Festive frights around a blazing fire: it’s time to revive the Christmas ghost story
From All Hallows’ Eve to the winter solstice, readers used to eagerly receive visitations of uncanny spirits in print form
One 19th-century tradition that has unfortunately disappeared is the practice of gathering around a blazing fire to share frightful tales on a dark, cold Christmas Eve. The rise of the modern ghost story is tied to mass literacy, advances in the technology of Victorian print culture and an explosion in cheaply produced periodical literature that was both affordable and accessible. From the late 1830s, the Christmas editions of Victorian magazines platformed ghostly tales rooted in an oral tradition of storytelling that was gradually being eroded.
Stories in Christmas periodicals did not necessarily take place during the holidays, as it was the ghosts themselves that made these magazines seasonal reading. From All Hallows’ Eve to the winter solstice, a liminal time during the transition from light to darkness, readers eagerly received visitations of uncanny spirits in print form.
Although Charles Dickens did not, as it is often assumed, invent the form, he certainly popularised it, and the public appetite for Christmas ghost stories wildly proliferated after the success of A Christmas Carol in 1843. This tale of reunion and spiritual redemption facilitated by a range of friendly and menacing spirits remains one of the most popular ghost stories of all time. Several Irish writers, including Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Charlotte Riddell, B.M. Croker and Rosa Mulholland, also contributed ghost stories to popular Christmas editions, including Dickens’ own famed periodical, All the Year Round.
Although the practice of storytelling was not completely abandoned by the Victorians, Christmas periodicals reinforced several social practices and values surrounding the winter holidays, namely togetherness and fellowship. The performative and social functions of oral storytelling are not easily replicated in print media.
As the fireside periodical gradually replaced the storytelling circle in 19th-century culture, elements of this practice were transferred to print. The framing tale, in which one or several narrators exchange stories on a dusky winter’s evening, sought to reproduce the aura and intimacy of storytellers, sometimes even replicating the dialect and vernacular of rural communities and old family retainers.
Oral storytellers were not only entertainers, of course. They were historians, advocates and guardians of shared values and culture. Storytelling continues to promote community, transmit values, strengthen social bonds and share communal histories across the world. Among the Traveller community and the seanchaí of the Gaeltacht, oral storytelling is a living, thriving art form; outside of Ireland, the West African griot tradition remains a powerful influence on music, film and fiction.
The inspiration for the annual MoLI Christmas Ghost Story came to me when I was a postdoctoral researcher restricted to a well-travelled 2km radius around Crumlin at the height of Covid. Musing on how technology was fostering togetherness, I had an idea: why not return to the practice of Christmas storytelling and use a recording of Irish ghost stories to connect people from all over the globe?
This revival began with an abridged version of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s The Familiar (1847; 1872), performed by Michael James Ford. This story, which follows a retired military official as he is stalked by an invisible but potentially deadly menace through the eerily empty streets of 18th-century Dublin, certainly resonated at the time.
Since then, three more stories have been brought to life by some of Ireland’s most distinguished actors: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover (1945), performed by Derbhle Crotty; Charlotte Riddell’s Hertford O’Donnell’s Warning (1866), performed by Kathy Rose O’Brien; and B.M. Croker’s Number Ninety (1895), performed by Ned Dennehy.
I have collected these in A Visit from the Banshee, and are joined by other classic Irish tales of ghostly terror, as well as contributions from Ireland’s contemporary tradition: an oral story from the Traveller community retold and adapted by Oein DeBhairduin; a folktale by Peig Sayers translated and adapted from Irish by Éilís Ní Dhibhne; and a story by Melatu Uche Okorie that is both drawn from and questions Nigerian folklore and traditions. These three stories were performed and recorded live at an event at MoLI on Monday.
A Visit from the Banshee
Stories of ghosts and uncanny happenings are compelling because they allow us to safely explore our innermost fears and anxieties within the bounds of a storytelling circle or the confines of a book. The more terrifying ones, however, leak into the real world and are not so easily dismissed. As is clear from the stories included in the aforementioned collection, the Irish ghost story is a transnational form shaped and enriched by both outward and inward migration.
In a time when Irish migrants to the United States were waked before their journey across the Atlantic, emigration, like death, could irrevocably disrupt the domestic circle and provoke deep grief, as expressed in Dora Sigerson Shorter’s A Strange Voice (1900). Katharine Tynan’s The Sea’s Dead (1895) similarly warns of the danger that befalls one who is uprooted from home. Far from being a localised phenomenon, Irish folk horror crosses national boundaries, and banshees play a significant role in the death rituals of both local and migrant Irish communities. The keening spirit brings agreeable tidings in the humorous Biddy Brady’s Banshee (1879), while it crosses the Irish Sea with the unwelcome news of an estranged family member’s death in Charlotte Riddell’s Hertford O’Donnell’s Warning (1867).
Ghosts exist at the periphery of life and death, and have the subversive potential to give voice to the experiences of the socially marginalised. Some of the most chilling stories expose an inequitable world that leaves women vulnerable to violence. In Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover (1945) and Gerald Griffin’s The Brown Man (1827), courtship and marriage prove to have fatal consequences, whereas Rosa Mulholland’s The Haunted Organist of Hurly Burly (1886) features the enduring and dangerous allure of obsessive love. Melatu Uche Okorie’s story Guardians of the Land: The Warrior Girl (2024), meanwhile, exposes how gender discrimination cuts women off from their spiritual heritage.
The phantoms within A Visit from the Banshee also represent the residual trauma of unresolved histories, as ghosts may speak truth to power. The leading character of Le Fanu’s The Familiar faces retribution for an atrocity he committed as a senior officer of the Royal Navy, whereas the haunting in B.M. Croker’s Number Ninety is obliquely tied to the misdeeds of an elite and improvident class. In Dorothy Macardle’s The Prisoner (1924), cycles of political violence haunt a man in Kilmainham Gaol, while the suffering of the Great Famine remains embedded in the earth in Oein DeBhairduin’s Hungry grass / Crōlušk sirk. Emblematic of an irrepressible past that erupts into the present, ghost stories do much more than provide us with a welcome thrill.
With this edition, MoLI invites you to celebrate Christmas like a Victorian: turn the lights low, light some candles and gather around a blazing fire with your loved ones to share stories of the ghostly and the uncanny. The collection serves as a companion to our catalogue of Christmas Ghost Stories available on RadioMoLI, and we encourage you to take advantage of modern electricity by listening to them as well. But be prepared to experience a chill – it may be the wind, or a branch scratching at the window, or something stranger altogether.
MoLI Christmas Ghost Story | RadioMoLI
radio.moli.ie
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