“There is probably a
smell of roasted chesnuts and other good comfortable things all the time, for
we are telling Winter Stories – Ghost Stories, or more shame for us – round the
Christmas fire.”
- Charles Dickens, Telling Winter Stories, 1859
Every year at about this time, I tend to turn my reading to
ghost stories. Okay, who am I kidding? I read ghost stories all year round. But
there’s something particularly nostalgic for me personally in sitting by the
side of a log fire, glass of single malt in hand, reading a spooky old tale,
particularly those set at Christmas.
The Christmas ghost story is something of a great British
tradition, of course. Like most things related to Christmas traditions, they
were really proliferated in the Victorian era – that Dickens fellow has a lot to answer for. After the success of A
Christmas Carol, Dickens took to publishing festive ghost stories annually
in the periodical All the Year Round,
in which he included tales from contributors such as Wilkie Collins and
Elizabeth Gaskell. In 1898, American anglophile Henry James (whose less famous
brother turns up in The Lazarus Gate,
you may recall) wrote The Turn of the
Screw – his own take on the Christmas Ghost Story, inspired in no small
part by Dickens and Collins.
That doesn’t mean all the stories we equate with being good
Christmas spook-fests are Victorian in origin though – many of my favourites
were written in the Edwardian or even post-war periods. M R James – my favourite
teller of ghostly tales – was a particular proponent of the Christmas ghosts
tradition. He would write a new story each year, and read it to a select group
of peers and students at King College, Cambridge, on Christmas Eve.
Anyhow, enough history. Over the last few years I’ve been
collecting festive ghost and mystery stories to read over the Yuletide period.
Here’s my pick of the bunch so far:
A Mystery in White
J. Jefferson Farjeon
I’ve been really quite taken by the British Library Crime
Classics series. Published in a very nice little paperback format, they now
produce a range of long-forgotten mystery thrillers from the golden era of
crime, and have even started branching out into supernatural mysteries. A Mystery in White is one of their
growing Christmas Mysteries range, and details the fortunes of a group of train
passengers stranded in a snow drift while trying to get home for Christmas.
When a man on the train dies under suspicious circumstances, a party of
intrepid passengers hikes to get help, whereupon they stumble across a spooky
old house, recently abandoned like the Marie
Celeste. Strange things are afoot in the house, but luckily one of the
party happens to be a psychical investigator…
Old Christmas
Washington Irving
“When I returned to
the drawing-room, I found the company seated around 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 forth strange
accounts of popular superstitions and legends of the surrounding country, with
which he had become acquainted in the course of his antiquarian researches.”
Pre-dating the Victorian era, American writer Washington Irving
wrote several spooky, winter tales, including this one set at Christmas-time. Although
he’ll be forever associated with Halloween, thanks to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, it’s well worth giving his other work
a read.
The Festival
H P Lovecraft
“It was the Yuletide,
that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than
Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind.”
In this typical story of madness, depravity and forbidden
lore, Lovecraft’s narrator pays a Christmas visit to Kingsport, only to find
that the locals at the church aren’t gearing up for a traditional Christian
celebration, but something altogether darker. Generally thought of as Lovecraft’s
first Cthulhu Mythos story, a fact that makes The Festival interesting in
itself.
The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance
M R James
I’ve included this lesser-known tale because it’s the only Jamesian
story to be actually set at Christmas-time. In truth, at this time of year I
take out my collected editions of his stories and read them all, because he
really is the master of the ‘pleasing terror’. This one is essentially a
low-key tale of a man searching for his missing uncle in his old home-town, and
features a memorable appearance from a creepy Punch & Judy show.
The Haunted House
Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, and others
No list of Christmas ghost stories would be complete without
some work from that most famous Victorian writer, Charles Dickens. However, as
everyone has read A Christmas Carol, or at least has seen the films a dozen
times, I’ve gone for a more unusual pick. Opening at Christmas Eve, this
portmanteau story by Dickens and five other hand-picked writers, follows the
fortunes of visitors to a haunted house. These aren’t actually traditional
ghost stories, but more tales of regret, injustice and fear, using ghosts as a
device to put the unfortunate protagonists through the wringer.
