‘It’s the most wonderful time of the year’, and as well as the jingle bells, marshmallows and caroling of the famed song ‘There’ll be scary ghost stories’ – but why?
Thousands of years ago, when the long, dark nights of winter were thought to mean the veil between the worlds of the living and dead was thin, tales of the supernatural were passed from one generation to another. While beliefs might have changed, the thrill of such narratives is as strong as ever and a succession of authors have helped to keep the tradition alive in the form of modern ghost stories at Christmas.
Pagan Belief
Perhaps the oldest known incarnation of a wintry supernatural story is that of the Wild Hunt whose roots lie in ancient European folklore. Across Celtic, German, Viking and Slavic cultures the faith was held that, as nature entered a state of darkness, a band of ghostly hunters would race across the skies during the winter solstice. With the rise of Christianity, the hunt was increasingly considered to be a malevolent pagan phenomena and witnessing the spectacle was a bad omen – if you were lucky enough not to be abducted or have your soul taken, some future disaster was likely headed your way, probably in the form of plague or war.
Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Written evidence of a cultural belief in the connection between spirits and wintertime begins to emerge in the works of Shakespeare. The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597–98) features the earliest record of the ghostly Herne the Hunter, who ‘Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight/ Walk round about an oak, with great ragg’d horns’, shaking a chain in a hideous manner and making cattle produce blood instead of milk. While the bard’s source cannot be established with certainty, there have been suggestions that the character’s origins lie in the mythical Wild Huntsmen of European folklore. A broader example comes from The Winter’s Tale (1609–11), with Mamillius declaring ‘A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one of sprites and goblins’ and Hermione setting him the challenge to ‘do your best to fright me’.
The Victorian Era
Following almost two centuries in which Christmas was barely celebrated (with the Puritans declaring it should be spent in contemplation and leaders of the Industrial Revolution claiming it as an ordinary working day), a surge of commercialization reinvigorated the festival during the reign of Queen Victoria. As families gathered round the hearth for the season, a market for entertaining tales that suited the midwinter chill soon developed, and although works such as Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’ set in ‘bleak December’ might have provided a foundation, it was Charles Dickens who capitalized on the genre, publishing spooky stories in the magazines Household Words and All the Year Round before the publication in 1863 of A Christmas Carol.
MR James (1862–1936)
In 1893 MR James entertained his fellow Chitchat Society members at King’s College, Cambridge with the presentation of a short horror story, A Curious Read (later named The Scrap-book of Canon Alberic). The event was such a success that it established something of a tradition for the medieval scholar, who went on to write over 30 such tales and debuted many of them during candlelit readings with colleagues on Christmas Eve – a move that echoed the oral storytelling of past centuries. With their evocations of fear, rather than concentration on the gothic or moralizing, the published stories fed a market for chilling tales that was also being fulfilled by authors such as Sheridan Le Fanu, Algernon Blackwood and HP Lovecraft.
The BBC’s Ghost Story for Christmas
Bringing the concept to a new medium, the BBC picked up the idea of a ghost story for Christmas in 1971 and for five consecutive years offered an adaptation of a work by MR James before turning to Charles Dickens, Clive Exton and John Bowen. The programme returned in 2005, at first intermittently but annually since 2021, with Mark Gatiss having adapted four MR James stories, Lot No. 249 by Conan Doyle and Edith Nesbit’s Man-Size in Marble. The series is set to continue this year, with the scheduling of EF Benson’s unnerving ‘The Room in the Tower’ on Christmas Eve, and with authors such as Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Perry and Syd Moore working on the genre the future of ghost stories appears to be in safe hands.
