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, edited by Lucy Evans and Tanya Kirk, is the third such collection, released in December 2022. If you, like me, would like to start spending your Christmases telling scary stories around a fire, I cannot recommend these collections enough! Continue reading Review of Sunless Solstice—Christmas Ghost Stories
Tag: Christmas ghost stories
Christmas Ghost Stories, Part 3
’Tis the season … for Christmas ghost stories! In recent years, I’ve been all about bringing back the classic tradition of livening up the winter months by sharing tales of terror. After all, encounters with the spirit world are the perfect way to get into the Christmas spirit! You can see some of the seasonally spooky tales I’ve previously recommended here and here. But if those aren’t enough for you, here’s a third round of Christmas ghost stories:
Humorous Ghost Stories
Not every ghost story has to be terrifying! Indeed, horror and humor are surprisingly similar modes of writing—both depend on eliciting certain emotional reactions from the reader through carefully timed revelations and unexpected juxtapositions. Horror can all too easily give way into unintentional humor, as any connoisseur of schlocky B-movies can tell you. But that blurred line can also be courted intentionally. All throughout the Golden Age of the ghost story—from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth—writers poked fun at the popular genre with silly and satirical takes on the ghost story. Here are just a few of my favorite examples of spectral tales more likely to make you split your sides with laughter than scream in fright:
Christmas Ghost Stories, Part 2
A couple years ago, I wrote about the tradition of the Christmas ghost story—which became an indispensable part of the festive season after Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol in 1843. The heyday of the Christmas ghost story overlapped with the Golden Age of the ghost story more generally, and many celebrated spooky authors began incorporating Christmas into their haunting tales. Last time, I highlighted several stories by male authors, but women were equally if not more involved in the festive ghost story game. Check out the stories by women below for a seasonally appropriate scare!
Christmas Ghost Stories
It’s the spookiest time of the year. No, not Halloween … Christmas! In centuries past, one of the most popular traditions of this holiday season was the telling of ghost stories. If you think about it, it makes sense—what better way to spend the longest, coldest nights of the year than to get your blood pumping with some tales of terror? It’s unclear how long this custom has been around, but it saw a significant resurgence during the Victorian era, due in large part to Charles Dickens and his famous ghost story, A Christmas Carol (1843). In this British classic, the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come, which scare him into changing his selfish ways. In the wake of Dickens, may other authors picked up their pens to write tales of seasonal ghosts. Below are a few of my favorites:
