Christmas and the English Ghost Story

Tales to keep you warm on a cold winter's eve. Plus, waxing poetic about novellas.

Well, monsters, here we are. Another year draws to a close, and we crouch on the eve of something new. Some new years approach with an aura of dreams and promise, but I don’t think that’s quite accurate of 2024.

For one thing, I think many of us were chastened by the swift and brutal reality that came in place of our optimistic our “2020 vision” as we closed out the teens.

For another, it’s an election year, arguably the most important election we have faced in living memory, and all that against the backdrop of horrific wars, a limping economy, a lingering pandemic, and a widespread uneasiness about countless existential threats that may or may not be lurking in the shadows of our shared human experience.

Merry Christmas, right?

For my part, 2023 has certainly been a year, sometimes one marked by big, swinging dichotomies of up-and-down. I lost my dad. I published a book. I’ve tried to emotionally support my mom. I got an exciting promotion at work. I lost the entire month of June, somehow, from my memory. I started several promising new projects. I didn’t finish anything.

I’m closing out 2023 feeling tired, and grateful, and anxious, and, hey, maybe even a little hopeful. Because any year you survive is worth celebrating, right?

Drop me a comment and tell me what YOU are looking forward to in 2024, or at least what you’re happy to put to bed with 2023.

At the time of writing, I’ve read 23 books this year. I’m on track to finish out a few more before the end (thanks, novellas!) but here are the stats:

• Genre: 7 nonfiction books, 8 horror, 1 romance, 3 contemporary fiction, 2 fantasy, 2 crime.

• Ratings: 4 DNF, 1 one-star, 3 two-star, 3 three-star, 3 four-star, 7 five-star.

• Demographics: 3 trans/NB authors, 5 Black authors, 3 Asian authors, 3 Latinx authors, 15 women. Some of those overlap, obviously.

I tried to sample outside my comfort zone, but I didn’t venture too far. Three of the horrors are cross-genre. Two of the nonfictions are literary criticism of horror, and two more are true crime. I like what I like!

Hoping to read widely next year, too. I’m not sure if I’ll try to stick with a monthly theme again or not. I guess we’ll see in a few weeks when I decide :)

As we creep up on Christmas, it seems only fitting to close out the year talking about ghost stories. After all, what’s the spirit of the season if not tales of the spooky and supernatural?

What’s that?

You don’t know about the Christmas ghost story tradition?

I suppose it’s got deeper roots in England than here in the states. But then, so do ghost stories in general, to the point that “a proper English ghost story” is something of a genre unto itself.

Oh, well. I guess we’d better take some time to unpack all that, shouldn’t we…

The Uniquely British Haunting

We’ve talked recently about ghost stories, and how hauntings are practically indistinguishable from grief. For as long as humans have understood the concept of mortality, we’ve fretted about ours and wondered what happens when we die. That’s been going on for millennia and isn’t going to let up any time soon.

So the English don’t have a corner on the ghost market by any means.

But, at least compared to Americans, the British do seem to have a distinct preoccupation with ghosts. For every small town on the English countryside, you’re bound to encounter some kind of local legend involving a spirit of times past.

And no wonder. Like we’ve said before, ghost stories require two essential elements: a place must have a history, and that history must be in danger of getting lost.

England is old. It became itself sometime around the 10th century, meaning its identity is over a thousand years at this point — and there are relics of that history still lying around, occasionally even in active use. America is old, too, of course, but the majority of its pre-colonial history was obliterated by settler genocide, and what remains is not a part of the heritage claimed by your average American.

In other words: the crumbled ruins of ancient civilizations in America belong to someone else.

The Hauntings of a Changing World

According to this fascinating article over on The History Channel website, ghost stories were a staple of English culture for centuries, reaching their apex in the Victorian era. The rough order of events is as follows:

• Various places had their own local legends and quirks.

• Stories were best shared around the hearth or in pubs, particularly on long winter nights when no one could get any work done.

• As Industrialization came, people began to move out of the countryside and into cities, where they still craved those familiar tales.

• The newly-popularized printing press created a demand for stories to be created and sold.

• Authors were tapped to write ghost stories with mass appeal so they could be printed and sold to nostalgic, homesick Englishmen (and an increasingly literate audience of female readers, too).

So we see an oral tradition swiftly turned into a literary tradition with authors like Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant and Arthur Conan Doyle authoring literary ghost stories for a new age.

But of all the names associated with English ghost stories, the honor has to go to M.R. James, a Medievalist and academic who helped codify the modern ghost story. And “modern” here is the key term. His interest was first and foremost with removing ghost stories from their Gothic trappings and bringing them into then-contemporary turn-of-the-century settings.

He wrote a great many stories and developed a formula for them. Quoting Wikipedia, a “Jamesian” story would include the following essential elements:

1. a characterful setting in an English village, seaside town or country estate; an ancient town in France, Denmark or Sweden; or a venerable abbey or university

2. a nondescript and rather naive gentleman-scholar as protagonist (often of a reserved nature)

3. the discovery of an old book or other antiquarian object that somehow unlocks, calls down the wrath, or at least attracts the unwelcome attention of a supernatural menace, usually from beyond the grave

James was interested in the way the old could collide with the new (an understandable preoccupation for a Medievalist, surely) and exhibited great distrust in the concept of modernity by and large. He also promoted quiet, gentlemanly horror, a slow build of tension that would leave things up to the imagination. To quote the man himself:

"Two ingredients most valuable in the concocting of a ghost story are, to me, the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo. ... Let us, then, be introduced to the actors in a placid way; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage."

Funny enough, these elements often persist in modern horror…and when they do, people sometimes refer to it as “Gothic.” Oh well.

There’ll Be Scary Ghost Stories…

So with all of that in mind, let’s get back to Christmas.

Like we said: ghost stories told ‘round the fire are a time-honored English tradition. And the Christmas season, taking place on the longest nights of the year, has often been associated with the supernatural. For the English, ghost stories and Christmas went hand-in-hand well before Charles Dickens made them spectacularly mainstream (and international) with A Christmas Carol.

Surely everyone knows by now about THAT story. What you might not know is that Dickens played a big hand in inventing modern Christmas. In Medieval times, Christmas was a days-long period of feasting, merriment, and inverted social order. But a few centuries later, the holiday was a pretty minor blip on the calendar, and in need of renovation for a modern world (and maybe one with less focus on inverting the social order in a way that might harm capitalism, ya know).

So Dickens, like other 19th century authors, made an effort to romanticize the holiday, invent new traditions for it, and promote a picture of Christmas that took off like wildfire.

The other thing you probably don’t know is that Dickens wrote plenty of other ghost stories. None of them gained popularity in America the same way, so we don’t tend to associate them with Christmas…but for his time and place, A Christmas Carol fits into a much bigger trend of telling scary stories in the winter.

And across the pound, that tradition continues. Hell, starting in the 1970s, the BBC made an annual tradition of telling ghost stories through film adaptations — including of M.R. James works — this time of year.

So why didn’t that tradition carry over to America?

For one thing, hard as it may be to currently believe, America was founded on science and rationalism and Enlightenment. We had some veins of spiritualism and occult fascination, of course, but we just had different vibes than the Old World with its history and witchcraft and spooky ruins.

For another, America had a different spooky season already lined up. Irish and Scottish immigrants had brought Halloween with them, and Washington Irving arguably did for American Halloween what Charles Dickens did for English Christmas.

But I say it’s never too late to build a new tradition.

Halloween horror. Christmas horror. Let’s just make that whole season a time for ghost stories. What do you say?

Further Reading

If you’re on the prowl for some English ghost stories to keep you up tonight, perhaps you’ll enjoy some Charles Dickens stories like The Haunted Man, To Be Read at Dusk or The Signalman.

You can also read a ton of M.R. James stories for free online. Here are summaries and links for 10 of his best.

If true stories are more your speed, here are a few clipped from British newspapers that might intrigue you.

And if you’d prefer something a bit more contemporary, try this list on of modern British horrors on for size. I personally recommend The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters for both capturing and then subverting many of the classic tropes.

Happy holidays, and happy haunting :) See you in the new year, monsters.