Peter Haining - Christmas Spirits

[dem bones]

Peter Haining - Christmas Spirits: Ghost Stories Of The Festive Season (William Kimber, 1983)

ionicus

Introduction: Peter Haining

Charles Dickens - The Goblins Who Stole A Sexton
Ch-r-s D-c-k-n-s - The Haunted Man
George Cruickshank - Frights!
John Kendrick Bangs - Thurlow’s Christmas Story
Jerome K. Jerome - Our Ghost Party
J. M. Barrie - The Ghost Of Christmas Eve
Bret Harte - The Ghosts Of Stukely Castle
Elinor Glyn - The Irtonwood Ghost
Alfred Noyes - The Lusitania Waits
H. P. Lovecraft - The Festival
Eden Phillpotts - Grimm’s Ghost
Stephen Leacock - The Christmas Ghost
M. R. James - The Story Of A Disappearance And An Appearance
A. N. L. Munby - A Christmas Ghost
Algernon Blackwood - S.O.S.
John Dickson Carr - Blind Man’s Hood

The only surprise is that it took PH until '83 to compile a seasonal collection - I'd have expected him to have half a dozen of them under his belt by then. This doesn't have the epicness of the soon-come Richard Dalby Christmas books and, call a spade a spade, it's not particularly good - the emphasis is on 'fun' which kind of dooms it from the start. That said, Christmas Spirits is not without interest; there's some yuletide xenophobia from Elinor Glyn, Carr's excellent but over-familiar Blind Man's Hood and Munby's horrid variation on pass the parcel. Best of the lot? I'll go for the Alfred Midnight Express Moyes' rarity.

Verdict. Unless you're a Haining completist you don't really need this and you'd be better advised to buy companion volume Hallowe'en Hauntings.

Includes:

Alfred Noyes - The Lusitania Waits: Jimmy Hunt has been crazy ever since he was taken prisoner aboard a German U-boat on Christmas Eve and bashed over the head with an iron bar for refusing to talk. But it wasn't the blow that broke his mind. Turns out this was the very same submarine that infamously sank passenger liner The Lusitania in 1915. Now the drowned dead come for their revenge.

A. N. L. Munby - A Christmas Ghost (Aka, A Christmas Game): Dorchester, 1880’s. Father invites Fenton, an old school friend, to spend Christmas with his family after a chance meeting in Exeter. The man has an aversion to anybody mentioning his years as an administrator in New Zealand.

Despite this, things are fine until the family settle down to play ‘dead man’ (as made infamous by Ray Bradbury in The October Game) and Fenton is handed two squishy grapes in the dark. He screams and suffers a stroke. Shortly after, the narrator, a young medical student sees the ghost of a blind Aborigine stumbling about the yard and it’s obvious who he’s come for.

Algernon Blackwood - S.O.S.: The narrator's husband-to-be is caught in a snowdrift in the Jurassic Mountains and hanging on grimly for dear life above a yawning chasm. His wraith appears - not to his bride, but to her friend, Dot. Between them and a trusty St. Bernard they manage to rescue him. Far too feel-good for my liking.

Ch-r-s D-c-k-n-s - The Haunted Man: Dickens is spending Christmas Eve toiling over Our Mutual Friend when the first phantom, the ghost of his cliches, appears .... Haining credits this to Bret Harte.

George Cruickshank - Frights!: Mr. Smith spins an elaborate yarn around the loss of his pigtail in the haunted Clay Hall mansion on Christmas Eve. Mr. O'Brien gives a more prosaic account of the same incident. Painless enough but, assuming Cruickshank actually wrote this, I'm glad he gave more time and energy to his illustrations.

[redbrain]

I'm beginning to wonder how many anthologies there are of Christmas ghost stories. I don't think that I've ever owned a single one of them. And I must have owned, at one or another, hundreds of ghost or horror anthologies. If it comes to that, I still own quite a lot of them.

[dem bones]

Off the top of my head apart from Haining who, astonishingly, seemes to have stopped at just the one;

Richard Dalby has Ghosts for Christmas, Chillers For Christmas and Horror For Christmas (there are also related crime, Mystery and - I think - murder titles in the series).

Kathryn Cramer & David G. Hartwell had Christmas Ghosts (Robinson, 1988)

For young adults there's the anonymously edited Chilling Christmas Tales (Scholastic Press, 1992)

I'm sure there must have been more.

The Dalby's are arguably the best and handily include most of the stories from the Haining and Cramer/ Hartwell collections. Oh, and I'd love to have a go at compiling one!

[dem bones]

Elinor Glyn - The Irtonwood Ghost: ([Pearson’s Magazine, Dec 1911). Estelle Charters is to spend Christmas at Irtonwood Manor with Sir George Handress and guests. Estelle has recently been informed that late husband's will has been contested and his right to the family fortune questioned. Unless a certain ancient marriage certificate can be located, she may be spending the New Year as one of the horrid little poor people!

From the first night at Irtonwood, Estelle has strange dreams, grows increasingly convinced that the answer to her problems lies in this very haunted house. It seems the spectre of a lady in white is intervening on her behalf, but the guests include a "loathsome foreigner" (did I mention that this was published in 1911? I think maybe I should), a mysterious so called gentleman named Duval, who is also deeply interested in the recovery of the document. The swarthy swine! We might have guessed!

Happily, between them the spectre and Sir George see to it that justice is done. Estelle is spared the humiliation of taking a demeaning menial job and frenchy is exposed as the lowest of the low!

J. M. Barrie - The Ghost Of Christmas Eve: (My Lady Nicotine, 1890). A 'hilarious' mix-up of On The Buses proportion sees the author mistaken for the legendary ghost of a Yorkshire Manor house. Barrie feels obliged to speak out when the incident is the subject of a startling paper in the following month's issue of the Society for Haunted Houses newsletter.

[dem bones]

Eden Phillpotts - Grimm's Ghost: (It Happened Like That, 1927). Beggar's Manor, Devon. Despite facing financial ruin, veteran gamekeeper John Hartland refuses to accept what he considers to be "charity" from the master, Sir Frederick Marsden. Betty Hartland is far from confident that the Lord will provide and enters into a conspiracy with Marsden to persuade the one-eyed old fool see sense. So it is that, on Christmas Eve, the legendary ghost of George Grimm appears to John by the fireside. A notorious miser all his days, Grimm can't ascend to Heaven until he's done a deserving someone a good turn. He reveals to Hartland where he kept his valuable collection of Sheffield plate. Niceness prevails!

Stephen Leacock - The Christmas Ghost: (Winnowed Wisdom, 1926). Unemployment in One of our Oldest Industries. The ghost of a man 100 years dead visits the author on Christmas Eve to bemoans his unhappy lot. He got this way by committing a highway murder and allowing an innocent man to hang in his place. The advent of electric light, the rise of the motor car have rendered his kind all but obsolete, leaving them forever at the beck and call of lousy spiritualists.

This volume might just as well be titled Nightcaps and Nightmares II as it seems to have been compiled from surplus public domain items considered for Haining's volume of "humorous" ghost stories. As anthologies they are both a bit ... flat. The commentaries are fun but editor seems to have fallen into trap of including stories either on the basis that they are the work of famous authors not immediately associated with supernatural fiction, and/ or because they have been "forgotten" since their original publication. I think most of us have learned the hard way that, just because a story is little seen does not automatically signify that it is in urgent need of revival.

[ripper]

A Christmas Game is the first Munby story I read, in Michael Cox's 12 Supernatural Tales, if I remember correctly, and it is still one of my favourites by that author. That creepy game is so atmospheric. Trust PH to slightly rename it and fool me for a few seconds into thinking I had come across a Munby story I had not read.