It was Christmas Eve.
I begin this way because it is the proper, orthodox, respectable
way to begin, and I have been brought up in a proper, orthodox,
respectable way, and taught to always do the proper, orthodox,
respectable thing; and the habit clings to me.
Of course, as a mere matter of information it is quite unnecessary
to mention the date at all. The experienced reader knows it was
Christmas Eve, without my telling him. It always is Christmas Eve,
in a ghost story,
Christmas Eve is the ghosts' great gala night. On Christmas Eve
they hold their annual fete. On Christmas Eve everybody in
Ghostland who IS anybody--or rather, speaking of ghosts, one should
say, I suppose, every nobody who IS any nobody--comes out to show
himself or herself, to see and to be seen, to promenade about and
display their winding-sheets and grave-clothes to each other, to
criticise one another's style, and sneer at one another's
complexion.
"Christmas Eve parade," as I expect they themselves term it, is a
function, doubtless, eagerly prepared for and looked forward to
throughout Ghostland, especially the swagger set, such as the
murdered Barons, the crime-stained Countesses, and the Earls who
came over with the Conqueror, and assassinated their relatives, and
died raving mad.
Hollow moans and fiendish grins are, one may be sure, energetically
practised up. Blood-curdling shrieks and marrow-freezing gestures
are probably rehearsed for weeks beforehand. Rusty chains and gory
daggers are over-hauled, and put into good working order; and
sheets and shrouds, laid carefully by from the previous year's
show, are taken down and shaken out, and mended, and aired.
Oh, it is a stirring night in Ghostland, the night of December the
twenty-fourth!
Ghosts never come out on Christmas night itself, you may have
noticed. Christmas Eve, we suspect, has been too much for them;
they are not used to excitement. For about a week after Christmas
Eve, the gentlemen ghosts, no doubt, feel as if they were all head,
and go about making solemn resolutions to themselves that they will
stop in next Christmas Eve; while lady spectres are contradictory
and snappish, and liable to burst into tears and leave the room
hurriedly on being spoken to, for no perceptible cause whatever.
Ghosts with no position to maintain--mere middle-class ghosts--
occasionally, I believe, do a little haunting on off-nights: on
All-hallows Eve, and at Midsummer; and some will even run up for a
mere local event--to celebrate, for instance, the anniversary of
the hanging of somebody's grandfather, or to prophesy a misfortune.
He does love prophesying a misfortune, does the average British
ghost. Send him out to prognosticate trouble to somebody, and he
is happy. Let him force his way into a peaceful home, and turn the
whole house upside down by foretelling a funeral, or predicting a
bankruptcy, or hinting at a coming disgrace, or some other terrible
disaster, about which nobody in their senses would want to know sooner
than they could possibly help, and the prior knowledge of which can
serve no useful purpose whatsoever, and he feels that he is
combining duty with pleasure. He would never forgive himself if
anybody in his family had a trouble and he had not been there for a
couple of months beforehand, doing silly tricks on the lawn, or
balancing himself on somebody's bed-rail.
Then there are, besides, the very young, or very conscientious
ghosts with a lost will or an undiscovered number weighing heavy on
their minds, who will haunt steadily all the year round; and also
the fussy ghost, who is indignant at having been buried in the
dust-bin or in the village pond, and who never gives the parish a
single night's quiet until somebody has paid for a first-class
funeral for him.
But these are the exceptions. As I have said, the average orthodox
ghost does his one turn a year, on Christmas Eve, and is satisfied.
Why on Christmas Eve, of all nights in the year, I never could
myself understand. It is invariably one of the most dismal of
nights to be out in--cold, muddy, and wet. And besides, at
Christmas time, everybody has quite enough to put up with in the
way of a houseful of living relations, without wanting the ghosts
of any dead ones mooning about the place, I am sure.
There must be something ghostly in the air of Christmas--something
about the close, muggy atmosphere that draws up the ghosts, like
the dampness of the summer rains brings out the frogs and snails.
And not only do the ghosts themselves always walk on Christmas Eve,
but live people always sit and talk about them on Christmas Eve.
Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on
Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories.
Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell
authentic anecdotes about spectres. It is a genial, festive
season, and we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and
murders, and blood.
There is a good deal of similarity about our ghostly experiences;
but this of course is not our fault but the fault of ghosts, who never
will try any new performances, but always will keep steadily to
old, safe business. The consequence is that, when you have been at
one Christmas Eve party, and heard six people relate their
adventures with spirits, you do not require to hear any more ghost
stories. To listen to any further ghost stories after that would
be like sitting out two farcical comedies, or taking in two comic
journals; the repetition would become wearisome.
There is always the young man who was, one year, spending the
Christmas at a country house, and, on Christmas Eve, they put him
to sleep in the west wing. Then in the middle of the night, the
room door quietly opens and somebody--generally a lady in her
night-dress--walks slowly in, and comes and sits on the bed. The
young man thinks it must be one of the visitors, or some relative
of the family, though he does not remember having previously seen
her, who, unable to go to sleep, and feeling lonesome, all by
herself, has come into his room for a chat. He has no idea it is a
ghost: he is so unsuspicious. She does not speak, however; and,
when he looks again, she is gone!
The young man relates the circumstance at the breakfast-table next
morning, and asks each of the ladies present if it were she who was
his visitor. But they all assure him that it was not, and the
host, who has grown deadly pale, begs him to say no more about the
matter, which strikes the young man as a singularly strange
request.
After breakfast the host takes the young man into a corner, and
explains to him that what he saw was the ghost of a lady who had
been murdered in that very bed, or who had murdered somebody else
there--it does not really matter which: you can be a ghost by
murdering somebody else or by being murdered yourself, whichever
you prefer. The murdered ghost is, perhaps, the more popular; but,
on the other hand, you can frighten people better if you are the
murdered one, because then you can show your wounds and do groans.
Then there is the sceptical guest--it is always 'the guest' who
gets let in for this sort of thing, by-the-bye. A ghost never
thinks much of his own family: it is 'the guest' he likes to haunt
who after listening to the host's ghost story, on Christmas Eve,
laughs at it, and says that he does not believe there are such
things as ghosts at all; and that he will sleep in the haunted
chamber that very night, if they will let him.
Everybody urges him not to be reckless, but he persists in his
foolhardiness, and goes up to the Yellow Chamber (or whatever
colour the haunted room may be) with a light heart and a candle,
and wishes them all good-night, and shuts the door.
Next morning he has got snow-white hair.
He does not tell anybody what he has seen: it is too awful.
There is also the plucky guest, who sees a ghost, and knows it is a
ghost, and watches it, as it comes into the room and disappears
through the wainscot, after which, as the ghost does not seem to be
coming back, and there is nothing, consequently, to be gained by
stopping awake, he goes to sleep.
He does not mention having seen the ghost to anybody, for fear of
frightening them--some people are so nervous about ghosts,--but
determines to wait for the next night, and see if the apparition
appears again.
It does appear again, and, this time, he gets out of bed, dresses
himself and does his hair, and follows it; and then discovers a
secret passage leading from the bedroom down into the beer-cellar,-
-a passage which, no doubt, was not unfrequently made use of in the
bad old days of yore.
After him comes the young man who woke up with a strange sensation
in the middle of the night, and found his rich bachelor uncle
standing by his bedside. The rich uncle smiled a weird sort of
smile and vanished. The young man immediately got up and looked at
his watch. It had stopped at half-past four, he having forgotten
to wind it.
He made inquiries the next day, and found that, strangely enough,
his rich uncle, whose only nephew he was, had married a widow with
eleven children at exactly a quarter to twelve, only two days ago,
The young man does not attempt to explain the circumstance. All he
does is to vouch for the truth of his narrative.
And, to mention another case, there is the gentleman who is
returning home late at night, from a Freemasons' dinner, and who,
noticing a light issuing from a ruined abbey, creeps up, and looks
through the keyhole. He sees the ghost of a 'grey sister' kissing
the ghost of a brown monk, and is so inexpressibly shocked and
frightened that he faints on the spot, and is discovered there the
next morning, lying in a heap against the door, still speechless,
and with his faithful latch-key clasped tightly in his hand.
All these things happen on Christmas Eve, they are all told of on
Christmas Eve. For ghost stories to be told on any other evening
than the evening of the twenty-fourth of December would be
impossible in English society as at present regulated. Therefore,
in introducing the sad but authentic ghost stories that follow
hereafter, I feel that it is unnecessary to inform the student of
Anglo-Saxon literature that the date on which they were told and on
which the incidents took place was--Christmas Eve.
Nevertheless, I do so.