How chilling ghost stories became a Christmas tradition

‘A sad tale’s best for winter,’ says little Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale: ‘I have one/ Of sprites and goblins…’ (He is dead by Act III.)

Ghost stories have always been best told on a midwinter night — preferably aloud, in a group drawn close together around a blazing fire. Pleasure comes from awareness of the icy cold and dark, hemming our small convivial light: there is a particular frisson in the contrast between ‘in here’ and ‘out there’, between the snug ‘us’ and a possibly malign ‘them’, the known and the unknown. And Christmas Eve, traditionally, was the time to swap ghost stories — drawing upon the early Christian notion that spirits and demons had a peculiar freedom on the night before an especially holy day. Halloween, the night before All Hallows or All Saints day, has now usurped this licence; but in Victorian times, as Jerome K. Jerome remarked: ‘The average orthodox ghost does his one turn a year, on Christmas Eve, and is satisfied.’

The oral tradition of telling ghost-tales at Christmas had become literary ‘orthodoxy’ in Victorian times — thanks to Charles Dickens, and to the extraordinary proliferation of periodicals in the 19th century. Many of these imitated Household Words in producing a special, ghost-filled Christmas issue. The genre rapidly spawned clichés. Many of the innumerable stories in the back numbers of these magazines are the Victorian equivalent of Christmas ‘repeats’ on television. And the feeling of familiarity is not helped by the fact that so many ghost stories are themselves tales of ghostly re-enactments — repeats of repeats, as it were. If a murderous event is supposed to recur year after year it can lack tension, which has to be whipped up by lashings of Gothic melodrama. Luminous skulls, chains, dripping daggers, shrieks, haunted organs, hidden chambers and monk’s habits are stock in trade; lost wills, buried treasure and unburied corpses prey upon the minds of the departed.