Merry Christmas!

It’s almost over as I write this, but I hope the day has been and continues to be a merry one for all of you. And that you’re enjoying some winter weather to set the tone. We’re running t he air conditioner here in Texas.

Today I’ve chosen to look at a ghost story by one of the practitioners whose work is associated with Christmas and keeping the tradition of ghost stories at Christmas alive into the Twentieth Century.

That would be Montague Rhodes James.

M. R. James routinely wrote a ghost story for his friends at Christmas, but there was only one that was acdtuallyt set at Christmas.

That story is “The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance”, which was first published in 1913.

It’s available in a number of volumes. I read it in Supernatural Horror Vol. VII edited by Will Oliver.There will be spoilers in this post.

Written in epistolary style, the story is in the form of four letters an unnammed narrator sends his brother between Decemberr 22 and December 26. The narrator has gone to help search from his uncle, a rector in a small town who has disappeared.

The searchers have no luck finding the body. The innkeeper where the narrator is staying had ill feelings towards the rector, who was reputed as difficult to get along with at times.

On Christmas Eve, a traveller tells the narrator about a new Punch and Judy show he has just seen. That night the narrator has a nightmare about a Punch and Judy show.

On Christmas Day, the narrator has an odd exchange with the innkieeper. He arrives early at the church for the Christmas service and sees some men returing the bier, which had been moved, although no one knew by whom. He was also disturbed by the sight of a clerk folding up a moth-eaten velvet pall.

Then the Punch and Judy show arrives that afternoon. There is some sort fo struggle between two of the perfomers. In the narrator’s dream, one of the puppets has his head covered in a sack like a condemened man. The narrator thinks he sees one of the performers wearing sucha  hood right before the stage collapses. Two men rise from the wteckage and run out of town.

One of the performers falls into a lime pit. The missing man’s body is found in the same pit.  He had been strangled. He was also wearing a hood (or cap, as James called it). It was a corner of this headcovering sticking out of the ground that led to the discovery fo the body.

There is no trace of the second man. The narrator questions if he was really chasing the other. The crowd returns to town. They find the body of the other man in the wreckage of the stage, dead.

No one knows who  they are.

End of story.

I have to admit that there were aspects of this story I didn’t entirely follow. Some of it was in the slang the innkeeper was using. I wasn’t sure how literal some of his statements should have been taken.

I’m also not very familiar with Punch and Judy. I know they were a long-running series of puppet shows that featured a lot of violence and stlapstick. I didn’t get some of the symbolism in the dream. I’m not sure what the men running from the wrecked stage, one of them clearly a ghost, had to do with the murder other than finding the body.

James implied that the innkeeper is the person who killed the rector. That was never conclusively established that I could tell.

I had never read this particular story, although I like M. R. James’s work and have read a number of his stories.