#Christmas ghost stories

[fiftysevenacademics]

Someone suggested we should revive the tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas and I thought that sounded fun, so here's my (not very creatively titled) contribution.

A Christmas Ghost Story

Mama moved to the little white cottage at the edge of a derelict lemon grove about twenty years ago, trading dust and howling coyotes for a fresh breeze and sea lions barking in the distance. She learned as a child how to pull cholla from the dog’s long hair and to read every constellation in the immense, pitch black sky as easily as neon signs. She grew up taciturn, her words sparse and sharp like the desert flora she loved. To this day, the scent of creosote still clings faintly to her skin, or maybe it just seems that way.

I’ve never quite understood what happened to make her suddenly pull up the stakes and land in this mild world, never far from the laughter of gulls or waves crashing against the sand.

I lived there, too, though I don’t remember it well. I was born on the winter solstice in the crowded emergency room of the only hospital for a hundred miles.

“Dropped you right on the floor like a loaf of bread,” Mama laughs.

She loves to tell me about the time she looked through the kitchen window and saw me in the garden, wearing diapers, tiny cowboy boots, and a tie-dye t-shirt, pulling up a carrot to feed a wild burro.

“I wish I remembered that,” I say each time.

“You were so little, I’m not surprised you don’t,” she replies.

My only memory of that place is the lonely owl calling for a mate through long winter nights, and the time I looked out to see its inscrutable face staring at me from the low sycamore branch outside my window. It hooted in surprise and flew away on soft, silent wings.

I also can’t even remember the last time Mama slept through the night. I first noticed her insomnia when I awoke from a deep, dreamless sleep to her crying into her hands at the foot of my bed, the mattress creaking with each heave of her chest.

“Mama?”

“Nicole!”

Her face radiated shock. She looked around the room, filled with carefully labeled unopened boxes, and felt for my face on the pillow.

“Nicole? Baby, I’m so sorry,” she sobbed.

“That’s OK Mama, I wasn’t tired anyhow.”

I threw my arms around her until her sorrow was spent and she collapsed into sleep by my side.

The next night, wailing from the kitchen woke me. I glided barefoot down the hallway to the kitchen doorway. Mama spun around to face me, screamed, and dropped the glass of water she had just filled into the sink.

“Nicky, don’t sneak up on me like that!”

I’d never seen her so rattled, and after that, left her to comfort herself. She went to work in the day, unpacked boxes in the evening, and most nights wandered forlornly around the house while I listened to her muffled footsteps and moans from my bed. Her life settled into a rhythm. She planted flowers and tended a few of the spindly lemon trees. On days when she swam in the surf, Mama returned smelling of citrus and kelp.

I think, after a time, she was happy enough because she began coming into my room sometimes when she couldn’t sleep, telling me stories of her childhood or poring over a photo album where she holds me, wrapped tightly in a blue and pink blanket, triumphantly on a hospital bed, or kisses me on the cheek on my first day of school. We laugh at the one where I’m barking back at the dog, and she caresses my chubby little baby legs in a bathtub photo. I always want her to tell me about the picture of me sitting on Santa’s lap, but she turns the page so fast I only catch a glimpse. I enfold her in my love, sure that nothing can breach such a formidable barrier, but her eyes are always hollow.

She baked me beautiful birthday cakes, fluffy pink frosting and sprinkles giving way to smooth ganache or fondant as the years passed. When I tired of my window’s unicorn and rainbow curtains, Mama redid my whole bedroom in sophisticated shades of blue and green, and replaced my wardrobe with the latest fashions.

At the heart of our domestic bliss, however, lay the mysterious sadness that tinged Mama’s speech and forced careful, measured movements from her always-tired limbs, as if the weight of even so slight a body as hers was more than she could bear. Something heavy flattened happiness and unhappiness alike and she trudged deliberately through her days.

“What’s wrong, Mama?” I would ask. She met my longing gaze with her own, then turned her head away.

Christmas came especially hard for her, and frequent calls from her sister only made her more despondent.

“Justine, you need to do something good for yourself. If you can’t make it for Christmas, please come visit for New Year’s. It’s been ages since I’ve seen you,” Aunt Susan implored over voicemail. “I love you and am here if you need me.”

We decorated a tree each year and Mama sang carols as she mopped the floor or baked cookies for her office but the closer we got to Christmas the quieter she became and she spent most nights curled up in her bed alone as soon as it got dark.

For some reason, I never seem to remember Christmas. I can remember the weeks before but as the date gets closer, it’s like I fall into a void within myself sometime around Christmas Eve and remain there until Mama’s sobbing drags me back and life goes on as usual.

“I would so love to see you, Justine, and it would be good for you to get away,” Aunt Susan said yesterday over the phone. Mama sighed and looked me up and down, as if noticing for the first time how adult I had become.

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

We spent the night looking at the old photos and telling the old stories, and some new ones about our life in the cottage, and as the weak Christmas Eve day sun struggled over the mountains to the east, Mama took my hand and rose.

“Nicky, come. I want to show you something.”

We got into the car and blasted through a maze of freeways until the air became dry and sharp and ragged mountains rose pink and grey to our right. We turned onto a smaller highway, and finally, a single-lane road. It felt both new and as familiar as my room, an uneasy sensation that made me nervous.

Mama parked the car in front of a shady, grassy park. We entered and strolled through what turned out to be gravestones. Mama clutched my hand and strode toward a slab of pink granite on the far end of the field. Her pulse pounded in the vein of her neck and she swallowed back tears.

“It’s OK, Mama, I’m here,” I said bravely, squeezing her hand.

“Nicole, I need you to just watch and listen for a moment,” she whispered. “Look.”

Engraved on the stone in tidy Gothic font it said:

NICOLE SUSAN BRISCOE

DECEMBER 21, 1994 - DECEMBER 24, 2000

Beloved daughter, forever young

The tattered remains of several stuffed animals and plastic flowers sat at the base and glass candleholders with printed dates lay scattered over the grave: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017. Fragments of broken glass hinted at even older candles.

Mama took a new candleholder and lighter from her purse. I saw a label with “2022” on it as the flame leaped onto the wick. I felt as if my guts were being torn out through my feet.

Mama cleared a space and set the candle down with the others, then faced me with both my hands in hers.

“Nicky, I need you to really listen this time. This is your home. I suppose it has been for 22 years.”

“I don’t understand, Mama!”

She smoothed the panic off my face with the back of her hand.

“We were coming home from the mall. You had sat for the first time on Santa’s lap and you were so scared at first! But he told you a joke and asked what you wanted for Christmas and when you smiled, that’s when the photographer took your picture. We had hot cocoa and started on the way home.”

I felt dizzy and had a sudden sensation of speed as images and sounds came back in a blur. Metal crunching. Pain. Oblivion. Then Mama sobbing on my bed.

“But we never made it. Or, rather, I eventually did but you did not. A drunk driver going the wrong way hit us head on. The airbag saved my life but not yours.”

I crumpled as if struck by lightning. Mama knelt and cradled my face in her hands.

“I’m so sorry, baby. I swerved but it was too late. I wish it had been me.”

I heard the most piteous wailing come out of my open mouth and could not make it stop.

“You are grown now, and have been for years,” Mama said gently. “It’s time for you to move on, and for me to move on too. This time, I’m begging you to please stay.”

We huddled on the grave, Mama stroking my hair and wiping away my tears, while the candle sputtered out and coyotes seranaded the twilight. I inhaled her scent, which was that of the desert itself, and pressed my ravaged face against her breast as lethargy seeped into me and my vision began to fade.

“This gets harder every year, Nicky,” Mama murmured. “I can’t do it anymore. You can't keep coming back."

She kissed my cheek but I barely felt it because my face was starting to dissolve.

“Mama! Help!” I shrieked, but she heard only agonized moans.

“I love you, Nicole. Goodbye,” Mama said as the earth absorbed me in a mist.

Mama dried her own tears and reached for her phone.

“Hi, Susan?” she said wearily. “Can you pick me up at the airport tomorrow?”

[thethistlegirlwrites]

If the "Scary Ghost Stories" are a classic Christmas tradition you wish would come back...I wrote one! Sort of! Featuring my chaotic little team of characters from Compass.

Going home to Pete's Appalachian family for Christmas was supposed to be an escape from work life for a week. But when Pete's five year old niece is bitten by a vampire, Sierra, Pete, and Shay are back on the clock...in more ways than one. 

You can read it on my WorldAnvil here: http://tinyurl.com/4at24mav

Or on my author site here: http://tinyurl.com/y3k2jjcs

(Yes, I wrote it in a week and it might be a bit messy, and I'm totally spoiling the ending of Compass for everyone, but like I said yesterday, some writing advice can be ignored sometimes and I'd rather be sharing fun Christmas stories than worrying about any of that!)

@catwingsathena @nade2308 @the-one-and-only-valkyrie @telltaleclerk @ettawritesnstudies

[fuckyeahmarkgatiss]

“Count Magnus is the latest ghost story for Christmas from Mark Gatiss coming to the BBC and Gatiss also stars as Jacob Marley in a stage production of A Christmas Carol in his own retelling of Dickens’ classic winter ghost story.”

New ghost story for the holiday season! 🎄👻

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Towards the end of each year, as fireplaces are lit and hot cocoa is made, Americans have made it a tradition to revisit their favorite classic holiday books, movies and songs.

And though ghost stories may seem out of place in present-day American holiday celebrations, they were once a Christmas staple, reaching their peak of popularity in Victorian England.

A Dark, Spooky Time of Year

Like most longstanding cultural customs, the precise origin of telling ghost stories at the end of the year is unknown, largely because it began as an oral tradition without written records.

But, according to Sara Cleto, a folklorist specializing in British literature and co-founder of The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic, the season around winter solstice, has been one of transition and change.

“For a very, very, very long time, [the season] has provoked oral stories about spooky things in many different countries and cultures all over the world,” she says.

Furthermore, spooky storytelling gave people something to do during the long, dark evenings before electricity.

“The long midwinter nights meant folks had to stop working early, and they spent their leisure hours huddled close to the fire,” says Tara Moore, an assistant professor of English at Elizabethtown College, author of 'Victorian Christmas in Print' and editor of The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories.

“Plus, you didn’t need to be literate to retell the local ghost story.”

Effects of the Industrialization Revolution

It was in Victorian England that telling supernatural tales at the end of the year — specifically, during the Christmas season — went from an oral tradition to a timely trend.

This was in part due to the development of the steam-powered printing press during the Industrial Revolution that made the written word more widely available.

This gave Victorians the opportunity to commercialize and commodify existing oral ghost stories, turning them into a version they could sell.

“Higher literacy rates, cheaper printing costs, and more periodicals meant that editors needed to fill pages,” Moore says.

“Around Christmas time, they figured they could convert the old storytelling tradition to a printed version.”

People who moved out of their towns and villages and into larger cities still wanted access to the supernatural sagas they heard around the fireplace growing up.

“Fortunately, Victorian authors like Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, and Arthur Conan Doyle worked through the fall to cook up these stories and have them ready to print in time for Christmas,” Moore says.

Industrialization not only provided tools to distribute spooky stories, uncertainty during the era also fueled interest in the genre, says Brittany Warman, a folklorist specializing in Gothic literature and co-founder of The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic. She adds:

"Interest was driven by the rise of industrialization, the rise of science, and the looming fall of Victorian Britain as a superpower.

All of these things were in people's minds and made the world seem a little bit darker [and] a little bit scarier.”

Stories Find a Wide-Ranging Audience

Telling horror-filled holiday tales continued to be a family affair in England, even when they were read rather than recited.

“We know from illustrations and diaries that whole families read these periodicals together,” Moore says.

The popularity of Victorian Christmas ghost stories also transcended socioeconomic status, according to Moore.

They were available to read everywhere from cheap publications to expensive Christmas annuals that middle-class ladies would show off on their coffee tables.

Their broad audience was reflected in the stories themselves, which sometimes centered around working class characters and other times took place in haunted manor houses.

“These upper class settings were intended to invite readers from all classes into an idealized, upper-crust Christmas, the type todays’ fans of Downton Abbey still enjoy as entertainment,” Moore adds.

Charles Dickens’ 1843 novella A Christmas Carol has forever linked the British author with the holiday season, but his contributions to Christmas in Victorian England — including the tradition of telling and reading ghost stories — extend far beyond Jacob Marley’s visit to Scrooge.

In fact, Cleto says that Dickens played a “huge part” in popularizing the genre in England.

“He wrote a bunch of different Christmas novellas, several of which involved ghosts, specifically,” she says, “and then he started editing more and more Christmas ghost stories from other people, and working those into the magazines he was already editing. And that just caught like wildfire.”

Dickens also helped shape Christmas literature in general, Moore says, by formalizing expectations about themes like forgiveness and reunion during the holiday season.

American Christmas Traditions: More Syrupy Than Spooky

Although countless trends made their way from England to America during the Victorian era, the telling of ghost stories during the Christmas season was not one that really caught on.

A Christmas Carol was an immediate best-seller in the United States, but at the time of its publication, Dickens was arguably the most famous writer in the world and already wildly popular.

The novella’s success in the U.S. likely had more to do with Dickens’ existing (massive) fan base than it did Americans’ interest in incorporating the supernatural into Christmas.

“American Christmas scenes and stories tended to be syrupy sweet,” Moore explains.

"There were a few American writers of the period trying to put Victorian-style Christmas ghost stories into American culture,” Warman says, including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James.

Washington Irving made a similar and earlier attempt, slipping the supernatural into Christmas-themed short stories published in 1819 and 1820.

Warman theorizes that America’s reluctance to embrace the Christmas ghost story tradition had to do, at least in part, with the country’s attitudes towards things like magic and superstitions.

“In America, we generally had a bit of a resistance to the supernatural in a way that European countries didn't,” she explains.

“When you come to America, you come with a fresh start. You come with a secular mindset and the idea that you were leaving the past behind. And some of these spooky superstitions were thought of as being part of the past.”

Another reason telling spooky stories never took off as a Christmas tradition in the United States was because it became more firmly established as a Halloween tradition, thanks to Irish and Scottish immigrants.

“That really impacted culture here, because they brought with them a concept similar to Halloween and that became, for America, the time period for ghosts,” Warman explains.

Traces of the Tradition

Other than A Christmas Carol, there is another piece of pop culture that reflects the Victorian Christmas tradition: a single line from a song written and released in 1963 by American musicians.

First recorded by Andy Williams, the song “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” lists 'scary ghost stories' as one of the highlights of the holiday season.

Although it’s unclear why the writers of the song (Edward Pola and George Wyle) included the tradition, Cleto says that it’s possible that the lyric is a reference to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

“It's only the one text,” she notes, “but it's such a big deal here in the US and the UK, and is pretty much all that Americans know about Christmas ghost stories in isolation.”

[rustbeltjessie]

December, aka Spooky Season Pt. 2 (December 16, 2022)

[leannareneehieber]

Omg folks look at the log line, I'm going to faint: "AUTHORS: EDGAR ALLAN POE and LEANNA RENEE HIEBER"!!! *runs around flailing in a black crepe whirlwind*

"Not More Lovely than Full of Glee" is a Christmas 'ghost' story about what happens after the events of Poe's "The Oval Portrait"...

Now live, for free, on PseudoPod, in digital and audio! Donations to PseudoPod encouraged!

Darlings, can I just say what a thrill it is, what an honor it is, what a joy it is to see a lifelong dream come true? To be situated next to THE legend, the man who remains my foremost inspiration, it is just the most incredible thing. I find it hard to put to words what it feels like to see my name next to his name. He is my everything. I would not be a writer if it were not for him.

I wrote "Not More Lovely than Full of Glee" for A WINTER'S TALE: HORROR STORIES FOR THE YULETIDE in 2020 and I had a dream that someday I'd see my sequel placed side-by-side with what inspired it. "The Oval Portrait" remains one of my favorite Poe stories, short and terribly chilling, and I felt I had something to say about the woman whose life was painted away...

Listen / Read here! Happy Holidays! Happy Haunting!

[jaybeefoxy]

Nice interview with Mark

[screamingeyepress]

Christmas Ghost Stories: Between The Lights By E.F. Benson

In a realm where the supernatural intertwines with the ordinary, set against the backdrop of a mysterious country house, our protagonist grapples with unexplained occurrences. The story navigates the delicate boundary between the living and the dead, offering a gripping exploration of the uncanny.

Read the story: https://www.screamingeyepress.com/between-the-lights-by-e-f-benson/

[georgelthomas]

The History of Telling Ghost Stories at Christmas

The History of Telling Ghost Stories at Christmas #WritingCommunity #WriterCommunity #BloggingCommunity #BloggerCommunity #ChristmasGhostStories #FestiveSeason #History #Tradition #Blog #Holidays #HolidaySeason #Christmas #Ghost #Xmas #Solstice

Hi everyone, I hope you’re all well!It’s that time of year again—the time for eggnog and Christmas cookies, and as the winter nights draw close and turn chilly, there is no better time for telling a ghost story around the fireplace or, if you’re anything like me, reading them in bed at night. But when did this tradition begin? Why do we like to tell ghost stories at Christmas? Let’s explore! The…

[thegothiclibrary]

Review of Sunless Solstice—Christmas Ghost Stories

As my various posts over the years about Christmas ghost stories might suggest, I’m on a bit of a mission to bring this spooky seasonal activity back into fashion. But I’m not alone in my quest! The British Library has started publishing annual collections of haunting Christmas tales as part of their Tales of the Weird series. Sunless Solstice: Strange Christmas Tales for the Longest Nights,…

[thatwritererinoriordan]

Scary Christmas!

[djohnhopper]

GHOSTS for Christmas. Just started reading Catherine Crowe's 'Ghosts and Family Legends: a volume for Christmas' published in 1859. Also about to start her 'The Night-Side of Nature, or Ghosts and Ghost Seers' of 1848. Recently discovered Catherine, would love to have known her. Strange fact: In February 1854, she was discovered naked in Edinburgh one night, convinced that spirits had rendered her invisible. #CatherineCrowe #ghoststories #christmasghoststories #reading

[fuckyeahmarkgatiss]

The Fangoria interview is available now.

[365filmsbyauroranocte]

A Warning to the Curious (Lawrence Gordon Clark, 1972)

[oculus-de-malus]

BBC's Ghost Stories for Christmas: Lost Hearts (1973)

[leannareneehieber]

Hello darlings. My one wish for the world, on this day and every day, is Peace. There isn't anything I can write here that I haven't already said in my books, as my books are aching, yearning hopes for a kinder and more beautiful world; ghosts and all. And on this day in particular, I like to share this segment from MISS VIOLET AND THE GREAT WAR (set in my Strangely Beautiful universe) which features The Christmas Truce of World War I, a real historic event. May you find transcendence in the year ahead. Blessings - Leanna