When Christmas was spooky season

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

We’ve all heard the reference to “scary ghost stories” in the Christmas carol “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” but most of us probably don’t give it much thought beyond the context of Scrooge’s spectral visitors in “A Christmas Carol,” by Charles Dickens.

Published in 1843 and distributed to avid readers in England and America alike, the novella’s influence on what we consider the “traditional” trappings of Christmas is rivaled only by the Coca-Cola Company, which created the image of rolly-polly Santa Claus sporting a white beard and red coat for a 1931 advertising campaign.

Those Victorians who picked up Dickens’ tale of yuletide existential dread and seasonal redemption would have scratched their heads at Jolly Old St. Nick, just as we wonder what “scary ghost stories” have to do with “the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”

An original illustration from Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

However, freaking out your friends and family with terrifying tales was part of the holiday festivities long before Dickens. More familiar to contemporary revelers are seasonal spirits such as the Germanic Krampus and even the Icelandic Yule Cat. The more well versed among us might even know about the Mari Lwyd tradition in South Wales, which includes mounting a horse skull on a pole draped in a white sheet and wassailing around the neighborhood with it.

Before Dickens’ iconic work, however, American author Washington Irving took a stab at infusing Christmas with the uncanny, with a portion of his essay collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., published in serial from 1819-1820.

Irving was living in England at the time, and as the introduction to the collection states, he hadn’t intended to publish his Sketch Book there — in part because he didn’t think British readers would care much about the contents, and he was offended by how badly English critics had treated the fledgling literary output of the United States.

Regardless, the book did well on both sides of the Atlantic, and provided the first well-known published Christmas ghost references in English.

In particular, Irving — or rather his alter ego, “Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.” — recounted spending a cozy holiday at the manor of Squire Bracebridge. Following Christmas dinner, the family and guests gathered around to hear “strange accounts of the popular superstitions and legends of the surrounding country,” courtesy of the local parson. 

Speculating that the “old gentleman was himself somewhat tinctured with superstition,” Irving wrote of “several anecdotes of the fancies of the neighboring peasantry,” including one about an undead crusader who rose from his tomb to stalk the churchyard on stormy nights.

“It was the belief that some wrong had been left unredressed by the deceased, or some treasure hidden, which kept the spirit in a state of trouble and restlessness,” Irving wrote. “Some talked of gold and jewels buried in the tomb, over which the spectre kept watch; and there was a story current of a sexton in old times who endeavored to break his way to the coffin at night, but just as he reached it received a violent blow from the marble hand of the effigy, which stretched him senseless on the pavement.”

A portrait of the crusader was said to be haunted in another tale, with the servants claiming that “whatever part of the hall you went the eyes of the warrior were still fixed on you.” 

The wife of a porter employed at the manor even said that on “Midsummer Eve, when it was well known all kinds of ghosts, goblins, and fairies become visible and walk abroad, the crusader used to mount his horse, come down from his picture, ride about the house, down the avenue, and so to the church to visit the tomb.”

The crusader could apparently transit through closed gates and stone walls, and “had been seen by one of the dairymaids to pass between two bars of the great park gate, making himself as thin as a sheet of paper.”

Irving’s narrator reported that while the squire of the manor wasn’t a believer himself, “He listened to every goblin tale of the neighboring gossips with infinite gravity, and held the porter’s wife in high favor on account of her talent for the marvellous.”

Elsewhere in The Sketch Book, Irving unveiled two of his most famous stories based in New England, rather than Merry Old England: “Rip Van Winkle” and the tale of “the headless horseman, or Galloping Hessian of the Hollow.” Rather than a Halloween tale, however, Irving wrote that the horseman of Sleepy Hollow played an integral part in the “fearful pleasure” of passing “long winter evenings with the old Dutch wives as they sat spinning by the fire, with a row of apples roasting and spluttering along the hearth.”

There, a visitor could “listen to their marvellous tales of ghosts and goblins, and haunted fields, and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges, and haunted houses,” and, of course, the horseman.

Included in those wintery fireside yarns were instances of “witchcraft and of the direful omens and portentous sights and sounds in the air which prevailed in the earlier times of Connecticut, and would frighten them woefully with speculations upon comets and shooting stars, and with the alarming fact that the world did absolutely turn round and that they were half the time topsy-turvy.”

By the end of the Christmas seasonal essays in The Sketch Book, the presence of creepy stories in the holiday tradition was well established, and Irving even offered an explanation for why people would find swapping ghoulish tales appealing during the otherwise joyful celebrations.

“[I]f there was a pleasure in all this while snugly cuddling in the chimney-corner of a chamber that was all of a ruddy glow from the crackling wood-fire, and where, of course, no spectre dared to show its face, it was dearly purchased by the terrors of his subsequent walk homewards,” he wrote, imagining Ichabod Crane’s reaction to hearing of the horseman. 

“What fearful shapes and shadows beset his path amidst the dim and ghastly glare of a snowy night! With what wistful look did he eye every trembling ray of light streaming across the waste fields from some distant window! How often was he appalled by some shrub covered with snow, which, like a sheeted spectre, beset his very path! How often did he shrink with curdling awe at the sound of his own steps on the frosty crust beneath his feet, and dread to look over his shoulder, lest he should behold some uncouth being tramping close behind him! And how often was he thrown into complete dismay by some rushing blast howling among the trees, in the idea that it was the Galloping Hessian on one of his nightly scourings!”

That’s about as far as you can get from the jingling of Santa’s sleigh flying through the air on Christmas Eve, and these days the only Christmas ghosts most people know are the ones who showed Scrooge the light — but, maybe, it’s time to get the Galloping Hessian back in the holiday season where he belongs.