A Ghost Story for Christmas

Katherine Rundell unearths the Christmas ghost story from pagan origins to Dickens, Susan Hill and 1970s folk horror television and considers what these curious bedfellows say about our complex relationship with this time of year.

Ghost stories have always been best told on a midwinter night — preferably aloud, around a blazing fire. Katherine joins Jeanette Winterson at the hearth of her haunted home to share ghostly archival tales from MR James, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens and to trace what she describes as ‘the greatest of pleasures’ - that combination of an icy haunting dark, hemming a Christmas globe of light. 

She learns how midwinter, not Halloween, is the traditional time to usher in a world beyond ours. In the company of Professor John Mullan, Katherine returns to some of our oldest texts including Beowulf to discover how spectres and ghouls have allowed us to express loss, resolution and rage around the fire over centuries.

Reading from her childhood diary, writer Sarah Waters describes her own long fascination with ghost tales in midwinter and reflects on the BBC’s reigniting of this tradition with its ‘A Ghost Story for Christmas’ adaptations in the 1970s and then again more recently. She examines yuletide motifs for horror including ancient houses where families gather once a year, creaking staircases and children’s faces at snowy windows.

Music by The Cabinet of Living Cinema and Zac Gvi
Produced by Sarah Cuddon
A Falling Tree Production for BBC Radio 4