Why This is the Best Time for a Ghost Story

Marley appears to Scrooge, original illustration from A Christmas Carol.

The winter solstice, falling on December 22nd this year, is making itself known. For centuries the belief has been that on the shortest day of the year, the veil between the living and the departed is most easily lifted. 

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. I write about Dickens' motivation in writing the novella here.

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, dated to the 11th century, 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 horrors told around the fire in late December, such as certain parts of the sprawling 11th century Eyrbyggja Saga, in which a strange 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?)

This story is absurdly chilling! According to Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind:

Now the same night the corpse-bearers came home after Thorgunna had been buried in Skalaholt, as men sat by the meal-fires of Frodriver, all who were in the house saw how a half-moon was shining on the paneling of the house wall--and it went backwards and widdershins round the house, and it did not vanish away while folk sat by the fires. So Thorodd asked Thorir Woodenleg what that might bode. Thorir said it was "the moon of the weird," and "the death of men will follow thereafter."

Note: The excellent podcast Saga Thing tackles Eyrbyggja Saga with insight and humor.

Things go bump in the night in the Thorgunna section of the Icelandic saga

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 What's On, 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!

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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."

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...

"Whistle and I'll Come to You"

From 1971 to 1978, the BBC ran A Ghost Story for Christmas, adapting for television five stories from M. R. James, among other works. 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.

The other American ghost story closest to my heart is Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Oh what happens to the nervous, withdrawn Eleanor when she accepts an invitation to look for ghosts at a house in which no one could bear living. 

The novel begins:

Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.   

Ghost stories are very subjective--of course--and forgive me if I've left out anyone's favorites!

I paid tribute to the wonderful tradition of the ghost story in my novella, The Ghost of Madison Avenue. The veil between living and dead is drawn aside in the weeks leading up to Christmas in my story, taking place in New York in 1912 and revolving around the private library of J. P. Morgan. 

Click here to learn more about my book and read the reviews.

Finally, here's a photo I took of the book "out in the wild." I think this has a certain "Haunting of Hill House" vibe, don't you?

Nancy Bilyeau is a magazine editor and novelist. She published a trilogy set in the 16th century--The Crown, The Chalice, and The Tapestry--with Simon & Schuster. Her standalone novel The Blue is an art espionage story set in the rivalrous porcelain factories of 18th century Europe. In December 2019 she published The Ghost of Madison Avenue, a mystery set in the private library of J.P. Morgan.

The Story Behind Charles Dickens' Writing of "A Christmas Carol"

This story was written for The Vintage News. Photos are courtesy of The Morgan Library. For more information on the wonderful exhibit at the Morgan Library on Charles Dickens, up this season until January 9, 2019, go here.

By Nancy Bilyeau

In the autumn of 1843, Charles Dickens was at something of a crossroads in his writing career. At the age of 31, he enjoyed literary fame due to the success of The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, but his latest novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, was not selling well in serialized form, and Dickens feared that his popularity was sinking.


He also had money problems. Dickens had a wife and four children to support; in late 1843 his wife, Catherine, was pregnant with their fifth. Dickens had just returned from a year-long trip to the United States that had been quite costly. His idea was to rent out the London home and for the family to retreat to the Continent for a year, but for that he needed funds.


So Charles Dickens needed a hit and quickly, but it's doubtful that in his most extreme fantasies, he could have foreseen the success and lasting cultural impact of A Christmas Carol.


At this time of year, attention often turns to Dickens's novel of Ebeneezer Scrooge, which gives us a superlative ghost story while introducing so many things that make up a "Merry Christmas." We enjoy the novel, the many film versions (while arguing over which actor is the best Scrooge), the new theatrical adaptations, even the cartoons.

"A Christmas Carol" original manuscript, purchased by J. P. Morgan in 1897.   Author: Courtesy of the Morgan Library

The original Dickens' manuscript is owned by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, one of its prized possessions, and from November 3, 2017, to January 14, 2018, the manuscript showing Dickens' own corrections is on display in the exhibition "Charles Dickens and the Spirit of Christmas."


Dickens was always preoccupied with the poor of England, especially in London and other cities. The country was going full tilt as an industrialized society, but that meant brutal working schedules for many, often 16 hours a day in the factories for six or seven days a week. "Child labor at the time was synonymous to slavery," wrote scholar Dr. Anindita Dutta. "Children were subject to inhuman torture, exploitation, and even death."

"A Christmas Carol" title page bearing Dickens' writing. Author: Courtesy of the Morgan Library

Some politicians, religious leaders, artists, and writers called for reform, but many others felt that there was no need to protect children from parents or guardians forcing them to work.

The year that Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, a newly married Victoria was on the throne, the Conservative Robert Peel was prime minister. The year before, 1842, an income tax was levied in England, for the first time in peace. There was a sense of turmoil in the country.


The 1834 New Poor Law had done much to criminalize poverty. Up to then, it had been up to the parishes to try to care for their poor as best they could. The new law said parishes must come together and create workhouses where aid would be provided. In the "workhouse," where families fallen on hard times were forced to live, conditions were kept as unpleasant as possible without actually killing people on order to make sure the message was clear. Inmates of the workhouse were fed three meals a day of thin gruel, with an onion twice a week and on Sundays perhaps a roll. When Ebeneezer demanded of those trying to collect money for the poor, "Are there no prisons, are there no workhouses?" and a man quietly answered that many would rather die than go there, he was speaking to an urgent social issue of the era.

Moreover, Dickens had experienced poverty firsthand. When he was 12, he was removed from school and sent to work at a blacking factory for at least 10 hours a day, six days a week. At the time, his father, John Dickens, was sentenced to Marshalsea Prison because he couldn't pay a debt of 40 pounds; his wife and children joined him there, while Charles lived alone in lodgings nearby, under pressure to help his father relieve the debt, which was the only way out of prison. The memories of this time scarred him for the rest of his life: "My whole nature was so penetrated with grief and humiliation."

The Ghost of Christmas Present. Author: Courtesy of the Morgan Library

By the time of the writing of A Christmas Carol, England was in the grip of "the hungry forties." Despite punitive measures—or perhaps because of them—there was rising unemployment and malnutrition in 1840s England.

In September 1843, Dickens visited the Samuel Starey's Field Land Ragged School, where the most deprived children of London's slums were taught lessons. He was disturbed by what he saw, and decided to tackle the gross unfairness of London society, its greed and callousness, in his book. "He had an idea of the state as a bad and neglectful parent of the poor," wrote Michael Slater in his biography Charles Dickens.

Dickens' portrait by Jeremiah Gurney. Author: Courtesy of the Morgan Library

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in six weeks, writing intensely from about 9 AM to 2 PM every day, followed by long, brainstorming walks, as far as 20 miles. He penned it in black ink, with a goose quill. There was no outline, no first drafts. He wrote the novel in one sustained effort, making numerous corrections in the margins.


Perhaps because he was on a fierce deadline, Dickens took much from his own history to create the characters. Many believe that Bob Cratchit and his large family trembling on the brink of ruin was based on Dickens' own father, the hapless clerk John Dickens. "He had begun, from the time of writing A Christmas Carol onwards, to draw on his own early life for fictional purposes at a much deeper level than before," said biographer Michael Slater. "It comes closer here to the factual sufferings of his childhood than ever before."


When finished, A Christmas Carol was 68 pages long, what would now be called novella length. Incredibly, he conveyed it to a publisher on December 2nd and it was available for the reading public to purchase on December 19th.

Ghost of Christmas Present illustration. Author: Courtesy of the Morgan Library

The book met with universal delight, and sold 6,000 copies in five days. By Christmas Eve it was sold out and new printings ordered. Dickens was very pleased by the reviews—“a most prodigious success, the greatest, I think, I have ever achieved”—but upset that initially, the book did not fulfill his goal of making him a lot of money.


Dickens himself was responsible, for he had taken control of the printing details, and he insisted on expensive production, with salmon-colored cloths and finely detailed colored etchings, but a relatively low price of five shillings. This meant a very narrow margin of profit. After deducting all of his expenses, Dickens made a grand total of 137 pounds from A Christmas Carol in its first round of publication.


"What a wonderful thing it is, that such a great success should occasion me such intolerable anxiety and disappointment!" he wrote of his sales.

Charles Dickens did come around to believing that his creation of A Christmas Carol was well worth his time. Most immediately, it initiated the lucrative series of Christmas books that he wrote over the next few year. The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man (1848) are all on display at the Morgan Library and Museum, along with the first one, the book that has never gone out of print: A Christmas Carol.

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Nancy Bilyeau is the author of the 18th century-set novel 'The Blue,' published on Dec. 3, 2018, in the US, the UK, Australia and Canada. The protagonist is a Huguenot artist living in Spitalfields who becomes a spy in a porcelain factory. Publishers Weekly said, "Historical fans will be well satisfied."