Audio of Weird: A Clutch of Christmas Ghost Stories
Snuggle down, drink up and listen in to a read-aloud of ‘Rats’ by M.R. James and ‘Over Before Christmas’ by Alec Worley
Lovely to see you! Do sit down.
The fire’s been keeping that armchair nice and warm for you.
Haha! No apologies, please! The word ‘late’ bears no meaning at all under this roof, I assure you. Though I do hope the snow hasn’t left the roads too inconvenienced…
My word! It’s quite the blizzard out there now, isn’t it? I fancy you were lucky in finding the place.
I know this address can be somewhat… elusive.
Brandy? Mulled wine? I can make you a sensational Old Fashioned…
Yes, I do seem to have gathered rather a lot of these fancy-looking bottles. Only the best for my subscribers!
Plus, Waitrose had an offer on.
So, you’ve come for a Christmas ghost story, eh? Well, you’ll be pleased to know I’ve prepared two of them!
Wonderful to see the old folk customs revived, isn’t it? Hats off to that Mister Gatiss at the BBC. I do so look forward to his dramas on a Christmas Eve.
In an age when faces aglow with Christmas spirit may be nothing but a facade of binary code, a predictability of ones and zeros, then a little re-weirding is what’s required.
It all goes back to the Celts, of course, gathering about the fire on the Winter Solstice, telling tales of the Wild Hunt galivanting across the night sky.
The close of the year, the promise of the next, the land dead beneath that glittering shroud, awaiting resurrection. Such a serene, reflective, liminal space. No wonder spirits are so inclined to wander from their beds at this time of year.
Old Ollie Cromwell tried his hand at an exorcism a few centuries ago when he put a ban on Christmas. Let’s keep Britain biblical! Turf out those pagans and Catholics and lay their ghostly practices to rest.
And so the ritual of the Christmas ghost story lay buried for a couple of hundred years, until Charles Dickens chose to dig it up again. Quite frankly, you couldn’t leave the Victorians alone in a parlour for five minutes without them trying to conjure the dead.
By now the skies of England were black with factory-smoke and her gutters choked with starving infants. Whatever happened to Christian charity? The educated classes were becoming nostalgic for kindness, for the bygone folklore that might remind them of their common humanity.
Dickens had written Christmas ghost stories before – The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton (1836) and The Mother’s Eyes (1840) – but it was the success of his now-ubiquitous A Christmas Carol (1843) that prompted him to include more such haunted tales in the yuletide editions of the periodicals he was then editing.
Spectral tales such as Elisabeth Gaskill’s The Old Nurse’s Story (1852), Jane Margaret Hooper’s Bring Me a Light! (1861) and Dickens’ own – greatest – ghost story The Signalman (1866) served not only as fireside entertainments, but also reminders that such wealth and comfort as one enjoys at Christmas is a privilege not available to all.
The great and quiet M.R. James, a cloistered antiquarian and provost of both Eton and Cambridge, carried on the tradition of telling a fearful tale every Christmas Eve, though he did so in a less didactic, more distinctly unnerving tenor.
The first of my two tales, James’s Rats (1929), is prefaced by a Dickens quote. Those opening lines about the ragged, mouldy bedclothes a-heaving and a-heaving like seas comes from the Dickens Christmas story Tom Tiddler’s Ground (1861).
Here… Let me get you a fresh glass. Same again?
I’m not saying my reading - and recording - sounds better when the listener is tipsy, but… Actually, yes that is absolutely what I’m saying. Alas, this humble teller can do scant justice to such a masterful little tale.
It’s set on the windswept coast of Suffolk and concerns humankind’s most vital and troublesome instinct, curiosity.
Just as some Christmas gifts are best left unwrapped, some doors are best left not only closed but very sensibly locked…
My second tale was written by a friend of mine. Well, more of an acquaintance, really. And even more of a bloody nuisance.
It’s called Over Before Christmas and the author has been tinkering with it ever since he wrote it a couple of years ago. He’s a writer for the penny dreadfuls, you know. Poor fellow. He’s so rarely afforded the chance to write a tale of his own.
I believe I have a typed manuscript of it somewhere…
Oh, here it is…
The story is partially set in the town where the author claims to have grown up, a borough south of the Thames called ‘Tooting’, though I’m fairly certain he must have invented that name, and can only have done so out of spite.
He tells me the story contains bits and pieces of past experience, strange encounters, loved ones, and so on.
Funny, isn’t it? The things that end up in the cauldron of story…
Well, it was lovely to see you. Do come again.
Stay warm and hurry home, though I wouldn’t advise taking a short cut through the churchyard. Not at this time of year. One never quite knows where one might end up.
Thank you! A very merry Christmas to you too!
And do stay weird.
You have a great voice for audiobooks.