Ghosts & Hauntings

A history of the Christmas ghost story

By T.K. Randall
December 26, 2014 ·  1 comment

Marley's ghost visits Ebenezer Scrooge. Image Credit: CC 1.0 British Library While tales of ghosts and hauntings might seem like an odd thing to be associated with Christmas, in Britain stories like the Charles Dickens classic "A Christmas Carol" have provided the festive season with a tradition of creepy tales and spooky anecdotes.

Dickens himself even encouraged other writers to create their own ghost stories at Christmas and helped popularize the concept of telling supernatural tales around the Christmas tree.Such traditions are believed to date back even further with "winter stories" being a popular pastime at Christmas during the Elizabethan period and possibly even earlier than that.

In Scotland and Ireland however tales of the supernatural tended to be associated more with Halloween, a tradition that was itself carried to the Americas by colonists. These days it is still Halloween, as oppose to Christmas, that we tend to associate with ghost stories.

Whether it is a Christmas tradition that will ever resurface in the future however remains to be seen.

Source: The State | Comments (1)

Tags: Christmas, Ghost Stories