“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 —”
Wait … scary ghost stories? Shouldn’t those have been told back in October leading up to Halloween? After all, this is Christmas, “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” as singer Andy Williams tells us in the classic tune from his self-titled 1963 Christmas album.
Before we chastise the dearly departed Williams and songwriters George Wyle (who also co-wrote “The Ballad of Gilligan’s Island” with television producer Sherwood Schwartz) and Edward Pola for mixing up the holidays, let’s find out what “scary ghost stories” there are at Christmastime.
‘MARLEY WAS DEAD’
Ghost stories told during the holiday season should not be a surprise, given that Christmas is integral to one of the best-known ghost stories, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
Dickens tells us it’s a ghost story in the first sentence of the novella—“Marley was dead: to begin with.” And the last sentence of that opening paragraph: “Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”
We know then that we’re not getting ready to read a lighthearted piece, such as the story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
Though we normally associate telling ghost stories with Halloween or, more generally, with gatherings around a campfire, Erika Brady, an emeritus professor of folk studies at Western Kentucky University, said that songwriters Pola and Wyle were referring to a custom in Great Britain’s Victorian Era (1837-1901) of telling ghost stories at Christmas.
“A broader way to think about ghost stories at Christmas is to think about the season of Halloween through Twelfth Night [the 12th day of Christmas, Jan. 5, also called the “Eve of Epiphany”] that has to do with the penetration of the supernatural world and our natural world,” Brady said.
“That seasonal period of the year is a cross-cultural phenomenon. Most cultures have an understanding that there are points of the year where there’s a boom from the supernatural world, certain periods where the membrane between those worlds is more penetrable in an empirical sense. In a customary sense, it’s a time our attention turns to topics of supernatural interest, whether we are believers in that or not.”
Brady posited that the chill in the air beginning in late October starts priming the supernatural pump—and people’s imaginations—heading into winter and the Christmas season, making the holidays especially ripe for tales of specters.
Although winter meant longer nights and colder weather, Brady said there may be other reasons people in Victorian England gathered around the fire to tell ghost stories.
“I think there’s a general sense that Christmas roughly corresponds to the [winter] solstice,” Brady said. “That’s a significant period in many, many cultures, where the days start to get longer, and there’s a sense of renewal and rebirth. I think of those ideas in the sense that they suggest death isn’t absolute; that, like the seasons change or like the trees renew themselves, maybe there’s a way that it’s possible for the human spirit to live on.”
Americans might find it baffling, also, that, in Victorian England, telling ghost stories was more common on Christmas Eve than it was on Halloween.
In his 1891 book Told After Supper, author and humorist Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927) wrote: “Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories. Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about spectres. It is a genial, festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, dead bodies, and murders, and blood.
“For ghost stories to be told on any other evening than the evening of the twenty-fourth of December would be impossible in English society as at present regulated.”
IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER …
Getting back to the idea that the cold and darkness of winter nights compel people to gather, Brady puts forth another thought about what makes Christmastime and winter such fertile ground for ghost stories.
“There’s something about sitting around a fire; something about the drawing of the fire, of watching fire in a fireplace,” she said. “Truly, I think you go into a light trance state. You know you’re watching the flickering of the flames, and it’s a stimulant to a certain kind of reaction.
“The other thing I think about the dark—and this is my own notion—is when you are telling stories in the dark, or when you’re telling stories around a campfire, generally you’re not looking one another in the eye. You’re looking at the fire.”
Although one might casually glance or catch someone else’s eye around the fire, Brady said it stood in stark contrast to sitting around a dinner table, where facial expressions and reactions to stories being told were laid bare for all to see and judge.
“But when you’re in the dark, everybody is—a little bit—in their own world,” she said. “It’s much easier to work on someone’s imagination in the dark. You couldn’t tell the same story in the daylight in your garden that you could around the hearth or a campfire. It would be a different kind of story.
“Around the fire, especially when the dark is all around you, anything seems possible.”
‘SOMETHING GHOSTLY IN THE AIR’
The cold draws us together, Brady said, in addition to the desire for warmth and companionship. “We may not have that kind of togetherness at any other time of the year,” she said. “If there’s ever a time to pass around those narratives and test them out, see what other people believe, Christmastime—winter—would be it.”
Jerome, from beyond the grave, agreed with Brady and wrote as much in his book. “There must be something ghostly in the air of Christmas—something about the close, muggy atmosphere that draws up the ghosts,” he wrote, “like the dampness of the summer rains brings out the frogs and snails.”
Indeed, Jerome suggested that there is a finite number of ghost stories to be told, and outside of those, everything else is variations on a theme.
“This, of course, is not our fault but the fault of ghosts, who never will try any new performances, but always will keep steadily to old, safe business,” he wrote. “The consequence is that, when you have been at one Christmas Eve party and heard six people relate their adventures with spirits, you do not require to hear any more ghost stories.”
One such theme Jerome cites is that of a man “who is returning home late at night from a Freemasons’ dinner, and who, noticing a light issuing from a ruined abbey, creeps up and looks through the keyhole. He sees the ghost of a ‘grey sister’ kissing the ghost of a brown monk and is so inexpressibly shocked and frightened that he faints on the spot, and is discovered there the next morning, lying in a heap against the door, still speechless, and with his faithful latch-key clasped tightly in his hand.”
In his book, Jerome offers several other examples, noting that all of them were told on Christmas Eve.
It’s with a twist of humor, and a nod to the longtime tradition of hosting family during the holidays, that Jerome points out that “everybody has quite enough to put up with in the way of a houseful of living relations, without wanting the ghosts of any dead ones mooning about the place, I am sure.”