If you celebrate Christmas, you’re probably preparing for a few days of eating cookies, singing carols, and catching up on a Christmas flick or two. You might spend the night before Christmas reading “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” If you’re my family, you’re watching Return of the Jedi and reheating tamales. Not that long ago, before television and central heating, the Holiday season was mysterious and a little spooky, and families across the English-speaking world spent Christmas Eve swapping ghost stories. In Told After Supper, a collection of comedic ghost stories, English humorist Jerome K. Jerome observed, “Whenever five or six people English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling ghost stories… It is a genial, festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, dead bodies, and murders, and blood.”
Where did this macabre holiday past time come from, and where did it go? According to author Jon Kaneki-James, medieval Scandinavian sagas featured ghastly tales of the undead haunting unsuspecting villagers on or around Christmas Day. At some point, the tradition travelled south to England. By the Early Modern period, Brits spent the coldest months swapping winter tales, fantastic stories full of ghosts and fairy folk. Shakespeare referenced the practice in his play The Winter’s Tale. In Act II, the prince Mamillius remarks, “A sad tale's best for winter: I have one of sprites and goblins.”
Christmas Eve ghost stories, along with other popular Christmas traditions, dipped in popularity in the late 17th and 18th centuries following a brief period of Puritan rule. The Puritans outlawed holiday celebrations. The tradition saw a revival in the Victorian period thanks in part to Charles Dickens and his quintessential ghost story, A Christmas Carol. Dicken’s tale of Christmas Eve specters was wildly popular and ignited a renewed interest in Christmas traditions. Dickens wrote five Christmas novels in all; three were ghost stories.
By the middle of the 20th century, the Christmas Eve ghost story faded into obscurity once again, especially in America. Radio and television offered new entertainment for chilly winter evenings, and Irish and Scottish immigrants brought Halloween to the United States where it thrived. Soon, America confined ghosts and ghost stories to October. Today, holiday merry makers might be puzzled by a refence to “scary ghost stories” in Andy William’s 1963 Christmas tune “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” In the United Kingdom, the Christmas Eve ghost stories have fared slightly better. In the early 1970s, the BBC ran a series of holidays specials called A Ghost Story for Christmas, and the series has seen a recent revival.
As we approach Christmas Eve, why not celebrate like the Victorians? Despite all the twinkling strings of LEDs and inflatable Santas, there’s something a little spooky about December. As the days grow shorter and the nights grow colder, there’s no better time to swamp a few tall tales about things that go bump in the night. Here are nine classic ghost stories from our catalog to get you started.
A Christmas Carol
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Written in 1843, Dicken’s story of ghostly redemption was a Christmas Classic from the start. Readers who are only familiar with A Christmas Carol from its various movie adaptions might be surprised by the sheer number of ghosts that haunt Dicken’s London. Scrooge is visited by the three spirits, of course, and the ghost of his former partner Jacob Marley, but he’s also besieged by an “air filled with phantoms” all suffering Marley’s same fate, and he gazes upon the gaunt faces of Ignorance and Want. Dickens knew that a Christmas story needed a happy ending, but he also understood that Scrooge’s sea change would feel earned if the miser met with a few ghouls and goblins.
Told After Supper
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This comic collection is a parody of Christmas Eve ghost story tradition and serves as an irreverent record of the custom. Jerome’s book doesn’t just cover the ghost stories, but the transitions between tales. Stodgy Victorians try their best to frighten each other with tales of vengeful street musicians (murdered thanks to their limited repertoire and talent) and fraudulent spirits.
The Turn of the Screw
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American Henry James wrote the quintessential English haunted house novel and he set it around Christmas. James presents the story of the governess in a haunted manor as a ghost story told around the fire on Christmas Eve. Adding another layer of narrative sleight of hand, the fictional storyteller claims to be reading a manuscript written by a family friend. James builds uncertainty right into the novella’s structure.
Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad
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You can read “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” in The Complete Ghost Stories of M.R. James. Volume 1.
Montague Rhodes James was an English scholar of Medieval History. His ghost stories are full of men like him—Edwardian academics obsessed with the ancient and occult. James was fond of sharing his ghost stories with his favorite students on Christmas Eve around the fire. “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” is one of his best stories (and James might be the greatest teller of ghost stories in the English language.)
“Oh, Whistle” follows a young professor on vacation in an English seaside town. When he stumbles upon a rusty whistle and an ancient inscription, the professor summons something that may be an ancient evil or a pile of bed linens.
The Bowmen
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You can read “The Bowmen” in The White People and Other Weird Stories.
Most of the Arthur Machen’s literary output fell under the genre of Weird Fiction, a pulpy mix of occult horrors and sci-fi strangeness, but “The Bowmen” is a ghost story through-and-through. It recounts a hopelessly lopsided battle between a small English company and a battalion of 3,000 Germans during the First World War. When an English soldier recites a line of half-remembered Latin, a host of unearthly allies join the Brits on the battlefield.
The Black Cat
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The horror that lurks in the cannon of Edgar Allan Poe is usually more psychological than supernatural. Poe’s unreliable narrators were terrified by their own guilty consciences or nagging thoughts. “The Black Cat” is an exception to that rule. Like the “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat” is narrated by a man wracked with anxiety after committing a gruesome murder. While feline phantom that haunts the protagonist in this story might be a flash of madness, Poe hints it’s something weirder.
The Death of Halpin Frayser
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You can read “The Death of Halpin Frayser” in American Supernatural Tales.
Most readers know Ambrose Bierce for his short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” but the American raconteur and journalist also wrote supernatural tales. “Halpin Frayer” is a Southern Gothic nightmare told in disjointed sections that mirror the protagonist’s confusion. Halpin Frayser is a troubled man far from home. He’s attacked by something — a ghoul with his mother’s face, or maybe a highwayman. The story’s unconventional structure and Freudian subtext feel unexpectedly modern, and more than a bit unsettling.
The Body Snatcher
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You can read “The Body Snatcher” in Charles Keeping's Book of Classic Ghost Stories.
In “The Body Snatcher,” Stevenson evokes the real-life horror of “resurrection men,” a class of grave robbers who supplied Victorian medical schools with fresh corpses. One particularly notorious case, the Burke and Hare murders, was a major scandal in Stevenson’s native Edinburgh. Like Burke and Hare, the resurrection men in “The Body Snatcher” turn to murder when their supplies run low. Burke and Hare were tried for their crimes, but Stevenson’s body snatchers meet a stranger fate.
The Sweeper
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You can read “The Sweeper” in Charles Keeping's Book of Classic Ghost Stories.
“The Sweeper” is a Victorian morality tale about class, cruelty, and karma. An elderly widow is haunted by a mysterious presence lurking just outside her home, the result of a callous act years earlier. “The Sweeper” is like a pessimistic A Christmas Carol. Burrage has less sympathy for the poor than Dickens, and unlike Scrooge, the miser at the center of Burrage’s story can’t escape her fate.