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!
Sunless Solstice opens with a short introduction by the two editors, who are both curators of the British Library’s Printed Heritage Collections, in which they discuss common elements of Christmas ghost stories as well as a few unexpected themes that crop up in these particular stories, such as “marriage and affairs of the heart.” What follows are twelve tales (read one for each of the twelve days of Christmas!), each preceded by a brief note from one of the editors about the author’s biographical details and any especially notable elements of the story. The authors in this collection range from literary giants like Daphne du Maurier and Murial Spark to the obscure Frederick Manley who is only known to have written one story. The publication dates of these tales span nearly a full century, from 1893 to 1974, but they all have the feel of the ghost story’s Golden Age.
Despite the traditional Christmas ghost story atmosphere, many of the stories in this collection are quite untraditional in other ways. I was particularly struck by the tales featuring the “ghosts” of people who are still living. These take a variety of forms. In Murial Spark’s “The Leaf-sweeper,” a man is institutionalized for his maniacal hatred of Christmas and a spiritual doppelganger with opposite views on the holiday seems to detach from him to torment his relatives with Christmas cheer. When the narrator reintroduces “mad Johnnie” to his living ghost, they appear to reintegrate into one being with a more moderate view of Christmas. Another living ghost is in the particularly unsettling story “The Visiting Star” by Robert Aikman. When a once-famous actress visits a small English mining town, she reveals her secret to a local researcher: a dedicated fan of hers with strange occult powers has removed what we might call her soul, except, as she says, “artists don’t have souls.” Her personality, as she calls it, now exists as a separate woman while the actress is free to fully channel the personality of any character and never grows older. As long as nothing happens to her “personality” doppelganger, of course. The ghost of a living person can also show up as a warning, as is the case in “A Fall of Snow” by James Turner. In this tale of Christmas nostalgia tinged with horror, the narrator recalls how he once saw a vision during a terrifying toboggan ride of the young maid he had a crush on lying dead in the snow. Though the maid is perfectly fine when he returns to the house, he learns of her bloody fate several years later.
“The Apple Tree” by Daphne du Maurier, the longest story in the collection, is another nontraditional haunting. In this case, a recent widower is haunted by grief—or is it guilt?—over his wife’s death, which he projects onto a particular apple tree on his lawn. He hates this apple tree in all of the ways that he could never quite admit to hating his wife, constantly contrasting it with a younger, more beautiful tree nearby and eager to be rid of it. However, even death (either of the wife or the tree) cannot part him from this ill-fitting marriage.
Not all the stories are terrifying or depressing, though. “On the Northern Ice” by Elia Wilkinson Peattie is a sweet tale about a benevolent ghost, even if it does feature a tragic death. And “The Ghost at the Cross-roads” by Frederick Manley, as I mentioned in my recent post about gambling, is an exhilarating tale about a near escape from the Devil amidst a Christmas snowstorm. But if you really want a ghost story that will bring the Christmas cheer, check out “Mr. Huffam” by Hugh Walpole (yes, he is related to Horace Walpole), in which the champion of the Christmas ghost story genre—Charles Dickens, himself—makes a ghostly appearance.
Grab a copy of Sunless Solstice, and join me in making ghost stories an integral part of Christmas celebrations once again! You can find the Sunless Solstice on Amazon, or buy a paperback directly from the British Library. Let me know your favorite Christmas ghost story in the comments below.