Of Christmases Long, Long Ago

While preparing for our spooky themed Archives Crawl in the fall, Special Collections Department interns found a surprisingly large number of ghost stories printed in our historic newspapers. What made this discovery even more fun was the fact that these 19th century ghost stories were not printed during autumn months, as most people would expect; they were mostly printed in the months of December and January. This presented an opportunity to tell tales of one of my favorite, obscure, historical subjects- the tradition of ghost stories at Christmastime.

Christmas ghost stories were popularized during the Victorian Era, but their origins go back much further. So much further, in fact, they predate Christianity itself. People have commemorated the Winter Solstice since prehistoric times. The longest night of the year has always been tied to the concepts of darkness and death but also rebirth and the impending return of light. Many of our ancestors believed spirits would make themselves known during this transitional time. It’s not hard to imagine why ghost stories came into the picture.

From The Hauntings of Cold Christmas by Verity Holloway, printed in folk-horror magazine Hellebore’s Yuletide Special:

The Boston Daily Globe,
Saturday, November 22, 1884

“Ghosts and Christmas are inextricably linked in the British Isles. The darkening days and the dangers of winter weather naturally breed stories of powerful interlopers intent on harm. The Christmas ghost stories of medieval England are bloody affairs, frequently requiring the wandering corpses of the wicked to be returned to the grave by violence or ritual. The horror author M.R. James pointed out the similarities between these tales of winter revenants and those of Scandinavian midwinter sagas. Stories of contagion, the walking dead, and otherworldly torments are hardly what we would call Christmas cheer. But the similarities between medieval English winter stories and their Scandinavian cousins suggest these tales share a bloodline traveling far back into pre-Christian history.

Modern readers may be more comfortable with the Victorian variety of Christmas ghost, cozily antiquated without being alien, and yet the unwelcome return of the dead remained a strong theme throughout the 19th century. Simon Stern prefaces Volume 3 of the Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories by saying that the 19th century festive ghost is an entity with no regard for the starkly contrasting boundaries of the wild and the home, the hearth and the snow, the living and the dead: ‘Instead of scaring up an external threat and imagining the home as the safe harbour, it terrorizes the inhabitants with spectral beings who wander between those two spheres.’”

 The clippings above are from the December 24, 1886 edition of The Boston Daily Globe. 

Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion, Volume 1, 1851 

The tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas is still alive and well in the U.K. Although the tradition became relatively popular among Victorians in the U.S., as demonstrated by the clippings above, for modern Americans it is largely a relic of Christmas Past. But remnants of the ritual remain. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a Christmas ghost story and one of the most famous stories in literary history, continues to influence the way Americans celebrate the holiday season. "It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," one of the most popular songs of the Christmas genre, says, “there’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago...”

If you’re interested in starting your own new holiday tradition by reviving a very, very old one, it’s as simple as pulling a favorite eerie book off your shelf and slightly frightening everyone in your household. May your holidays be merry and bright- but also a little bit scary and dark, for old times’ sake.

Alyssa Persson

Processing Archivist