Ghost Stories for Christmas underscores traditions, celebrations of Christmas past

 

I've finished reading this absolutely marvelous new anthology, Ghost Stories for Christmas: Volume 1. Compiled by writer Andi Brooks, it's a collection of supernatural Christmas stories published in the 19th and early 20th century periodicals. There are great writers featured, including Washington Irving, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Charles Dickens. But just as much fun is sampling the tales of mostly forgotten writers (William Wilthew Fenn, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Henry Ross ...) , published in mostly forgotten books and periodicals (Routledge's Christmas Annual, The Illustrated London News, Santa Claus: Dupuy's Christmas Annual ...) . Usually to find these stories, you'd haunt Ebay or dusty used book stores, or peruse Google to find digital restorations.

Readers can imagine themselves sitting by a warm fire on Christmas Eve, reading these tales by candlelight or early electricity. Or gathered around a big Christmas table listening, captivated, to an oral rendition of a story in the Christmas edition of Once a Week, or many other publications.Brooks has done a wonderful job of compiling these stories, and Plan9Crunch had the opportunity to interview him. -- Doug Gibson

This blog post includes some original art from the stories, when they were first published.

The interview with Andi Brooks

Provide our readers the research it involves preparing the anthology, how you choose the various stories?

Brooks: The idea for the anthology had actually been in the back of my mind since around 1999 when I found a copy a book called Christmas Past: A selection from Victorian Magazines in a used bookshop. Compiled by Dulcie M. Ashdown, the book is a wonderful collection of festive poetry, stories, games, fancy dress ideas, recipes, articles on how Christmas cards and Christmas crackers are made, and guides for decorating the home, making hand-made gifts and entertaining guests. It is a simply delightful book.

Among the typical Victorian heart-wrenching and heart-warming stories is a solitary ghost story from the 1895 Christmas edition of The Woman at Home, Annie S. Swan’s Magazine by Percy Andreae called, rather appropriately, A Christmas Ghost Story. A romantic rather than scary ghost story, I found it intriguing and decided to seek out more Christmas ghost stories from Victorian magazines and newspapers with a view to compiling an anthology. But, to cut a long story short, a lot happened in the next twenty years to keep me occupied and it wasn’t until I had finished my own book, Ghostly Tales of Japan, last year that the idea resurfaced. In the intervening twenty-odd years, the Internet had firmly become an everyday part of our lives and a researcher’s dream come true.

Whereas back in the 1990s when I was researching Vampire Over London: Bela Lugosi in London with Frank Dello Stritto we had to physically travel to libraries and archives to source material, now a wealth of material can be found online. Ideally, I would have liked to have visited those libraries and archives again to see physical copies of magazines, newspapers and books, especially to source the illustrations which often accompanied Christmas ghost stories, but living in Japan made that impossible, so I was very grateful for the Internet. To prepare what I was intending to be a single volume, I researched and compiled a list of ghost stories actually set at Christmas time rather than just ordinary ghost stories which appeared in the Christmas editions of magazines and newspapers. Many of the famous stories as we known them now are revisions of the originals made by the authors for publication in book form, but I wanted to go back to the originals as much as possible for this anthology. Scouring online archives, I stumbled across more and more stories, many of which I had never heard of and may have lain unread since first publication, until my original single volume had expanded to five or six. I’ve always enjoyed research much more than writing and become quite obsessive once I begin, so I am sure that I will unearth even more stories. 

Do you think our contemporary vision of Christmas ghost stories is dominated by the classic, A Christmas Carol. Is there a dearth of knowledge of Christmas ghost stories and their long tradition as part of the holiday?

Brooks: A Christmas Carol certainly casts a very long shadow. Ever since its publication on December 19th, 1843, it has dominated the popular imagination as no other story has since or, in my opinion, ever will as the embodiment of not just a Christmas ghost story, but as a story which encapsulates the very essence of the spirit of Christmas. It really was a phenomenon from the very first day, with all six thousand initial copies selling out in just five days and another two editions being published before the end of the year. By the end of the following year it had gone through a remarkable fourteen editions and has stayed in print ever since. Starting with eight competing theatre adaptations running in London theatres just two months after its publication and Dickens’ own public readings, which he continued until one month before his death in 1870, it has been repeatedly adapted to every possible medium.

That’s a tough act to follow, but of course A Christmas Carol is just one story in a rich genre of which there have always been devotes, even as its popularity as a seasonal staple has waxed and waned. However, I think that a wider appreciation of the Christmas ghost story, along with a greater awareness of the tradition, has certainly grown in recent years with more and more anthologies being published and, perhaps more importantly, an explosion of information and the stories themselves reaching an increasing number of people online. I hope that my own anthology and the future volumes in the series will help to continue that momentum and help to introduce readers to some less-trod corners of the genre. 

You mentioned earlier to me you could fill five volumes of Christmas ghost stories. So, in another era, the Christmas ghost story was a staple of 19th century, 20th century periodicals? You even have another Dickens holiday season ghost story by Dickens, about the mean sexton and goblins. Dickens wrote a lot more holiday ghost stories than A Christmas Carol, right?

Brooks: Although Dickens wrote five “Christmas books,” starting with A Christmas Carol, not all of them are ghostly or set at Christmas. The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year (1844), set on New Year’s Eve, features the spirits of some church bells and their goblin attendants. The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home (1845) tells of a family and their cricket guardian spirit. The Battle of Life: A Love Story (1846) has one scene set at Christmas, but no supernatural elements. The last of Dickens’ Christmas books, The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, A Fancy for Christmas-Time (1848), the story of a man’s encounter with a ghostly doppelgänger of himself is set at Christmas. Despite the lack of ghosts in his Christmas books, Dickens was a great lover of ghost stories, and wrote some fine examples of his own, one of the best known of which is probably The Signal-Man. Contrary to his reputation as a Christmas ghost story writer, however, he wrote few genuine supernatural tales set during the festive period. He often included ghostly episodes in his stories. One of my favourites is the ghostly section of A Christmas Tree, which is told by ghosts. In the story, Dickens hints that the telling of ghost stories pre-dates the celebration of Christmas by referring to them as “Winter Stories.”

The story which I chose for my anthology, The Story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton, is one of five ghostly stories featured in The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Containing a Faithful Record of the Perambulations, Perils, Travels, Adventures and Sporting Transactions of the Corresponding Members, more commonly known simply as The Pickwick Papers. The “true” tale is recounted on Christmas Eve by a reluctant Mr. Wardle at the prompting of Mr. Pickwick after Mr. Wardle’s mother recalls that her late husband had once told it one Christmas Eve many Christmases before. Published on December 31, 1836, it can be viewed as a prototype for A Christmas Carol, with the two stories bearing many similarities. 

I love The Christmas Dinner, by Irving. It takes me back to an old-fashioned Christmas celebration long ago. At Chrighton Abbey is another one that tugs at my heart, what Christmas traditions were long ago. But there are so many stories. I have read about 20 so far. What are some of your favorites in the collection?

Brooks: Although Irving’s The Christmas Dinner isn’t strictly a ghost story, I wanted to have it open the anthology to set the scene and illustrate how ghost stories were once told at Christmas. It is interesting to read that at that time, 1820, people were looking back with nostalgia at the traditions of Christmas past and trying to recreate them. That’s how I celebrate Christmas, trying to recapture that elusive feeling of an old-fashioned childhood Christmas in a simpler, more innocent time surrounded by long departed loved ones. 

I read and re-read all of the stories in my book so many times while compiling it that I came to appreciate and love every single one of them in a way that I never could have by reading them in the usual manner. As I got to the very heart of the stories, I was often taken unawares by the depth of emotion which they stirred. The Old Nurse’s Story by Elizabeth Gaskell is a shocking reminder that the past cannot be undone and will come back to haunt us in old age. The Earth Draws by Jonas Lie is also a very potent story. But there are two stories which really stand out for me in terms of their emotional impact. After working on the book in the cold dead of night, I could not shake off the feelings of dread inspired by E. Nesbit’s Portent of the Shadow. I think its power lies in the very banality of its setting, an ordinary modern house rather than ancient ancestral pile, and the utter helplessness of the protagonists. The self-sacrifice of Miss Eastwich, the storyteller was also very poignant. The other story which has stayed with me is of a very different nature. I have shed a tear only three times in my life while reading. Most recently was when I read Their Dear Little Ghost by Elia W. Peattie. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it, so I shan’t give the story away.

You have tongue in cheek stories, like Real Estate Man of Yore (I love old eastern USA stories) and Dickens' The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton. And then you have eerie gothic holiday tales, such as At Chrighton Abbey, and tongue-in-cheek tales like The Three-Cornered Ghost, and grisly tales like Mansleigh Grange. Were you looking for a balance in moods of the tales?

Brooks: It’s interesting that you should mention Real Estate Man of Yore. Being English, I’m not really familiar with that brand of old eastern USA stories, and I was quite unimpressed by it upon my first reading. I recall actually being dismissive of it. But with successive readings, I grew to not only appreciate it, but to really enjoy it. I think that if I had been compiling a single anthology, I would have been inclined to go for the throat and have compiled a collection of full-on horror stories, but as my research progressed and I started to amass far too many stories for a single volume, I began to appreciate the sheer breadth and variety of the genre, and I decided that I wanted to tell its complete story. I felt quite strongly that every single story, no matter how obscure, deserved to be read again. Having settled on arranging the stories in each volume in chronological order, I next decided, as you suggested, to create a balance of moods. So each volume will contain examples of moving stories, amusing stories, and horrific stories side-by-side. My aim is to create a definitive library of that golden age of the Christmas ghost story which spanned the Victorian and Edwardian eras. 

The Pearl Princess I enjoyed a lot. Many of these authors are very obscure. Did it interest you to look into their biographies, and what else they wrote. I kind of associate this book with going to a very old used bookstore, and browsing, just looking for treasures.

Brooks: Very much so. I researched every single author and their known works. Of course, literary giants such as Dickens, Irving and Stevenson need no introduction, but I still took the time to re-read their biographies and bibliographies because I didn’t want to just mechanically put this anthology together. I wanted to feel as much of a connection with the authors as possible and to understand their motivations for writing the stories and the backgrounds to them in the context of their lives and careers and the times in which they lived. My motivation for compiling this anthology grew out of a genuine love of the genre, so it’s important to me to do it as respectfully and thoughtfully as I possibly can. I know that it’s a cliché, but it really is a labour of love. What is intriguing is that we know so little about some of the authors. For example, Augustus Cheltenham, author of The Pearl Princess, a story which I enjoyed as I know the area in which it is set very well, remains a complete mystery. We do not even know the dates of his birth or death. Just two published stories bear his name. Future volumes in the Ghost Story For Christmas series will feature stories which were published anonymously. It is unlikely that we will ever know who penned them. 

I do love browsing in old bookshops or online in search of treasures. It’s a real thrill to come across something that you’ve never seen or heard of before. When I find them, as with my Bela Lugosi research on the Bela Lugosi Blog, I have a really strong desire to share them so that other people can enjoy them too. I hope that this anthology and its sequels will bring some joy to like-minded people.

There is just one aspect of my research which has frustrated me. I think that the illustrations which accompanied some of the stories on their original publication are every bit as important as the stories themselves. Although I was able to include some of them in the anthology, the ones which appeared in newspapers were often not available in a good quality to reproduce. Hopefully, I will one day be able to source better quality versions for later editions. 

As I said earlier, my search for obscure Christmas ghost stories is ongoing, so if any of your readers ever come across any in vintage newspapers or magazines, I’d love to hear from them. If I can use them, they’ll receive a credit and a copy of the volume they appear in.

Here are a few more illustrations that were originally published with the stories in this anthology:

Ghostly Tales of Japan provide supernatural bedtime stories

Review and interview by Doug Gibson

Andi Brooks, who lives in Japan with his wife and son, is the co-author of "Vampire of London: Bela Lugosi in Britain," a book we’vereviewed in this blog. He also oversees the superb, The Bela Lugosi Blog. Andi has also been writing fiction for more than a generation and recently published “Ghostly Tales of  Japan,” (Kikui Press, 2020) an anthology of supernatural stories. (Purchase it here) He dedicates the book to his son, Yuine, which is appropriate because Andi created these stories as bedtime stories for Yuine.

The stories are anchored in Japanese culture and tradition. Most range between a couple to four minutes of reading time, perhaps a tad long in audio. The longest is about a 10-minute read. I am captivated by these tales, which from revenge horror to ghostly reunions that tug at your heart to moral tales, with abrupt, pithy endings in which an unforgiving or unpleasant protagonist gets his or her due.

The first story, “The Hunter’s Wife,” tells of a hunter lucky enough to kill a stag with his arrow. The doe with the stag escapes, but not before providing a piercing stare at her adversary. The hunter marries and has children before the doe reappears in his life in an ending so shocking it kept me awake the night I read it.

An interesting tale, almost fable- or parable-length, very short, “The Kindly Old Woman Who Wasn’t,” provides a very succinct commentary on how society offers prefer to remain away from truth so long as they are satisfied.

“The Ginkgo Tree and the Drunken House” is a captivating story of love surviving a mortal tragedy and the loved one’s unconventional resurrection.

My favorite story, the longest, is “The Homecoming,” a tale of an adult somehow finding his way back home to his long-dead parents to receive assurances and renewals of love he has long sought. One knows at the end that this visit will impact his remaining years

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“The Story of Matsudo Hideyuki” had a Twilight Zone-type eeriness. It involves a man, out of place in the modern world, finally solidifying an existence in the past he craves to  be in.

As mentioned, the stories, there are 30, are steeped in Japanese history, traditions, religion and culture. Below this review is an interview with the author. The stories are very well-crafted and possess lyrical prose blessed with the author’s gentle intellect and knowledge. In spirit, if not necessarily style or subject matter, they remind me of “The Harafish,” by Naguib Mahfouz. Enjoy the interview with Brooks, who lives in Tokyo with his family, below.

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Interview with Andi Brooks, author of Ghostly Tales of Japan

1) How long have you been writing short fiction? Was your interest sparked by Japanese life, history and culture, or was there an earlier genesis?

Brooks: I first attempted to write short fiction in 1992. I was laid off work with a very handsome payoff, which included six months paid leave and a contractual clause prohibiting me from taking another job during that period. With all of that time on my hands, I decided that I would try my hand at writing. The first story I wrote was an ecological sci-fi tale called The Visitor, which was miraculously published in an anthology. Although I remember the thrill of seeing the book on the shelves of a local bookstore at the time, I haven’t got the courage to reread the story now!

After this unexpected initial “success,” I threw myself into writing. The short stories I wrote at that time were all heavily derivative of 1950s sci-fi and were, probably quite rightly, all met with scathing rejections. My other rejections from this period included a radio play featuring a life-size cardboard cutout of Vincent Price as one of the main characters and a grade Z trashy sci-fi horror film script called The Butcher Girls, which got as far as scouting locations and actors before ending up on the scrapheap.

After that I restricted my writing to non-fiction. I contributed articles of varying merit on vintage films to various magazines in the UK and the U.S., which culminated in the Bela Lugosi biography “Vampire Over London: Bela Lugosi in Britain,” with Frank Dello Stritto.

I didn’t do any further writing until moving to Japan in 2006. At a creative loose end, I tried to fill the void by writing an unpublished volume of humorous poetry and some darkly humorous short stories heavily influenced by Vivian Stanshall’s “Rawlinson End” for my short-lived first blog.

I finally threw all of my energy into putting together The Bela Lugosi Blog for a few years until returning to my main passion of music. I reactivated my 1980s record label, promoted a monthly live event in Tokyo and produced my own music.

As recounted in the introduction to "Ghostly Tales of Japan," I started writing Japanese ghost stories completely by accident. My son and I had been really captivated by the world of the Japanese supernatural since catching an episode of the long-running supernatural animation series Ge! Ge! Ge! No Kitaro on TV shortly after arriving in Japan when he was three-years-old. Bedtime reading sessions alternated between Dr. Suess and the world of yūrei (Japanese ghosts) and yōkai (Japanese supernatural creatures). One night when he was around six, we read a story from Lafcadio Hearn’s “Kwaidan.” When he learned that it was the last one in the book, he asked me to tell him another story, so I made up what was to become the first story in “Ghostly Tales of Japan,” "The Hunter’s Wife." I made up more for him until he stopped requesting them.

I completely forgot about the stories until about three years ago when I visited a small historic pond in Tokyo called Muchi no Ike (commonly translated as the Pond of the Whip), which, legend has it, is inhabited by kappa, an amphibious supernatural creature of Japanese folklore. I didn’t see any of them, but the atmosphere inspired me to write a story, which in turn reignited my interest in the old stories I’d written for my son. When I reread them, I liked them sufficiently to decide to try to write enough stories for a collection. There were lots of stops and starts until last year when I threw all of my energy into the project.

2) You have a tremendous knowledge of the land you live in? How was this interest sparked? What resources did you utilize to learn this much?

Brooks: Most things in my life just seem to come out of the blue. Whenever someone hollers “Hey, let’s put on a show!” I always seem to be at the front of the queue. If I remember rightly, that’s how the Bela Lugosi biography came about. Frank phoned me up from America and said, ”Hey, lets write a book!” The thought had never occurred to me, but of course, I just said okay.

That same attitude led me to Japan. Until 1998, my knowledge of the country was pretty much restricted to Godzilla and documentaries about World War II. It was a place which didn’t really register in my consciousness.

That changed when I reluctantly went to a party in 1998. I started to chat with a stranger who was living in Japan at the time. The alcohol had clearly been flowing rather generously as she said, “Hey, why don’t you come over for a visit?” One month later I arrived in Japan for a month-long stay. Even though I thought it would be a one-off trip, when I returned home I began to study Japanese and to read classical Japanese literature, which often has a healthy dose of the supernatural, and histories of the country.

To be truthful, I would describe my knowledge of Japan, its culture and its history as selective, but I have always been fascinated by history and enjoyed research. Whenever I come across an interesting snippet or someone tells me something interesting, I jot it down in a notebook for possible use in a story. I often visit local museums and places of historical interest. Japan has lost an awful lot of its historical structures due to wars, natural disasters and the relentless march of progress, but everywhere there are signs and markers on the streets relating the history of the place. The ghosts of the past are on almost every street corner. My own garden has a statue of Jizō (the Japanese incarnation of the Buddhist deity Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva) which has supposedly been standing there for at least 400 years.

To be truthful, I often feel like the character in my story “The Story of Matsuda Hideyuki,” a man who lives in the present, but has one foot firmly planted in the past.

One thing which was very important to me when writing the stories was that they were all historically and culturally accurate. They may be works of fiction, but I tried to make the background settings and details as real as possible. I want to eventually have the book translated into Japanese, so I don’t want a Japanese reader to feel that they are not natural or to think that some aspect is impossible. I basically write two kinds of stories. They are either directly inspired by a place I have actually visited, such as Muchi no Ike in Tokyo or Nijo Castle in Kyoto, or inspired by historical or cultural knowledge I already have.

For the latter, I write the story first and then check that that it fits the historical and geographical context I have given it. For that, I consult either my own library or the Internet. Quite often the information I need exists only in Japanese, so my Japanese wife is very helpful in helping me to research sources which are beyond my ability to read or understand. One of the most difficult stories to square with reality was “A Pilgrim’s Tale.” I already knew about the ancient pilgrimage route upon which I set the story, but the lake by which the main events take place was of my own creation. I suppose it would have been okay to have a fictitious lake as the average reader would have no idea of the geography of the pilgrimage route, but it went against my desire to have each story 100 percent believable. It took quite a bit of searching before I could find a real lake which fit my own.

3) What is your son's favorite story/ies?

Brooks: Funnily, although the book is dedicated to him and without him it wouldn’t exist, he hasn’t read it yet! Some stories he remembers from when I read them to him when he was younger and others he knows because I discussed them with him. So, he feels as if he has already read it.

His feedback was very helpful during the writing process, especially for “The Story of Matsuda Hideyuki.” I was very unsure about the ending and actually had two versions. When I asked for his opinion, he choose the one which is in the book. I discussed the possibility of using the alternative, perhaps more subtle, ending in the forthcoming paperback version, but he was adamant that I shouldn’t change it.

4) Anything else you want to add? I am impressed with your pacing, the abrupt endings, either terror or moral story ending. The first story really grabbed me. It stays with me, the ending.

Brooks: I have very little faith in my ability as a writer. I know the story ideas are good, but writing does not come naturally to me. It’s an often painful process. All of the stories have undergone countless revisions. Whenever I thought they were finished, I would reread them and find so many flaws. I was never happy, but in the end I had to tell myself that enough was enough. I could have gone on revising them forever. Despite that, even when the proofreading was completed I found myself doing some tweaking. I suspect that I would still want to revise them if I sat down and reread them now.

The Japanese have a particular knack for reinvention. When Buddhism was introduced to Japan, the deities were given Japanese incarnations. Many Japanese legends and myths have a Chinese origin. You can find the same folktales retold throughout Japan with regional flavours added. There is a tradition of writers of each age rewriting and adapting stories for their own times. Popular kabuki plays were rewritten by subsequent generations of writers to keep them relevant for current audiences. Even a startlingly original story such as “Ring,” by Koji Suzuki follows the tradition of incorporating and updating already very well-known elements of folklore.

Anyone familiar with Japanese ghost stories will recognise the well, the long black hair and the white funeral garb as centuries-old staples of Japanese horror. To some extent, I have tried to do the same with my stories, to connect them both directly or indirectly to a recognised tradition to make them acceptable to a Japanese audience. To do this, I totally absorbed myself in written, pictorial and filmed adaptations of Japanese ghostly stories.

The abrupt moral story endings you mentioned were influenced by medieval Buddhist setsuwa, a teaching tool used by itinerant monks to illustrate the laws of karmic causality. The abrupt horrific endings are more akin to the sensational horror stories of the Edo era (1603-1868) a period when the telling of ghost stories as a popular entertainment came into its own. It is an effective format still popular in modern short storytelling. We will have to wait for the Japanese translation is completed to discover how successful, or not, I have been.