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!
“The Ghost’s Summons” by Ada Buisson (1868)
Ada Buisson was a British author who rubbed shoulders with the likes of celebrated novelist and fellow ghost story writer Mary Elizabeth Braddon. In fact, Braddon was the one who published “The Ghost’s Summons” in her magazine Belgravia, and though Buisson is little known today, this story continues to appear in collections of Victorian Christmas ghost tales. The story starts with a down-on-his-luck doctor about to sit down to his dinner and dreaming of some hot Christmas punch when a mysterious patient appears with an unusual request. The pale but otherwise healthy-looking man asserts that he will die at 1:00am and offers the doctor a hefty sum to preside over his deathbed. Unable to resist, the doctor follows the man through the snow to a splendid mansion that sits just beside a graveyard. And indeed, when the clock strikes 1:00am, the doctor sees a ghostly “shape” appear at this patient’s bedside. But rather than your run-of-the-mill spirit of the dead, this shape might be something more sinister.…
You can find the text of the story here, or check out one of my favorite bands, Valentine Wolfe, giving a spooky reading accompanied by music here (the story starts at twelve minutes in).
“A Twin-Identity” by Edith Stewart Drewry (1891)
Did you like that ghost story/murder mystery combo? Here’s another one that was also published in Braddon’s magazine Belgravia. Like Ada Buisson, Edith Stewart Drewry is rarely read today, although she was a prolific author of novels and short stories alike. I learned of her, and of this story in particular, from Melissa Edmundson’s collection Women’s Weird 2. While the ghost was the murderer in “The Ghost’s Summons,” in “A Twin-Identity” the ghost of the victim helps a professional investigator to solve the crime. In a particularly interesting set-up for the frame story, a French female police detective entertains her fellow travelers with a ghost story while they ride the train to London on their way to Christmas celebrations. Her story is timely for the season, as it concerns a wealthy young bride who was brutally murdered on Christmas Eve. After her superiors give up in frustration, the detective doggedly pursues the investigation for many months. When she is close to solving it, but still missing a piece of the puzzle, the ghost of the murdered woman appears on the anniversary of her death to guide the detective to the murderer.
The best version of this text that I could find online is this copy of a newspaper printing, but you can also find the story in Women’s Weird 2: More Strange Stories by Women, 1891–1937, edited by Melissa Edmundson.
“The Shadow” by Edith Nesbit (1905)
Edith Nesbit is another British author I first discovered through Melissa Edmundson’s Women’s Weird books, though she’s a bit better known today than Buisson and Drewry. Like “A Twin-Identity,” “The Shadow” is presented as a sort of meta Christmas ghost story, using the tradition of telling spooky tales during the holiday as a framing device. The tale opens with a bunch of young women settling down after a Christmas dance to tell scary stories in the darkened bedroom they’re sharing for the night. When the housekeeper stops by, they invite her to join them in telling tales and the main story begins. Hesitantly, Mrs. Eastwich begins telling them about her experience with a mysterious shadow that haunted the home of her best friend and former lover. But it turns out that the shadow has not been left behind in her past, as she had thought.…
You can read “The Shadow” online here or you can find it in Melissa Edmundson’s first Women’s Weird volume, Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890–1940.
What ghost stories will you be reading this Christmas season? Have you read any of the ones discussed here? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!