Introduction to a ghostly Christmas Personal Anthology

Each Christmas Eve, M. R. James would invite friends, colleagues and students to his rooms at Cambridge where they would gather and socialise. At some point, James would rise and move from candle to candle, extinguishing them until only one remained. By this point his assembled guests would have fallen silent. James would sit by the single candle and read aloud his latest ghost story.

Ghost stories are one of the purest forms of storytelling we have. Although many recognise the tradition as going back to the Victorian era into which James was born, their origins lie much further back in human history. There are ghosts found in Shakespeare, in the writings of Pliny the Younger, in The Epic of Gilgamesh, in the Old Testament, and presumably in countless stories shared orally to another during the pre-written age. Collectively, these tales map out our primal fascination with the unknown and the malevolent.

It’s perhaps not surprising that ghost stories have also developed a strong connection to winter: the long nights seem to demand these tales, inviting listeners to huddle closer by the fire and imagine the terrors that lurk out there, unseen in the darkness.

This Christmas I have put together Ghosts at the Old Library, a project I created via Levenshulme Old Library, an arts charity I work for in Levenshulme, South Manchester, housed in the local former library building built in 1904. I commissioned six authors to each write a ghost story inspired by a landmark in the local area. These have been published individually and recorded for broadcast on ALLFM, our local community radio station, and will be released as podcasts on Spotify over the Christmas period. But the central aspect of the project has been a series of events where audiences are led from one space within the building to another, hearing each story read in full by lantern-light. Science, technology and lighting may have advanced a good deal since M.R. James first sat down to read his ghost stories, but the allure of a tale of dread and woe told in darkness feels timeless.

In the lead-up to this project, myself and the authors involved had countless discussions about ghost stories: Why were they so effective? What was it that made the successful examples work? Which were our favourites? Which frightened us the most?

Collected here are some of the most haunting ghost stories to ensure that, regardless of how garishly lit your Christmas, a troubling shadow will linger somewhere on its periphery.

‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book’ by M. R. James

Selected by Richard V. Hirst

This was the first known ghost story M.R. James wrote for his Christmas Eve gatherings and, for me, it remains the most affecting. Here we find Dennistoun, an English antiquarian on holiday with friends in southern France who, during a solo day trip to an obscure and decaying cathedral city falls in with some mysterious locals. Via them, Dennistoun encounters an obscure manuscript he discovers is in fact a collection of pages cut from illuminated medieval manuscripts.

All the James elements are there: the stately, slightly fussy erudition, the rare but cursed medieval artefact, the tourist whose curiosity gets the better of him, the shadowy ambivalence about the nature of the ‘ghost’, the “slight haze of distance” (the story is presented as a tale heard second- or perhaps third-hand).

First published in the National Review, 1895; collected in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, Edward Arnold, 1904 and subsequently in Collected Ghost Stories, Edward Arnold, 1931. Read it online at Project Gutenberg here

‘Seaton’s Aunt’ by Walter de la Mare

Selected by Richard V. Hirst

While celebrated during his lifetime, de la Mare isn’t widely read today, perhaps because his proclivity for rather heightened, maximal prose which often felt even old-fashioned even at the time of he was working. De la Mare’s most popular work remains a poem, ‘The Listeners’, which takes a gentle, wistful view of the supernatural.

However, his fiction, at its strongest, casts a stranger, icier eye on the terrain, informed by an interest in the aberrant and inexplicable and, for me, ‘Seaton’s Aunt’ skirts close to perfection.

As with the best ghost stories, the plot itself is deeply uneventful. A man called Withers recounts a series of encounters with Seaton, an unpopular schoolmate, and his overbearing aunt. Seaton tells him his aunt has the power to commune with the dead, something Withers initially greets with scepticism, writing the two of them off as a family of oddballs, only to reconsider following an odd but materially uneventful encounter with them in adulthood.

The story’s potency lies in its casual presentation of the ghostly and the psychological as profoundly connected, with the murky, malignant atmosphere of Seaton’s home appearing to be a by-product of a reciprocal relationship between cruelty, madness, and an infernal force.

First published in The Riddle and Other Stories, 1923 – read it online here

‘The Tooth’ by Shirley Jackson

Selected by Dyani Sheppard

Shirley Jackson pulls the reader into her suburban worlds where everything is almost normal, but just a touch off kilter. I found it is this subtlety is so unsettling and she is a master of creating dark stories with a lingering unease. I first read her classic We Have Always Lived in the Castle and felt how setting her stories in the recent past, somewhere vaguely familiar but just out of reach, works so well in disarming the reader. In ‘The Tooth’ we meet Clara Spencer as she is in the haze of a bad toothache, travelling in the dead of night to New York to visit the dentist. She is joined part way through the journey by a mysterious stranger (a phantom figure that seems to me to float in from Jackson’s other story ‘The Daemon Lover’). Clara’s confusion increases as the pain, codeine and whisky numbs her reality. She slips in and out of sleep and the story itself gets increasingly disorientating. We follow Clara as she is hauled back and forth from the bus to diners to the back of taxis and waiting rooms, an endless cycle of temporary spaces where she is not allowed to rest. I felt my frustration building as Clara seems isolated in her journey, the mundane routines of the world continuing maddeningly oblivious to her plight.

First published in the Hudson Review, 1949, collected in The Lottery and Other Stories, Farrar, Straus, 1949

‘Ringing The Changes’ by Robert Aickman

Selected by Jo Howard

A couple honeymooning in a remote East Anglian town at Halloween are drawn into a macabre ritual.

This story stands out for its atmosphere of pure menace which builds incrementally to a frenzied climax. Nobody told Aickman to get the inciting incident in early. He makes you wait while Gerald mansplains railway construction to his much younger wife, Phrynne. And it works. Gerald’s properness is the perfect foil for the unsavoury behaviour of Holihaven’s denizens. His paternalistic concern for the tiny, beautiful Phyrnne leads him to accept the infernal tolling of the town’s church bells; the true inciting incident of the story. When he learns they are ringing to wake the dead, his need to keep up appearances leaves him incapable of evasive action.

And what of Phrynne? I had to look up that name because why not Janet or Barbara? Phyrnne was a courtesan in Ancient Greece, a historical figure, who was tried for indecency and, legend has it, acquitted upon revealing her breasts to the jury. This can’t be an accident. The sex in this story is alluded to in the most oblique way. Nevertheless, Phrynne ends up in a torn nightdress, revealing her lovely body. In the final scene, whilst Gerald is horrified, there is an undercurrent of sexual depravity to Phrynne’s reaction, “her cheeks reddened and her soft mouth became more voluptuous still.”

CW: Gratuitous use of the N word in a simile.

First published in 1955 in The Third Ghost Book, Pan and republished multiple times, including in Aickman’s 1964 collection Dark Entries, Collins and The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Ghost Stories, 1996, OUP

‘The Breakthrough’ by Daphne du Maurier

Selected by Lauren O’Donoghue

“‘If we succeed, you see what it will mean?’ he said. ‘We shall have an answer at last to the intolerable futility of death.’”

‘The Breakthrough’ opens with electrical engineer Stephen Saunders being transferred to Saxmere, a research facility in the East Anglian marshes run by a disgraced government scientist. The landscape, like the narrative itself, is bleakly drawn; moments of warmth or comfort are transient, and not to be trusted. Saunders himself is acerbic and mean-spirited, his snide observations leaving little room for sentimentality.

First written in 1964 for a Kinglsey Amis-edited sci-fi anthology that never came to fruition, ‘The Breakthrough’ turns a scientific eye upon the paranormal. It touches on hypnotism, early computing, poltergeists, telepathy, military weapons development and synthesised voices, but ultimately culminates in one hubristic experiment—an attempt to capture a person’s life-force at the moment of their death.

The intersection of technology and the supernatural has been explored by many writers—Nigel Kneale’s teleplay The Stone Tape (1972) springs to mind—but it’s the growing sense of menace, more than the subject matter, that makes du Maurier’s story really stick in your teeth. The atmosphere at Saxmere is claustrophobic, ascetic and isolated. The threat of being shut down by ‘The Ministry’ hangs over the facility; there is a desperation to the work. The relationships between the characters are casual and friendly despite this, but the conviviality is sinister given the exploitation taking place—the human test subjects are a young man dying of leukaemia and a child with learning disabilities, both regularly placed under hypnosis by the ominously-named ‘Charon’ machine. Ultimately, this ruthless use of the vulnerable becomes the core of the story’s true horror.

First published in Not After Midnight: Five Long Stories, Gollancz, 1971. Reprinted in Don’t Look Now and Other Stories, Penguin, 1973 and standalone as The Breakthrough, Penguin Modern, 2018

‘Lucille Would Have Known’ by John Burke

Selected by Nicholas Royle

John Burke edited three excellent volumes of Tales of Unease and finally had a collection of his own stories published in 2000. ‘Lucille Would Have Known’ was one of the strongest stories in that collection and one of the highlights of the anthology in which it first appeared. Lucille organises an annual Getaway Weekend Study Tour for a group of couples of a certain age. This year’s tour is of Romantic Castles of the North-East, but the organiser passes away before the date comes around. The tour goes ahead nevertheless. “Lucille would have wanted us to make the trip,” says Madge, Lucille’s “natural successor”. Be careful what you wish for, Madge. Second-hand copies of the New Terrors volumes are worth tracking down for Campbell’s story introductions alone. Of ‘Lucille Would Have Known’ he writes, “In the context of this book his tale may seem a reassuringly traditional ghost story – but there is one detail which may look reassuring but which, in retrospect, grows worse and worse.”

First published in New Terrors 2, edited by Ramsey Campbell, Pan, 1980, reprinted in New Terrors Omnibus edited by Ramsey Campbell, Pan, 1985. Collected in We’ve Been Waiting For You, Ash-Tree Press, 2000

You can read Nicholas Royle’s own personal anthology and other contributions here

‘Noël parmi nous’ (‘Christmas With Us’) by Marie Darrieussecq

Selected by Nicholas Royle

This is an exquisitely subtle ghost story published, as far as I am aware, only in the original French. The translation of the title is mine and has no official status. Another translator might well have gone for ‘Christmas Among Us’. The narrator, unhappy in her job and in need of a break, intends to spend a few days in her family’s second home in the apparently fictitious town of Céranges. She will be on her own, since her husband doesn’t like the house; he finds it “chilly”. It is an intricately constructed, deceptively simple story of ominous allusions and artful repetitions with a deep well of pain at its centre. For those with even a little knowledge of French, the language is not too difficult. There are even five lines in English. The collection, Zoo, contains fifteen stories and is very good overall. Darrieussecq’s novels, which I highly recommend, and a recent memoir of insomnia, which I have not read, are available in English translation.

First published in different version in Vogue, December 2002. Broadcast on France Culture in 2004 in version collected in Zoo, P.O.L, 2006

You can read Nicholas Royle’s own personal anthology and other contributions here

‘The White Cot’ by Jackie Kay

Selected by Dyani Sheppard

I love Jackie Kay’s short story collection Why Don’t You Stop Talking – the stories are witty, sharp and perceptive, largely focusing on the lives of women. We meet the protagonists in their everyday realities and their emotional interiorities are used to take speculative turns with the narrative. I was excited to come across ‘The White Cot’ to see what Kay does with the ghost story, and I think her narrative structure lends itself perfectly to the genre. The story centres on Dionne, who needs a relaxing weekend away with her partner, after feeling down and ‘going through the change’. As they enter the house they have rented for the weekend, they instantly feel unsettled, an atmosphere intensified by the creepy white cot that stands in the bedroom. At night, Dionne struggles to sleep in the unfamiliar room and in the blurriness between sleep and wakefulness meets the presence haunting her. Dionne drifts further from her partner and from sanity and a real trepidation is built as the ghostly activity intensifies. The story primes us to expect the paranormal, establishing a creepy setting and an unreliable narrator who carries an unresolved sorrow. The use of these classic tropes alongside a modern storyline creates a truly unsettling story that feels more sinister in its relatability.

Published in Reality, Reality, Pan Macmillan, 2012

‘Foreboding’ by Kamila Shamsie

Selected by Lauren O’Donoghue

Like ‘The Breakthrough’, ‘Foreboding’ is set primarily in a workplace—in this case Kenilworth Castle, where the main character, Khalid, works as a security guard. I’m always interested in depictions of work and labour in fiction, and I think they’re particularly fascinating as sites of haunting in ghost stories. We often wonder why inhabitants of haunted houses don’t just leave. When your job depends on staying right where you are, that question answers itself.

‘Foreboding’ feels like a very traditional ghost story until it doesn’t. Taking place in a nine-hundred-year-old castle, where “queens had danced and plots had been laid and kings had been insulted”, it’s easy to think that we know where the story is going. When the ghost arrives in earnest, however, the truth proves far more devastating. It’s a deft narrative volta, the rather quaint terror of the haunted house paling against the tangible horrors of war. It made me think about the term haunted, and how often we use it to speak of trauma, as well as ghosts.

First published in Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of New Ghost Stories, September Publishing, 2018. Read online at Lithub here

‘Lo! He Abhors Not the Virgin’s Womb’ by Robert Shearman

Selected by Gaynor Jones

To my shame I only discovered Shearman’s short fiction a couple of years ago as part of a horror fiction course, but ‘horror’ doesn’t even begin to describe his work. I’ve never read pieces so disturbing, or so utterly affecting. The ‘ghosts’ that haunt the edges of this particular festive story are varied and many – the eerie balloon friends, the stable family members trapped in stasis between life and death, and even the lost Christmas traditions of ‘the old times.’ If that sounds like an odd mix, then it is, and I haven’t even mentioned the disappointing return of Jesus Christ or the snow that burns your skin on landing. I highly recommend seeking out this incredibly dark alternative Christmas tale.

Collected in We All Hear Stories In The Dark Volume III, 2020

You can read Gaynor Jones’s own Personal Anthology and other contributions here

‘Here We Come A-Wassailing’ by Terri Potvin

Selected by Gaynor Jones

The Molotov Cocktail is one of my favourite online publications and I have a particular fondness for their regular themed contests. This shortlisted piece is a favourite of mine, and a much more traditional tale than the Shearman piece. I love stories that meld horror with folklore, that legitimately seem like they could have been passed down through the years, and such is the case here with the ‘wassailers’.

The story itself has quite a childlike, almost fairy-tale telling, as befits an oral folk tale, with simple language and even a song. The wassailers are ghastly, ghostly creatures who change before the narrator’s eyes. But there’s a couple of moments that heighten the horror for me, beyond the description of the wassailers, notably the almost throwaway line early on, “I haven’t had a sister since then.” And then the almost comically blunt description of poor Mrs Miser who, for whatever reason, did not meet the wassailer’s requirements. “I followed the bloody footprints to Mrs Miser’s house and witnessed the gruesome aftermath of the wassailers’ last visit. She was everywhere.”

First published in The Molotov Cocktail, November 2022 and available to read here

You can read Gaynor Jones’s own Personal Anthology and other contributions here

‘The Something’ by Abi Hynes

Selected by Jo Howard

A young woman buys her first house and becomes aware of a presence, at first helpful, then gradually more controlling.

This tale of suburban obsession is worth reading for its crisp prose alone, but it’s also a cracking yarn. Hynes subverts the traditional ghost story. The setting, a modern home, complete with burglar alarm and double glazing, is the antithesis of gothic. The uncanny presence, far from creating a sense of unease, seems friendly, providing freshly folded towels and steaming mugs of tea. But Andrea soon realises ‘The Something’ rewards and punishes her in equal measure. A series of post-its charts her descent into a relationship characterised by coercive control; her love affair building to its ultimate conclusion when the house leaves her a final note.

Published in Hynes’ collection Monstrous Longing, Dahlia Publishing 2023