Ghosts Of & At Christmas

MrRING

MrRING

Android Futureman
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Watching the great Alastair Sims Christmas Carol, I began to wonder - was it just chance that Dickens looked at Christmas as a time for ghosts?

Putting two and two together with "Santa Claus: Last of the Wild Men" article, which seemed to indicate a common kind of festival that linked Christmas, New Years, and Halloween, was perhaps Dickens tapping into a dimly remembered traditions of Christmas hauntings?

Has Christmas been considered a time for hauntings?
 
You get scary movies on TV around Christmas, and the BBC used to do "A Ghost Story for Christmas", but I've never heard of any actual Christmas ghosts.
 
Christmas has been traditionally a time for TELLING ghost stories. Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol' was part of this and M.R. James' ghost stories were written to entertain guests at Christmas.
 
Yes and the Victorians did sit around the fire and read to each other
all kinds of material. We think of them reading Dickens and Wilkie
Collins, especially in their magazine forms but the most popular
writer of the day was G. W. M. Reynolds, whose work has not
survived.

The growth of mass literacy allowed pulp writers like Reynolds to
recycle the Gothic fiction which had thrilled Jane Austen's generation.
Horrors were extremely popular, though there was a tendency for the
genre to be deplored as the Victorian Age became ever more concerned
with what its servants were reading.

In the 1840's & 50's, The London Journal and Reynolds's Miscellany published
lengthy serials with titles such as Mysteries of the Inquisition, Faust,
Mysteries of London and Mysteries of the Court of London which drew
heavily on the example of Eugene Sue, whose Mysteries of Paris was
the favourite youthful reading of Karl Marx.

So the appetite for spooky tales was well-established before Dickens
launched Household Words in 1850, explicitly to provide better quality
reading matter at an affordable price. All The Year Round followed a few
years later.

It was often in the Bumper Christmas Numbers of these periodicals that Dickens's
famous ghost stories appeared. They included A Christmas Carol in 1843,
and the collaborative Mugby Junction in 1866. :)
 
Fae Ghoolies an' Ghosties an' Long Leggit Beesties, The Good

The Mid Winter Solistice, especially around the time of the Shortest Day is a very special time in several ancient calendars and cultures. It is time of the Death of the Old Sun and the Birth of the New. The Darkness rules and the barrier between life and death is at its weakest. The portal between one world and the next is opened and the dead can walk with the living.

Many ancient rituals, like Halloween and Martinmass are prophylactic rituals intended to fend off the forces of the dark. Rituals like Christmas and Hogmanay celebrate the Birth of the New Year and the vanquishing of the forces of Darkness by the Forces of Light.

And between the two there was no better time for story telling. Creation myths, Legends of Gods and Heroes, Folk Tales, Fairy Stories and Ghost stories to freeze the blood. Sitting round the hearth fire, keeping out the cold and the dark.

There may have been some crossover, and merging between the various rituals, over the years.
 
I do hope your sig isn't prophetic, AndroMan!

Carole
 
Whoooooooooo

TV ghost stories- who remembers Hardy's 'The Signalman'? Dunno what Xmas that one was first on but it should be every year!


I was up early this morning and caught Alastair Sim as Scrooge in the 1951 fillum. Superb.

From the text-

'Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!'' exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.

``Spirit! are they yours?'' Scrooge could say no more.

``They are Man's,'' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. ``And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!'' cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. ``Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!''

``Have they no refuge or resource?'' cried Scrooge.

``Are there no prisons?'' said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. ``Are there no workhouses?''

The bell struck twelve.
 
I guess I was getting at the idea, if Halloween, Christmas, and New Years were all originally around the same time of year before being split up by incoming Christian religious types, then maybe this time of the year IS the real Halloween, the time where the dead walked the earth.

And that maybe Dickens was tying into a larger tradition of Christmas ghosts, some of these posts which do indicate there were christmas ghosts in literature and storytelling traditions.

I've read something about the tradition of Christmas gifts growing out of a 1823 fad of Christmas gift books... did any of these stories feature a strong ghost or supernatural element?
 
By coincidence, my copy of The Signalman DVD arrived today. It's by Charles Dickens, though, not Hardy. I'm going to watch it tonight...
 
Hahahaha, Dickens not Hardy, I was thinking of 'The Withered Arm' which I read last night. Slip of the, er, tongue.



'Below there! Look out! Look out! For God's sake, clear the way!'
 
My sister was haunted every year at her present house , but only at Christmas . She was sure it was an old lady who had lived in the house since it was built , brought up five children in it and finally died there . The ghost would bang about a lot and push or throw things off shelves , once my sister saw a small plate slide from the back of the couch , slowly , then fall on the floor. She didn't turn up this year though !
 
Only slightly OT, but I was lucky enough to get the BBC Ghostwatch DVD this year. I never saw the live broadcast but, being a good little Fortean, knew all about it, of course, so eagerly sat down to watch it on Christmas morning.

So we're there in our pajamas, clutching our giant mugs of tea and chortling at Sarah Greene's big hair bow, Craig Charles' jacket, and the general BBC Drama-type acting, but we quietened down once the children started getting possessed. I have to say that although I knew the history behind the hoax I was quite absorbed and even jumped at one point.

However, none of that prepared me for waking up at 4am desperately in need of the toilet, but actually too terrified to traverse the distance to the bathroom in case some real life spook decided to teach me a lesson...

Deary me. I'll be watching it again tomorrow...
 
I thought this was interesting:

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepage ... age10.html

as it suggest that Dickens may have fictionalised a night terror/sleep paralysis/old hag attack. I'm not convinced as there really isn't a huge amount of diagnostic evidence in the story, which you can read here:

www.gutenberg.org/etext/46

However it is enough to be intrguing and help cement Dickens' status as a proto-Fortean novelist ;)
 
Interesting about A Christmas Carol; didn't the event of writing it produce a permanent change in his life?

Going forward, here's a great little story of seeing ghosts on Christmas (or technically, a little before Christmas):

http://www.christmasarchives.com/usk_monmouth.html

The rooms here were just as impressive. The bathroom left a lot to be desired: just big enough for a bath and toilet, It was within the thickness of the wall over the cloister. There was also a narrow staircase leading up to the attics. Three times I started to climb that stairway, and yet could not continue. I was gripped with a fear which I could not explain. I am not a claustrophobic person - I hid in cupboards and holes as a child, and still like cosy poky corners. The room at the end of the house, over the library, was boarded off because this was where the fire had been. It had been the nuns' private chapel in the original convent, but subsequently, I assume, just another bedroom. There were no details about it on the estate agent's sheet.

I went back to the first room, and stood looking down on the courtyard, planning my restaurant, wondering if the church bells would edify or annoy hotel guests, and toying with the idea of asking my building acquaintance to come and give me an idea of costs to get things started. Then to my annoyance, in the dusk, I saw five nuns walking from the far end of the house, by the library, towards the church. `Blow it! I thought. `Obviously someone else is after the place too.' The estate agent had said something about another interested party, but had I known nuns were after it, I would not have bothered getting all steamed up about the place. It was a perfect convent setting in the twelfth century, and still was in 1970, and I was not one to oust a convent of nuns just to have restaurant!

When I left, the nuns were not in sight - probably looking round the church, I thought. Going round by the builder, who was packing up as I passed, I called to him that I was OK, and took the key back to the agents. They had already closed, as it was just after 6 p.m. so I put the keys through the letterbox and went into the old pub on the square in front of the priory walls. Curiously the locals began asking questions, the whys, whos and wherefores of my visit somehow they already knew I had been up at the priory.

`You'll get plenty of help locally,' commented one. `We're all keen to see the old place come to life agin'

I said that I was very keen but would not make a decision unless the nuns who were there did not buy. There was a strange silence and a few guarded glances. then one said in a quiet but confident, blustery way `Oh they old biddies won't buy, they bin there long enough already!'
Click to expand...
 
So, it seems like Charles Dickens pretty much created the modern myth of Christmas, according to the following article; maybe that's why it seems so ghostly...

Charles Dickens has probably had more influence on the way that we celebrate Christmas today than any single individual in human history except one.

At the beginning of the Victorian period the celebration of Christmas was in decline. The medieval Christmas traditions, which combined the celebration of the birth of Christ with the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia (a pagan celebration for the Roman god of agriculture), and the Germanic winter festival of Yule, had come under intense scrutiny by the Puritans under Oliver Cromwell. The Industrial Revolution, in full swing in Dickens' time, allowed workers little time for the celebration of Christmas.

The romantic revival of Christmas traditions that occurred in Victorian times had other contributors: Prince Albert brought the German custom of decorating the Christmas tree to England, the singing of Christmas carols (which had all but disappeared at the turn of the century) began to thrive again, and the first Christmas card appeared in the 1840s. But it was the Christmas stories of Dickens, particularly his 1843 masterpiece A Christmas Carol, that rekindled the joy of Christmas in Britain and America. Today, after more than 160 years, A Christmas Carol continues to be relevant, sending a message that cuts through the materialistic trappings of the season and gets to the heart and soul of the holidays.

Dickens' describes the holidays as "a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of other people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys". This was what Dickens described for the rest of his life as the "Carol Philosophy".

Dickens' name had become so synonymous with Christmas that on hearing of his death in 1870 a little costermonger's girl in London asked, "Mr. Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?"
Click to expand...

http://www.fidnet.com/~dap1955/dickens/christmas.html
 
My sister and I were raised on Charles Dickens - my mother's favourite author. She owned a leather bound , gold leafed set of all the novels, which we were allowed to look at as a special treat once in a while, although of course we had full and regular access to the everday copies which were dog eared from reading and re-reading. What really stuck with both my sister and I the longest were the illustrations by the famed 'Boz'. These books would probably have been worth something, even back then, and I was left them when my mother died. Unfortunately, I knew that in adulthood, I would never open that particular set, even though I did, and still do, love Dickens. Those illustrations haunted our sleep all through our childhoods. They were quite, quite horrible, Anyone who has ever seen them will know what I mean!

As young children. we obviously never read the stories, which were, of course, full of humour, pathos and adventure. Just looking at those illustrations gave one the idea that all the tales were horrifying, ghastly and totally sinister. It's a wonder we ever plucked up courage in later life to read them at all! Ugghh! Those illustrations!!
 
isn't "Boz" a pseudonym for the man himself? My dad was reading a book called "sketches by Boz" which is all journalistic essays by Dickens, writing as "Boz".
 
Yes Boz was Dickens. George Cruikshank is probably the artist most associated with his works. The serial nature of publication meant that novelist and illustrator needed to work very closely together. Mario Praz goes so far as to say that, " . . . at the beginning, anyhow - the work of the writer Dickens ranks below that of the illustrator Cruikshank, so satisfactory a formula has the latter already found for what Dickens is struggling to say."

This hand-in-glove approach to the illustration of his works has caused many to pore over the sketches intended for the unfinished Edwin Drood. The first artist engaged was Dickens' son-in-law Charles Collins but he withdrew and was replaced by Luke Fildes.

So Hecate's making the writer his own illustrator reflects a sort of truth.

:)
 
Hello everyone.

I was wondering if there was a thread of Christmas related ghost stories. Not so much the more well known seasonal offerings (MR James, Dickens, Joyce etc) but any tales or experiences of festive frights or Yuletide hauntings? I seem to recall reading in FT many years ago about a priest who moved into a new parish one Xmas. The presbytery was afflicted with snapping sounds coming from the stone walls, muffled voices coming from within Christmas decorative statues and some polt activity that focused on a small synthetic Christmas tree while the real tree in another part of the building was left largely alone.

I'd love to read any Fortean tales that embody the spirits of Christmas.
 
Here's a Xmas story excerpted from another thread ...
A Mancunian Haunting

In 1975, my dad took over a pub/hotel in Ardwick, Manchester. (The Junction Hotel on Hyde Rd, in case any other Mancs on here). ...

One night, they had kept some pub regulars and bar staff behind to help put up all the Xmas decorations. They finished the job at 3am, and went off to bed. The very next morning, the pub cleaners arrived at 8am and found that all of these decorations had been taken down, put away neatly in the same boxes they had came out of, and then stacked up in the middle of the pub floor!! ...
Click to expand...
FULL STORY: https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/a-mancunian-haunting.28040/
 
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