The opening sequence to the 1984 BBC adaptation of John Masefield’s children’s classic The Box of Delights is nightmare fuel with tinsel on top. A wolf stares from the darkness, then fades into the void until only two yellow eyes remain. It is replaced by a Punch and Judy doll, followed by a man dressed as a lion and, strangely and terrifyingly, by a glaring mouse head.
Eeriest of all, however, is the music. It begins as a sharp, sustained note. Then, like a shark’s dorsal fin breaching the water, it is revealed to be the third movement of the Carol Symphony by Victor Hely-Hutchinson, aka the First Noël. This horrifying procession is the introduction to a Christmas story for kids.
Christmas has always had a spooky side. It’s cold and dark, and a strange man who keeps tabs on your children throughout the year is about to access your house via a chimney. Put that way, it is little wonder December 25th has long been regarded as distinctively eerie.
True, the real horror doesn’t arrive until January and your first credit card statement. Nevertheless, with the winter solstice come and gone and even the middle of the day grim and overcast, it is hardly surprising that late December is seen as having a peculiarly haunted quality.
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This was a fact understood by Masefield, who published Box of Delights in 1935. It tells the story of a young boy who takes possession of a time-travelling container that allows him battle various supernatural entities and ultimately save Christmas. Yet he was merely writing in the shadow of the Victorians, who pioneered the Christmas ghost story. They celebrated the season as one of comfort and joy – but also of chills and thrills. Of merry gentleman and unhappy spirits.
Within a few decades of the publication of Box of Delights, that tradition fell from favour. First, the Bing Crosby/dad jumper idea of Christmas supplanted it. Then came the Merry Xmas Everybody, pass-the-Quality-Street version. Here, December 25th served as an eternal extension of the 1970s, with pride of place given to grotesque jumpers and terrible TV.
However, in recent years, the concept of a supernatural Christmas has come swooping back, rattling its chains. Bookstore shelves groan under Christmas ghost anthologies, with names such as The Haunting Season, A Very Ghostly Christmas, Spirits of the Season: Christmas Hauntings.
“The traditional trappings of the holiday are turned upside down,” declares the blurb to Spirits of the Season. “Restless spirits disrupt the merry games of the living. Christmas trees teem with spiteful pagan presences and the Devil himself treads the boards at the village pantomime.”
The great ambassador for Christmas ghost stories has been Mark Gatiss, the actor, comedian and writer who helped reboot Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. Raised on Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, he has since 2013 – with a few fallow years – presented an annual Christmas ghost story for the BBC. The latest, an adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lot No 249, airs on December 24th, starring Game of Thrones’s Kit Harington as a Victorian gentleman who has a rum run-in with an Egyptian mummy.
Christmas ghost stories are great fun and chime with the contradictory feelings many experience this time of year. December 25th is about celebration and family. But also about taking stock and reflecting on both the highs and the lows of the 12 months just gone. Amid the jolly carnage of turkey, crackers and naff knits, thoughts may turn to those absent from Christmas dinner – of the empty place at the table. It is a melancholy feeling that can become overpowering if you’re not careful. That, believes Gatiss, is where the Christmas ghost story comes in.
“There’s the end of the old year and the beginning of a new, so you’re looking backwards and forwards,” he said several years ago. “With this in mind, Christmas is a joyous time but also very sad because of the people we’ve lost. All those things make it feel like the boundaries are very thin this time of year.”
A Christmas Carol, from 1843, is the foundational text for the Christmas ghost story. Miserly neoliberal Scrooge is visited by three spirits on Christmas Eve night. They include the terrifying Ghost of Christmas Future – and, if you’re watching Brian Henson’s 1992 take on the tale, The Muppet Christmas Carol, the even more unnerving Ghost of Christmas Past, who in the Muppet version looks like a soft-toy version of one of Tolkien’s Ringwraiths.
Dickens wasn’t the only one to investigate the genre. MR James, Algernon Blackwood and the Irish gothic writer Sheridan Le Fanu contributed to the Christmas ghost canon, too. Tellingly, these writers were all British or Anglo-Irish. With a handful of exceptions, the Christmas ghost story never crossed the Atlantic. And so, as the American version of Christmas came to dominate through the 20th century, that older tradition dwindled.
Irish people might feel ambivalent about that. Christmas ghost stories ran aground in US because the US already had its scary season in Halloween – a Celtic festival brought to the new world by Irish immigrants. It is a rare example of Irish culture trumping the British equivalent and eclipsing America’s reflexive anglophilia. Christmas ghost stories were out, jack-o’lanterns and trick-or-treating in.
Happily, today, there is room for both. You can love Halloween while also enjoying snuggling up with a tingling tale on Christmas Eve. “It’s like chocolate and orange: no one knows why they go together,” Mark Gatiss told Fangoria in 2022. “But they also go together at Christmas, don’t they?” How right he is – which is why, though we all look forward to a Merry Christmas, some of us hope for a spooky one, too.