‘Haunting Futurities’ revolves. We show that haunting is not only about people (or communities, or whole generations) who are no longer there yet are still here as ghosts. In other words, it is not only about the past or the present. Haunting, as this special issue demonstrates, can also be a matter of the future. The aim of this special issue is to unpack and challenge assumptions about ghosts and haunting, as being solely about the past. We argue that the future may be both haunted and haunting: whether through the ways in which the past casts a shadow over (im)possible futures; or through horrors that are imagined as ‘inevitable’; or through our hopes and dreams for difference, for change. Yet haunting is not about utopian potentialities, nor is it about inevitable horrors. Rather, as we suggest in this article and as other contributors to this special issue demonstrate, haunted futurities are about responsibility. We have responsibility to listen to ghosts of the future, especially those of violentfutures so that those futures do not become enacted, but in a way that is alert and sensitive to the possibility of unintended consequences.