Many modern-day carolers and Christmas song enthusiasts are often surprised the holiday tune “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” includes mention of telling ghost stories as a part of the seasonal festivities, specifically scary ones. Of course, there are renditions of A Christmas Carol on the stage, the television and even in theaters—I have fond recollections of seeing the black comedy Scrooged when it was released in theaters in the frosty days of November, 1988—but those stories are not terribly frightening. Morality tales, yes. Sad in places, sure. The stage productions in particular strive to add a touch of the chill when the Ghost of Christmas Future arrives to let the old cheapskate Scrooge know about the lonesome grave awaiting him should he not change his ways. However, the idea of honestly eerie stories of the paranormal as a part of the holiday tradition is somewhat unusual in our enlightened era, where holiday cheer is most often aligned with That Next Big Present, the next Big Family Gathering, and the goal of stuffing oneself like a prize turkey.
However, during the 19th century, this was not the case. Tales of the uncanny and otherworldly made for regular seasonal reading. In fact, a veritable cottage industry arose via magazines and holiday annuals, presenting tales of the weird, the ghastly, and the mournful. These stories might not have all been guaranteed to raise gooseflesh, but they nevertheless presented narrative junctures between the mundane and spectral worlds. Some of the stories were not even set during the holiday season itself, but by virtue of simply appearing in annuals published around that time they have taken on a mantle of the seasonal spirit. This article will briefly venture into this tradition, exploring a few of the more notable practitioners, and examine how the Christmas ghost story perseveres even though the height of popularity around the form vanished in the opening decades of the twentieth century. 
A Seasonal Longing for What Is Gone
In her introduction to the inaugural volume of The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories, editor Tara Moore offers a view on such tales and speculates about their role in the holiday. She draws a line between the sentimentality of the season and its call for familial unity, which only added to the appeal of ghost stories, particularly in cases when families were spread over large distances.
Many of the tales from the classic era at the tail end of the nineteenth century were also published with an eye toward being read aloud at gatherings. In that spirit, one can imagine a collection of friends or family, huddled together amidst candlelight, around a roaring fire, or possibly under the hiss and glow of gas lamps turned low listening to somber stories about people gone but not forgotten. This is even the setting and the practice Henry James evokes at the beginning of his 1898 short novel, The Turn of the Screw.
Scholars of the field are quick to admit the year’s end ghost story did not start with the Victorians or even with Christmas holidays, alluding to earlier incarnations of the tradition. The day celebrated as Christmas has a far older, and less Christian, historic associations whether it is called Saturnalia or the pagan Winter Solstice. The winter season has long been a symbol for death, with a Springtime rebirth months away. Cultures have expressed similar ideas and ideals throughout their written and spoken literatures.
However, the idea of December ghosts peaked with the technological innovations that made publishing far less expensive as well as at the height of an empire that sprawled far and wide enough that the sun would supposedly never set upon it. Other cultures had plenty of ghost story traditions, but the industry around Christmas ghost stories is not surprisingly centered on the Victorian era UK.
A Close Examination of Intent
A broad reading of the stories finds they fall into one of four camps, in terms of authorial intent.
Some of them are interested in producing a chill for its own sake with no attempt to resolve that horror. These include such stories as Sir Walter Scott’s “A Tapestried Chamber,” which posits a wintry visit between old chums, where the visitor is given a room to sleep in that may well be haunted. Alas, the narrator’s host does not reveal this fact until after the protagonist experiences an encounter with creeping horror. The host then reveals he was using the visitor as a kind of guinea pig to see if a manifestation might occur without any forewarning, thus removing the possibility of an informed mind jumping at shadows.
The intent behind the second grouping of tales involves those most interested in laying the ghost to rest, releasing it from whatever elements fettered it to walk the earth instead of receiving its eternal reward. This tradition often lent itself to a mystery, locating a lost will or solving a past crime.
Third, some of the holiday annuals and magazine stories published tales that utilized the ghostly to offer a moment’s remembrance for those lost in the previous year. The supernatural is an apt metaphor for our grief as well as a vehicle to speed our passing through it. Ghosts are echoes of the past by their very nature. Attunement to the strange energies that manifest in the world, allowing sensitives to view things long gone or the shadows of things yet to be. These kinds of stories run the gamut from encounters with supernatural personalities to stories where consciousness pushes past the immediate to behold information a character could not have any reason to possess about persons or events tied to haunted locales or objects. Mirrors have long been a favorite subject for object-related stories, allowing viewers a chance to both witness some intrusion into their own lives and to reflect upon its impact both to their own lives.
Finally, there are the stories that impart moral instruction or, in their most palatable form, the cautionary tale. In these stories, the supernatural intrusions upon the mundane world align with antisocial behaviors or outright destructive societal norms. These are the tales of bad people having redemption thrust upon them, good folks tempted into despair and turning away in the final hour, and selfish or single-minded persons discovering a place for them in a much larger world than they reasoned existed. The contribution to the holiday ghost story Charles Dickens is perhaps best known for falls into this camp. However, A Christmas Carol is not his only tale in this regard. He released a handful of others around the holiday season, including the chilling short story “The Signal-Man,” in which a railway worker recounts three phantom warnings he has received, one long past, one recently come to be, and one yet to arrive. That said, Dickens is an exemplar of the cautionary tale and the story of moral instruction, with all the thrills and baggage such tales come with.
The End of the Form’s Popularity
The cottage industry of holiday annuals started going out of vogue with the turn of the century. By the time World War I turned Europe into a meatgrinder battleground, the celebrated “Golden Age of the Ghost Story” all but ended. However, the tradition of holiday dark fantasy tales has not fallen completely by the wayside. Following World War I, quite a few notable additions to the tradition or subgenre have appeared. Some of them involve tales written for the holiday season and others involve tales set during that season. Providing a thorough overview would exceed the scope of this article. Instead, we will consider a handful of highlights.
M.R. James
Celebrated ghost story writer Montague Rhodes James penned several of his tales of malevolent spirits and paranormal intrusions as entertainments for Christmas Eve readings. These stories made their way into books such as Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories. His five volumes of ghost stories appeared across the first three decades of the twentieth century. He is perhaps the most famous practitioner of the Christmas ghost story from the twentieth century if for not other reason than he is one of the most well-received writers of supernatural fiction working in that century.
- M. Burrage
Likewise, A. M. Burrage added a shivery tale to the form in 1931 with “Smee.” That piece recounts a story about a gathering, which has devolved into late night games. One of these is a spin on “Hide and Seek,” in which the seeker creeps upon the hidden and whispers the phrase “It’s me.” Spoken at a rush, that phrase becomes the story’s title, “smee.” Burrage’s story is initially drenched in the season’s bright spirit, so when the lights turn down for this game, the atmosphere gets all the creepier. The ghastliness comes in when the players realize there is an unaccounted for player in the game, sitting quietly in the dark. Who or what could it be? As it turns out, this figure is a haunt, a revenant of a victim of no small personal tragedy. The game to locate hidden participants becomes a game to unravel a mystery, to hunt up answers hidden by time.
In some ways, this story is a complement for and somewhat indebted to J. H. Riddell’s contribution to the Christmas ghost story, “A Strange Christmas Game,” which employs wandering a dark house and grounds as a means for understanding a more recent tragedy itself shrouded in no small amount of mystery.
Richard Matheson
Although his work Hell House is a novel and not a short story, the author still pays homage to the holiday ghost story tradition. His novel, which posits the titular domicile as the Mount Everest of haunted houses, kicks off with the arrival of an investigative group on December 18 and ends just before Christmas. In between, there are numerous chilling encounters with ghostly figures, psychic sessions gone awry, and clashes of will. Although the novel is far more shocking than anything the Victorian practitioners might have conceived of, it still pays more than lip service to that old Christmas tradition.
Ramsey Campbell
The most respected British writer of horror today is also incredibly well read. His affection for fiction from such esteemed authors as M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and H. P. Lovecraft has informed quite a few of his tales. Also, he has toyed with the Christmas ghost story tradition both in the short form and the long.
His tale, “Calling Card” is one fine example, about a woman who receives a sixty-year-old Christmas card, which triggers nervousness, anxiety, and possible paranoiac brushes with the supernatural. Before long, she starts to see sinister intent in an unsold Christmas tree, in the occupants of an aquarium, a knock at the front door, and other seemingly innocuous details. Something terrible may well be coming around to call on her.
As well, Campbells’ novel Midnight Sun explores cosmic horrors and familial disintegration in a frozen winter setting. As with Matheson, this is not specifically a Christmas ghost story as it has cosmic ambitions, but it nevertheless invokes the tradition.
Stephen Gregory
Another entry of more recent vintage is Stephen Gregory’s chilling “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Wake Up.” The tale is set at an all-boys boarding school over the Christmas holiday. Although most of the lads have gone home, one is forced to remain behind, until the watchful eye of the Headmaster and his hound Brutus. Isolation and the headmaster’s history with pain and suffering arouse the ghosts of the past, drawing the boy into a past mystery. The tale balances chills and melancholy, guilt and regret in equal helpings, building to a powerful conclusion. It might not have first been released for the Christmas season, but the tale (which can be found in the author’s collection On Dark Wings) is nevertheless an update on that staid tradition.
There are, of course, numerous others that could be mentioned in connection with this topic, and quite a few articles published in various magazines have done so over the years. It is almost a tradition unto itself.
Concluding Remarks
While the tradition of the Christmas uncanny might have shifted out of the levels of popularity it once saw during those Victorian times, it has not vanished altogether. A few authors play with the idea and experiment with technique to this day, and perhaps there should be more efforts in this vein.
Year’s end and the holiday season has taken on the mantle of cheer and hope for brighter tomorrows and better years to come. However, all this cheer and these twinkling, decorative lights do little to mask a season (in the Northern Hemisphere, at least) where nights linger far longer than daylight hours do and chills creep straight to the bone. A good ghost story around these holidays might be a perfect way to pass the time, to bring the family a little closer together, and to express those otherwise inexpressible feelings of loss and yearning for closeness.
Works Cited
Moore, Tara (ed.). The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories. Richmond: Valancourt Books. 2016.
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Daniel R. Robichaud lives and writes in Humble, Texas. Having worked for over two decades in academic and corporate R&D, he’s turned to writing full time. His fiction has been collected in Hauntings & Happenstances: Autumn Stories as well as Gathered Flowers, Stones, and Bones: Fabulist Tales. His next collection is coming soon.