“The Governess’s Story”
Amyas Northcote
available in Winter Ghosts: Classic Ghost Stories for Christmas
ebook only $0.99

There’s an old English tradition of sitting around the fire on December evenings, especially on Christmas Eve, and telling ghost stories. I’m not sure when or how this tradition got started, but I like it.  The practice never caught on here in the States, which makes me think it started in the late 1700s or early 1800s. I’ve always associated telling ghost stories at Christmas with the Victorians, probably because Charles Dickens had some success with them.

But I digress.  I’m going to attempt something here, and that’s to post a review of a ghost story set at Christmas every day until Christmas.  (I’m writing this on the 17th.)  We’ll see how it goes.  I’ll be drawing from a number of different books and will try not to review stories from the same book two days in a row.  I will also try to avoid spoilers as much as I can.

To kick this off, we’ll look at “The Governess’s Story” by Amyas Northcote.  The Christmas connection is rather weak in this one, at least if you’re looking for stories set at Christmas rather than simply told at Christmas.

There’s a framing sequence in which a family is sitting around telling ghost stories at Christmas. Some of the family members prevail upon the elderly governess to tell of an experience she had when she was just starting her career.

The narrator was an young. unemployed governess when she was hired to be the governess to a widow’s children. The boy is eleven and the girl seven, and they live in an old mansion in the countryside.  The governess takes an immediate dislike to the widow, but adores the children. They adore her in return.

The governess’s bedroom is next to the room used for the school lessons. Every night at about 11:30, she hears footsteps walking above her and a window being violently opened. After that all noises cease.

There just one problem. There’s not another floor above her room. The wing of the house she’s in is only two stories high.

There’s also the matter of the dead husband’s first wife and the son he had with her. We’re not told what happened to the first wife, but I assumed she died. That was what made the most sense in the context of the story. The new wife, AKA the current widow, seemed to love her stepson as much as her own children. At least until he husband died.

You can probably see where this is going, so I’ll not tell anymore details. Suffice to say, this was an entertaining and enjoyable, if somewhat predictable, tale. Northcote was a contemporary of M. R. James, so the writing style is a bit old-fashioned.  I was fine with that. I would be interested in reading more of Northcote’s work.