The winter solstice falls on Saturday, December 21st, this year. For centuries, the belief has been that the veil between the living and the departed is most easily lifted on the shortest day of the year.
That is why the ghosts appear to Ebeneezer Scrooge just before Christmas. Charles Dickens’ writing of A Christmas Carol followed a long tradition of ghosts showing themselves at this time of year.
The tradition has continued right up to modern times. In the 1963 song “The Right Time of the Year,” Andy Williams sings:
There’ll be parties for hosting/ Marshmallows for toasting/And caroling out in the snow/There’ll be scary ghost stories/And tales of the glories/Of Christmases long, long ago.
When did this begin, the custom of scary tales told just around the time when families traditionally gather to open gifts, admire the Christmas tree, and dive into a big dinner?
It is the solstice rather than the celebration of the birth of Jesus that seems to have launched it. The days were at their shortest, food supplies could be running low — and spring seemed a long way away. Gathering to frighten one another with stories of the supernatural was a way to ward off more prosaic fears. (Not that different than people going to the cinema to watch a horror film today.)
However, there was nothing Andy Williams-ish about the earliest known Christmas ghost stories. They were gruesome medieval stories. Within some stiff competition, the Icelandic tales were particularly terrifying.
In The Saga of the People of Floi, a group gathers for feasting on Christmas Day, finally falling asleep, exhausted. That night, a knock is heard on the door. One of the revelers rouses himself to answer it, steps outside and disappears. One by one, some half a dozen men are picked off, for it turns out that specters wait outside to drive them insane and to their deaths.
“Once Christmas is over, the dead return in force: not only are the rowdy Jostein’s crew brought back as Revenants, but so are a number of dead locals,” writes Jon Kaneko-James in the article Ghosts of Christmas Past: Christmas Ghost Stories, Scandinavian Revenants, and the Medieval Dead in England. “Finally Thorgils, captain of the crew who slept early, takes all of the dead and burns them in a pyre, ensuring that none of the Revenants, one of whom was his wife, would rise to trouble the living again.”
More Icelandic stories unfurl Christmas horrors, such as certain chapters of The Eyrbyggja Saga, in which a moon foretells the dead seeking to join the living for Christmas — and it’s very difficult to get them to leave. The Thorgunna section revolves around a wealthy woman dying and giving specific requests about what should be done with her bedsheets. These requests are not honored. (Are you surprised?)
Note: The excellent podcast Saga Thing tackles The Eyrbyggja Saga with insight and humor.
Today Iceland has the tradition of the lovable Yule Lads who show up on December 12th, leaving gifts in the shoes that children left on windowsills.
But the Yule Lads have gone through an astonishing transformation. In Journalist Ragnar Tomas writes:
“The first mention of the Icelandic Yule Lads is the 17th-century Poem of Grýla , which asserts that they are the sons of Grýla — a flesh-eating hag who cooks children in a cauldron — and Leppalúði, a lazy troglodyte. Needless to say, such people should not reproduce. Ailurophiles (‘cat-lovers’) might think better of them knowing that they kept a cat. But not so fast. Theirs was not some amiable Maine Coon, who lazed around their apartment and snuggled up to house callers. No, their cat was the ‘Christmas Cat,’ who prowled the snowy countryside and devoured children who had not been given new clothes to wear before Christmas (admittedly, an oddly specific culinary preference).”
Medieval England offers up its goodly portion of Yuletime chills too. One example: A tailor named Snawball who encounters the spirit of a dead man in the form of a crow wreathed in fire.
One of my favorites is from the Tudor period, taking place on the Orkneys. A woman named Katharine Fordyce dies in childbirth but appears in a dream to tell a woman who was her neighbor that she must name her next daughter after Katharine. As long as that girl lives in the home, the family will be safe.
When the girl grows up and marries, preparing to leave home, Katharine Fordyce has her vengeance. On the wedding night a “fearful storm” arrives that “the like had no’ been minded in the time o’ anybody alive,” according to Examples of Printed Folk-lore Concerning the Orkney & Shetland Islands
The sheep belonging to the bride’s father were swept off the land and into the sea:
Some folk did say that old men with long white beards were seen stretching their pale hands out of the surf and taking hold of the creatures.
More and more such stories found themselves into print. In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Mamillius says, “A sad tale’s best for winter. I have one. Of sprites and goblins.” It hardly needs to be pointed out that the Bard loved a ghost!
Still, it’s the Victorian age, with its whiff of the occult, when telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve or another night close to Christmas firmly established itself. Groups gathered, usually around the fireplace, to share tales of ghouls and specters, trying to outdo one another.
Of course, no discussion of ghost stories is complete without M. R. James, who lived from 1862 to 1936. A medieval scholar and provost of King’s College, Cambridge, he published collections of ghost stories that have exerted enormous influence. As The New Yorker wrote in a story on James, “At Eton and at Cambridge, he liked telling his scary stories to boys and undergraduates around the fire in a dimly lit room, and presenting a new story to friends at Christmas.”
I'm not the only one to thrill to M.R. James. He is the subject of a recent episode on one of my favorite podcasts, Gone Medieval: 'The Haunting Medieval World of M.R. James.' It's worth a listen!
It’s hard to choose among H. R. James’ gems, but the one that seems to linger with me the longest is “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.” A professor finds a whistle in a ruin bearing two Latin inscriptions. One he can translate; the other he can’t. Not knowing it’s a warning, he blows the whistle…
From 1971 to 1978, the BBC ran A Ghost Story for Christmas, adapting five stories from M. R. James, among other works for television. They were “The Stalls of Barchester,” “A Warning to the Curious,” “Lost Hearts,” “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,” and “The Ash Tree.”
Americans are no slouches in the telling of ghost stories, nor in connecting them to the tradition of Christmas time. Henry James begins his 1898 horror novella The Turn of the Screw like this:
The tale had held us, round the fireplace, sufficiently breathless, however except the obvious remark that it changed into gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an antique residence, a weird tale need to basically be, I remember no commentary uttered until someone to mention that it become the satisfactory case he had met wherein the sort of visitation had fallen on an infant.
Ghost stories are very subjective — of course — and forgive me if I’ve left out anyone’s favorites! And be sure to read one around Christmastime.
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Nancy Bilyeau is a magazine editor who has worked on the staffs of ‘Entertainment Weekly,’ ‘Rolling Stone,’ and ‘InStyle’ and a writer of historical fiction. She followed her Joanna Stafford suspense trilogy, set in Tudor England, with ‘The Blue,’ an espionage tale set in the porcelain factories of 18th century Europe, ‘The Fugitive Colours,’ its sequel, and, in 2025, ‘The Versailles Formula.’
Nancy wrote a Christmas ghost story novella titled ‘The Ghost of Madison Avenue.’ It is set in the Morgan Library in 1912.
Learn more at www.nancybilyeau.com.
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