THE CHRISTMAS GHOST STORY - TIA BYER

The Christmas Ghost Story is one of England’s strangest seasonal traditions. Its prevalence is referenced in Shakespeare’s 17th-century play, A Winter’s Tale, with the lines: “A sad tale’s best for winter. I have one / of sprites and goblins.” And thanks to Charles Dickens’ famous tale of seasonal spirits, A Christmas Carol (1843), the popularity of the supernatural story was immortalized during the Victorian era. Cambridge’s own M.R. James (1862 - 1936), lived and breathed this sinister tradition. Hailed as the master and originator of the antiquarian ghost story, M.R. James is best known for works such as Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad, Casting the Runes and The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, to name a few. A Cambridge based archaeologist, medievalist, and Provost of King’s College, James’s plethora of gothic tales often featured characters like himself: scholarly bachelors or members of the Anglican clergy, usually in search of antiquarian objects that unknowingly unlock supernatural menace. 

Illustration from’ Whistle and i’ll come’ to you’

You might ask; so what has this got to do with Christmas? Well, whilst many of his haunting tales do take place during the wintery season, (summer ghosts are a rarity) it is actually James’s own unique connection with the Yuletide festivities where we set our scene.

The occasion is Christmas Eve. The place is King’s College Cambridge. The year is somewhere towards the beginning of the 20th century. And the time is nearing midnight. There is a mood of merriment, with the expectant hint of foreboding.  

The Christmas choir has just finished its rendition of ‘We Three Kings’, and the fellows and students file out of the College chapel. After a warm helping of spiced beer, conversation flags and guests retire to bed - another year of festivities draws to a close within the cloistered quad.  But not all. With a nod of a head to each other, a select few make their way to the sitting-room of M.R. James.

 In his sitting room lit only by the open fire and a handful of flickering candles, the guests take their seats. Rows of books line the walls and leathered armchairs abut the thick burgundy carpet. Rare and ancient manuscripts clutter the corner desk. The fire crackles. The spine chilling Jamesian custom is about to begin. In the adjoining room M.R. prepares for the ritual. A rustling of papers follows. Then a clearing of a throat. The listening audience distribute their snuff and port and finish their sardines on toast.

There is nothing left to do now but wait.

 In a moment the guests hear footsteps from behind the closed door.  The creak of floorboards signals an approach. Suddenly the doorknob grates, and the door opens. The shadowy mastermind appears, illuminated ever so slightly by the flickering candlelight. Clutching an ink-stained manuscript, M.R. James enters. He walks to the centre of the room. A stirring hush falls over the guests, followed by a sharp gasp. James has blown out all candles except one. Looking up from his manuscript, James reads in a loud other worldly voice : “By what means the papers out of which I have made a connected story came into my hands is the point which the reader will learn from these pages”. The macabre tale begins…   

James’s fireside story was an annual event. In fact, James used, what he called his Christmas ‘entertainments’, as a way to try out his material. Christmas Eve was their first spine chilling debut. Intended to be read aloud, there is a spontaneity to his spine-tingling tales, with stops and pauses written into the text to mark an anticipatory gasp or outbreak of nervous laughter from his audience. James’s dramatic readings have an enduring legacy. As a confident and clear orator James was adept at impersonating and dramatizing his diverse array of characters- and were even televised. James’s tales ran every December 24th from 1971 to 1978, and A Ghost Story returned in 2000. Christopher Lee starred as James himself, and the series imitated the iconic readings of Christmas Eve decades before..

For many, Christmas is the right time for a spine-chilling tale. As nights darken frosty weather closes in, and a cosy fire seems to provide protection, the winter months inspire an eerily perfect setting for the world of the supernatural to manifest itself. The Anglophile American author Henry James even drew from this tradition in the ultimate horror story The Turn of the Screw (1898). James first heard it from the Archbishop of Canterbury when a dinner party rounded off with a story telling session. His text begins: “The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as on Christmas Eve in an old house a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to note it as the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.” Anyone who has heard the story, or the Opera by Benjamin Britten or worst of all seen the terrifying film with Deborah Kerr as the Governess, will shudder at this memory.

But what is it about the Yuletide hearth that keeps us coming back for that eerie feeling of dread, a terror enhanced by the sanctity of the religious feast that this world of spooks and ghosts somehow violates?  And where does this fireside tradition come from?

To understand this phenomenon a little more, we must return to M.R. James’s childhood. Born in 1862, James was very much a product of the Victorian age. And it was the Victorians who loved the custom of fireside ghost stories. No one author contributed more to this practice than Charles Dickens. James was influenced by Dickens work from childhood. Despite its moralistic undertones, A Christmas Carol is first and foremost a ghost story. And this notion began centuries before the printing press

The idea that Christmas was a spooky time of year derived from 15th century pagan Yuletide celebrations linked to the Winter Solstice on 21st December. These symbolized the death of light and the Yule log brought in from the forest outside and thrown on the fire pays tribute to the longest night of the year. This was the moment when the world of the living met the realm of the dead. Dickens drew on this transitional time with his depiction of A Christmas Carol’s most ominous spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Scrooge professes, “Ghost of the Future... I fear you more than any spectre I have seen”. Dickens writes how the silent and grave phantom appears simultaneously distinct, yet “difficult to detach…from the night, and separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded”.

The Christmas ghost story is surely an example of reactionary literature. The greater risk of death around the winter months would have also given the people of the past, right up to the Victorians and Edwardians, much to fear. Before the invention of modern medicine, illnesses in wintertime could be fatal. Did our ancestors and our literary forefathers, like James and Dickens, come up with a masterful way to entertain themselves during those sombre evenings by a confrontation with the darker side of our lives?

And with an alarming year in the modern era behind us, a time when we helplessly confronted a malign force of which we had no knowledge  - and certainly no solution- might this be a time to revisit this paradox of fear and triumph? Especially as we can do in the reassuring knowledge that unlike our ancestors, we now have a way out?

 And now it is high time for me to take down a copy of  M.R. James’ classic ghost stories and  start to ready the scene for my own fireside fright night What better way to celebrate the strangest of English Christmas tradition ?

The Fenstanton Witch, by M.R.James'