(Portions of this work were previously presented live at the Seasons Screamings 2021 convention.)
“The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.”
I’ll be surprised if anyone here can name what famous book begins with this line, because it’s a tale almost never identified with Christmas ghost stories: The book is Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, published in 1898.
Many of us have pondered the line from the beloved Christmas song “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” about telling “scary ghost stories,” and we’ve heard that the Victorians loved to tell ghost stories around a holiday hearth, but where did this tradition come from, why did it die down, and how did it lead to—arguably the greatest ghost novel of them all—The Turn of the Screw?
Telling scary ghost stories at the end of December actually makes perfect sense, given that the winter solstice—the longest night of the year—occurs on December 21, but late December spirited hijinks have other historical sources as well. The Romans celebrated their gods with the week-long wild Saturnalia, which began on December 17 and involved inversions of social norms (slaves became rulers) and wild excesses. If that sounds more like the merriment of Christmas, the fun (which also came with a dark side, like allowing pretend murders as part of the licentiousness) existed side-by-side with spookier traditions like mumming plays performed in villages throughout Europe, about noble knights fighting monsters; or the Austrian Krampus, a flipped St. Nicholas who steals bad children and whips the legs of observers during Krampus parades held in December. Early folklorists like Sir James Frazer (author of The Golden Bough) suggested that midwinter witches and monsters glimpsed in fairy tales were actually diminished pagan gods. And lastly, it’s not hard to take pre-Christian and medieval traditions into the time before mass media existed, and imagine families around a fire on the chilly evening of the 24th entertaining themselves with stories that were often fanciful retellings of local legends.
Catherine Crowe, the author and folklorist whose 1849 classic The Night-Side of Nature was a significant influence on both the 19th-century rise of Spiritualism (a religion which believes mediums can communicate with the dead) and the popularity of ghost stories, wrote a book in 1859 entitled Ghosts and Family Legends: A Volume for Christmas. In the preface to the collection, Mrs. Crowe suggests that telling ghost stories at Christmas served as a sort of communal ritual: “…the conversation branched out into various speculations regarding the great mysteries of the here and hereafter; the reunion of friends…in short, we began to tell ghost stories…”
One of the earliest examples of a Christmas ghost story is found in the Arthurian tale Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which includes scenes like the mysterious Green Man retrieving his severed head before riding away, and begins on Christmas.
Shakespeare wrote about Christmas ghosts in Act I, Scene I of Hamlet:
Some say, that ever ‘gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad.
We might note here that Christmas prior to the late 19th-century was not the major holiday that it is today. Remember how A Christmas Carol’s Bob Cratchit has to work on Christmas Day? The fact is that nearly everyone worked on Christmas Day up until 1871, when Queen Victoria finally made it a bank holiday. Up to that point, it was either not celebrated in England, where the anti-Catholic Parliament had banned all Catholic celebrations in 1647, or it was celebrated just on Christmas Eve, with a gathering and a feast.
One of the best descriptions of early English Christmas ghost storytelling comes from the American Washington Irving, who in his Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon—yes, the same book that gave the world “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”—describes celebrating Christmas in a rural English manor:
When I returned to the drawing-room I found the company seated round the fire listening to the parson, who was deeply ensconced in a high-backed oaken chair, the work of some cunning artificer of yore, which had been brought from the library for his particular accommodation. From this venerable piece of furniture, with which his shadowy figure and dark weazen face so admirably accorded, he was dealing out strange accounts of the popular superstitions and legends of the surrounding country, with which he had become acquainted in the course of his antiquarian researches… He gave us several anecdotes of the fancies of the neighboring peasantry concerning the effigy of the crusader which lay on the tomb by the church altar. As it was the only monument of the kind in that part of the country, it had always been regarded with feelings of superstition by the good wives of the village. It was said to get up from the tomb and walk the rounds of the churchyard in stormy nights, particularly when it thundered; and one old woman, whose cottage bordered on the churchyard, had seen it through the windows of the church, when the moon shone, slowly pacing up and down the aisles.
That legend, by the way, would inspire the famed story “Man-size in Marble” by Edith Nesbit, an author best known for her children’s stories. Although published in an 1887 Christmas issue of the magazine Home Chimes, Nesbit chose to set the action of her tale of marble grave effigies come to terrifying life on Halloween.
Within about two decades after publication of Irving’s Sketch Book, printing technologies and new cheap paper had made books and magazines cheap and popular, and the Christmas ghost tradition moved from rural retellings of old local legends to more accomplished printed fictions. The greatest of these, of course, was A Christmas Carol, which was published on December 19, 1843. Nowadays we think of A Christmas Carol as primarily a story about Christmas, but in its original form it’s also a darn fine ghost story with some genuinely unnerving moments. Check out this passage, as Scrooge is trying to relax in his favorite chair on Christmas Eve:
As he threw his head back in the chair, his glance happened to rest upon a bell, a disused bell, that hung in the room, and communicated for some purpose now forgotten with a chamber in the highest story of the building. It was with great astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house.
This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but it seemed an hour. The bells ceased as they had begun, together. They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine-merchant’s cellar. Scrooge then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains.
The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight towards his door.
“It’s humbug still!” said Scrooge. “I won’t believe it.”
His colour changed though, when, without a pause, it came on through the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, “I know him; Marley’s Ghost!” and fell again.
Within a year of the publication of A Christmas Carol, other journals were noting that Christmas ghost stories were as “plentiful as blackberries in Summer.” Dickens contributed more to the Christmas ghost story than just A Christmas Carol, though: he also edited the periodical Household Words from 1850 to 1859, which did special bonus Christmas issues every year (and which not only far outsold the magazine’s regular issues—100,000 copies compared to the usual 40,000—they also paid the authors more for their contributions). In the 1850 Christmas annual he published his essay “A Christmas Tree,” the second half of which concludes with a lengthy description of the types and varieties of ghost stories, told against the smell of roasted chestnuts and “other good comfortable things.”
There is no end to the old houses, with resounding galleries, and dismal state–bedchambers, and haunted wings shut up for many years, through which we may ramble, with an agreeable creeping up our back, and encounter any number of ghosts, but (it is worthy of remark perhaps) reducible to a very few general types and classes; for, ghosts have little originality, and “walk” in a beaten track. Thus, it comes to pass, that a certain room in a certain old hall, where a certain bad lord, baronet, knight, or gentleman, shot himself, has certain planks in the floor from which the blood WILL NOT be taken out. You may scrape and scrape, as the present owner has done, or plane and plane, as his father did, or scrub and scrub, as his grandfather did, or burn and burn with strong acids, as his great– grandfather did, but, there the blood will still be—no redder and no paler—no more and no less—always just the same. Thus, in such another house there is a haunted door, that never will keep open; or another door that never will keep shut, or a haunted sound of a spinning–wheel, or a hammer, or a footstep, or a cry, or a sigh, or a horse’s tramp, or the rattling of a chain. Or else, there is a turret–clock, which, at the midnight hour, strikes thirteen when the head of the family is going to die; or a shadowy, immovable black carriage which at such a time is always seen by somebody, waiting near the great gates in the stable–yard. Or thus, it came to pass how Lady Mary went to pay a visit at a large wild house in the Scottish Highlands, and, being fatigued with her long journey, retired to bed early, and innocently said, next morning, at the breakfast–table, “How odd, to have so late a party last night, in this remote place, and not to tell me of it, before I went to bed!” Then, every one asked Lady Mary what she meant? Then, Lady Mary replied, “Why, all night long, the carriages were driving round and round the terrace, underneath my window!” Then, the owner of the house turned pale, and so did his Lady, and Charles Macdoodle of Macdoodle signed to Lady Mary to say no more, and every one was silent. After breakfast, Charles Macdoodle told Lady Mary that it was a tradition in the family that those rumbling carriages on the terrace betokened death. And so it proved, for, two months afterwards, the Lady of the mansion died. And Lady Mary, who was a Maid of Honour at Court, often told this story to the old Queen Charlotte; by this token that the old King always said, “Eh, eh? What, what? Ghosts, ghosts? No such thing, no such thing!” And never left off saying so, until he went to bed.
Dickens gathered a stable of writers who contributed ghost stories to the Christmas issues of his magazines every year; these writers (who rarely received credit in the actual magazines, although readers who inquired about the authors’ identities were provided with the correct names) included authors like Elizabeth Gaskell, whose 1852 contribution “The Old Nurse’s Story” is one of the most famous ghost stories of all time. Gaskell’s tale, which is innovative in presenting the ghosts of both the dead and the living, has been in print in some form for over a century and a half. It also demonstrates a frequent trope of these stories, which was including the actual word “story” in the title.
Dickens was far from the only magazine editor publishing Christmas ghost stories. In fact, other magazines gave their Christmas issues expressive titles like “A Stable of Nightmares” (Tinsley’s, 1868) and “The Witching Time” (Unwin’s Magazine, 1887). The latter begins with a poem, “In Witching Time” by Austin Dobson, which sets the scene: as “the last log crumbles in the fire,” then “through the midnight’s creeping cold/The shadows lengthen, fold by fold.” This particular issue includes work by F. Marion Crawford and Vernon Lee, among others. Occasionally these special Christmas issues were themed, usually around a group of stranded travelers (Dickens, who had started this convention, would even write framing devices to tie all the stories together). For example, the 1886 edition of Unwin’s is called The Broken Shaft: Tales in Mid-Ocean, and includes Crawford’s classic aquatic terror “The Upper Berth.” That story, by the way—which features a mysterious aquatic entity that may or may not be a ghost—demonstrates that the term “ghost story” was applied throughout the 19th-century to any tale of terror, most of which we would now refer to under the genre label “horror.”
By 1900, the tradition of the Victorian Christmas ghost story was winding down. Spiritualism, which had exploded in popularity alongside ghost stories, was on the wane, since so many popular mediums had been revealed as frauds, and magazines noted the fading tradition of the traditional ghost story told at the Christmas hearth (one review of Emma Francis Dawson’s collection An Itinerant House and Other Stories dismissively called the old Christmas ghost tales “conventional apparitions”). The ghost story, however, was far from dead, as these same periodicals celebrated the rise of a new crop of authors. M. R. James, perhaps the greatest practitioner of ghost stories, told annual Christmas ghost stories to colleagues and students while serving as Provost at King’s College, Cambridge, beginning in 1893. Those stories eventually made up his classic collection Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. And in 1908, Algernon Blackwood published the terrifying story “The Kit-Bag.” The story was published in a Christmas magazine and is set at Christmas, but this is no polite ghost found in a ruined manor house. This spirit is that of a famous murderer, who has been tried and executed just before the story begins. The protagonist is a young law clerk who needs a bag for his Christmas trip to the Swiss Alps, and unfortunately his employer mistakenly gives him the murderer’s bag. As the young man is packing for his trip, things are getting very creepy: he hears footsteps when no one is present, feels a strange “malaise” steal over him, and of course finds the kit-bag in a slightly different location every time he turns away and back.
The tradition of telling Christmas ghost stories has never really gone completely away. Aside from frequent cinematic versions of A Christmas Carol, other horror films—like the 1972 BBC classic The Stone Tape—have been released for the holiday. And of course 1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas provided the ultimate mash-up between Christmas and the ultimate festival of fear, Halloween, and gave fans all over the world a ready-made excuse to add spooky ornaments to their Christmas trees.
If you’re looking for ghost stories to tell on your own Christmas Eve, there are new collections: Valancourt has published five volumes of an excellent series called The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories; the British Library’s “Tales of the Weird” series has published several Christmas anthologies, some of which extend the tradition into the 20th century with work by authors like Robert Aickman; and the company Biblioasis published a series of classic Christmas ghost stories as small paperbacks illustrated by the acclaimed cartoonist Seth.
Scary Christmas and Happy New Fear, everyone!
