The children are up past their bedtime, sitting on the knees of their aunts, uncles, and grandparents, bellies full after the best dinner they've had all year. It's Christmas Eve, one of the longest nights of the year, and the wind is cold enough to bring tears to the eye, but everyone is inside, wrapped in shawls, fortified by warm drinks, and gathered around the fireplace. Grandfather stokes the flames in the hearth as one of the aunts begins to speak. She tells a story as old as any hand-me-down or heirloom in the house, a story that has been passed down generation after generation. It is a story about family, about home and hearth and the shadows that linger there. It is a story about ghosts.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the Victorian passion for ghost stories was burning brightly, and the genre had its own season: the Christmas season. Guests at holiday parties challenged each other to see who could come up with the most chilling tale. Periodicals released at Christmas time published eerie tales of hauntings and apparitions. Popular authors such as Charles Dickens released frightening new stories every year. If Christmas was in the air, then so were ghosts.

The Geography of Christmas Specters
Today, Christmas and Hallowe'en tend to be very clearly distinguished and delineated by those who celebrate. The cozy holiday versus the spooky holiday; the one about family and nostalgia versus the one about horror and witchcraft. In the nineteenth century, these holidays were a little more nuanced than that, and their traditions and celebrations varied from region to region. In the United States, Hallowe'en became the designated day for frights and chills, but in England, where Hallowe'en was not celebrated as enthusiastically, Christmas was the season for ghost stories.¹

As with most Victorian legends and folkloric beliefs, Christmas ghost stories were often rooted in a strong sense of place and community. One Victorian writer, who penned a piece on holiday ghosts for the Liverpool Mercury in 1894, described the regional character of seasonal legends:

Norfolk and Suffolk, for instance, still have their legends of "white women" haunting particular spots, of coaches "drawn by horses without heads," and sometimes accompanied by spectral and headless grooms and outriders, of monstrous white dogs, footless ghosts, and uneasy spirits that refuse to be laid. Many other parts of the country are equally favoured with ghostly traditions; and when the villagers gathered within the squire's hospitable walls, as the ale circulated and the shadows in the hall deepened, stories of white witches and wise men, and tales of headless horsemen and phantom coaches, midnight monsters, and restless churchyard sprites, with many another tradition of legendary horror, would pass from lip to lip…²

One intriguing Scottish legend, entirely new to me, was recorded by T. F. Thiselton-Dyer in The Ghost World, his compendium of spectral legends. Thiselton-Dyer refers to a folkloric belief that children born on Christmas would be capable of both seeing and even commanding spirits.³ This seems like something that would have piqued the interest of the spiritualists, who were always curious which factors might predispose someone to mediumship or spirit communication, but I have not been able to find any evidence that they investigated or wrote about this belief.

Another haunting piece of Christmas lore, recorded in John Glyde's book of folklore, The Norfolk Garland, is as follows:

Many legends of bells under ground and under water are known in various parts of England. Where the churches are said to have been swallowed up either by earthquake or the ravages of the sea, the old church bells are said to ring, deep, deep in the earth, every Christmas morning, and people go forth and put their ears to the ground, hoping to catch the music of the mysterious chimes in the subterranean temple.4

To me, this vision of phantom bells ringing out from the deep every year captures the spectral spirit of Victorian Christmastime.

The Origin of the Cozy Christmas
Across the nineteenth century, the Christmas holiday transformed dramatically, evolving from a date of only moderate importance into a major event and cultural phenomenon.⁵ This metamorphosis of Christmas was part of a larger cultural shift driven by the Victorian middle class, which expanded significantly during the nineteenth century. Just as many of our ideas about what looks spooky, gothic, or haunted originate from the Victorian era, our modern sense of what's cozy, homey, and domestic is also colored by nineteenth-century sensibilities.

As Britain became more industrialized, people left the villages and hamlets of the countryside to seek economic opportunity in the city. This increased urbanization sparked the desire to cultivate a warm and sheltered environment in the family home so that people who felt battered by the daily grind of city life could at least return to a cozy and cheerful refuge at the end of the day. The growing middle class quickly developed an appetite for the material comforts of modern life, fueling Victorian consumerism. With factories popping up all over and increasing varieties of consumer goods available, there was booming demand for furnishings, décor, and toys. As the Victorian taste for domestic comforts grew, Christmas became more and more popular, and Christmas celebrations were increasingly lavish and elaborate.⁶ Even ghost stories were caught up in the commercial Christmas boom, as books, especially books of ghost stories, became very popular Christmas gifts.⁷

Why Ghost Stories?
For generations, there had been a loose association between ghosts and midwinter in Britain, but as Christmas became a much more enthusiastically celebrated holiday with many more associated traditions, the old link between specters and Christmastime spawned a craze for holiday ghost stories. As the extravagance of the Victorian Christmas season increased, its ghostly traditions grew ever more powerful.⁸ Thiselton-Dyer speculated that the Christmas season was particularly rife with ghost sightings because it was customary for the gentry to return to their ancestral family homes in the countryside during the Christmas holiday.⁹ If the spirit of an ancestor had any messages or warnings to impart to younger generations, the Christmas season was one time when the entire family was assembled at the estate.

It makes sense that, for Victorians wealthy enough to have a city home and a country home (and for any companions or staff who traveled with them), leaving the bustle of the city and returning to the countryside each winter might feel like slipping backward in time. Half-forgotten memories could be refreshed, long-dead ancestors might feel much closer, family traditions could continue another year, and the years would begin to blur as swift and silent snow settled around the house. In the old manor, at once familiar and unfamiliar, all kinds of strange thoughts and memories might take root. So, what better way to spend one of the long winter nights than trading ghost stories around a fire?

It's a shame that many have abandoned the custom of telling ghost stories at Christmas. Though we now have a much more robust cultural celebration of Hallowe'en as the time of magic, mischief, and the macabre, there's something to be said for keeping a little of the edge, and some of the darker magic, in Christmas. At a time when many people are fixated on their shopping lists and their wish lists, what they've achieved in the past year and what they want in the coming year, it makes sense to insert a memento mori: a reminder that death comes for us all and you can't take your gifts with you. In fact, that is exactly the message of Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" (1843), the most enduring and beloved classic Christmas ghost story. Dickens uses the four ghosts that visit his miserly protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, to remind the reader that no amount of worldly wealth is more important than kindness, compassion, and generosity. Arguably, our modern celebrations of Hallowe'en contain an element of this warning as well. People celebrate, decorate their homes and themselves, and eat delicious treats, but always with an edge, always with the reminder of death. Perhaps humans are just naturally drawn toward the marriage of revelry and death.

Spiritualists and the Ghosts of Christmas
Since spiritualists engaged in frequent spirit communication and often reported apparitions and spirit sightings, it's natural to wonder what they made of the Christmas ghost story tradition. I have not been able to find any evidence that serious spiritualists engaged in the same spooky storytelling that other Victorians enjoyed at Christmas. I suspect that for mediums, who considered a ghost sighting far more than just a scary story to share on a dark night, the tradition might have seemed too frivolous or irreverent. After all, for the spiritualists, an apparition was an important phenomenon worthy of being seriously recorded, reported, and studied. However, since many of the people who attended spirit circles were in mourning and sought connection with lost loved ones, it wouldn't be surprising if there was an uptick in séances around Christmas. The spiritualists encouraged the bereaved to stay in touch with those who had passed beyond the veil, and the holidays are a time when people particularly long for connection with those they've lost.

Classic Victorian Ghost Stories
Here are just a few nineteenth-century ghost stories to give you a taste of the genre; the Elizabeth Gaskell story and both stories by Dickens were written and published specifically for the Christmas holiday, making them delightful seasonal reads.

• "A Christmas Carol" and "The Signal-Man" by Charles Dickens
• "The Old Nurse's Story" by Elizabeth Gaskell
• "The Open Door" by Margaret Oliphant
• "Ligeia" and "Morella" by Edgar Allan Poe
• "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James

Try It Yourself
There are many benefits to exploring the shades and shadows that lurk in the final weeks of December. For those who are bereaved or who have painful memories connected to the holidays, honoring the darkness as well as the light at this time of the year might help with processing conflicted emotions. Meanwhile, even the most cheerful of holiday revelers might experience bittersweet nostalgia or poignant moments that highlight the inexorable passage of time. Around the holidays, the mandatory cheer that permeates the air can sometimes feel more oppressive than festive, so taking time to acknowledge the sorrowful as well as the sweet can be healthy and may enhance the experience of the holidays.

Tell Ghost Stories
Of all the Victorian traditions discussed here, spooky or spiritualist, the telling of holiday ghost stories might be the easiest one to revive. There are many ways to add the haunting and crystalline magic of a chilling ghost story to our modern celebrations (and you can add ghost stories to any holiday, not just Christmas). If you just want to introduce a shiver or two to your festivities, you can put a very modern spin on the practice by watching scary films, listening to eerie podcasts, or even staying up late reading terrifying anonymous internet stories. But if your aim is to recreate the tradition as authentically as possible, then you should have friends over for a holiday celebration and close the evening with a round of ghost stories.

For those who desire an authentically Victorian flavor, here's one tip for telling a ghost story like a Victorian: hit close to home. Victorians liked to tell very personal ghost stories, rooted in specific people or places. Many guests, called upon to share a ghost story, might report something chilling or mysterious that they claimed to have experienced themselves. Others would share local legends from their hometown or frightening stories that had been passed down to them by family members. Lots of ghost stories centered on a particular location: a certain crossroads, an old bridge, or a nearby churchyard. So, think locally. Is there a particularly creepy abandoned house that you pass every day on your commute to work? Tell a harrowing tale about why it's abandoned.

Hold a Christmas (or Yule, or Solstice, or Hanukkah) Séance
For us, séances are so strongly associated with Hallowe'en that it can be odd to imagine Christmas as a prime time for spirit communication, but if you think about it, Christmas might be the ideal season for spirit circles. Christmas and other family-oriented annual celebrations have a way of pulling us backward in time, reminding us of holidays past and loved ones long gone. If you're in the Northern Hemisphere and Christmas falls in the middle of the winter for you, then there are additional reminders of death: trees without leaves, animals in hibernation, and familiar sights frosted over and ghostly in the long nights.

For those who have lost people close to them, the celebration of Christmas, Hanukkah, or any other holiday that is rooted in childhood, family, and cultural traditions might be extremely difficult. The sadness can be overwhelming and isolating as everyone else in the world seems to be heedlessly celebrating the season without the same grief. This is not a new sorrow; bereaved Victorians would have faced the same misery (though they did live in a culture that took mourning more seriously). Given that the holiday season can stir up melancholy, nostalgia, loneliness, and longing just as readily as joy and contentment, it makes sense that the desire for spirit communication might be at an all-time high around the Christmas season. So, hold a séance as one of your seasonal activities this year. If you celebrate a holiday other than Christmas, such as Yule or Hannukah, then you can tweak the suggestions below to make them fit your seasonal celebration. You can also just hold a séance on the solstice as a reflective practice, without connecting it to any established holiday.

Before you begin, you might spend some time setting up a space that pulls you back to another time or place. You can put old family photos on the kitchen table, add a few heirlooms or past Christmas gifts that remind you of your loved ones, and even prepare some holiday food or drink. Many spiritualists liked to open their séances by singing hymns; given that Christmas is a very musical holiday with so many associated tunes and lyrics, consider opening your Christmas séance with music. However you choose to open the séance, you can then follow the séance exercise from the first chapter of Spirits, Seers & Séances—using either the solitary or the group instructions depending on whether you're alone or with company.

References
1. Yuko, "How Ghost Stories Became a Christmas Tradition in Victorian England."
2. "Christmas Ghosts," Liverpool Mercury, December 25, 1894.
3. Thiselton-Dyer, The Ghost World, 216.
4. Glyde, The Norfolk Garland, 67.
5. Storey, "The Invention of the English Christmas," 17, 19–22.
6. Storey, "The Invention of the English Christmas," 20–22.
7. Cox and Gilbert, The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories, xii–xiv.
8. Briggs, "The Ghost Story," 180–81.
9. Thiselton-Dyer, The Ghost World, 382–83.

Excerpted from Spirits, Seers & Séances, by Steele Alexandra Douris.