James Skip Borlae is perobablay not a name familiar to many of you. I recall under what circumstances I bought The Shrieking Skull and Other Victorian Chritmas Ghost Stories. I bought a year ago, or maybe two. I didn’t get a chance to read any of the stories before Christmas in whatevder year I bought it.

So I decided to read on this year for Twelve Days of Christmas Ghost Stories. I read two stories that didn’t have a ghost in them, although they were set on Christams Eve and were horror stories without supernatural elements.

Then I read “The Specter Horseman”. (I haven’t read the title story yet. Maybe I should  ahve started with that one.)

I enjoyed the story, but I was disappointed int he ghost element.

Set during the English Civil War, it’st he story of an elderly minor nobler who is a Royalist. He falls for a beautiful young girl and convinces her poverty-stricken father to let him marry her. Or as the story puts it, sell her to him. Continue reading →

L. P. Hartley was a British writer of ghost stories as well as mainstream novels during the middle of the previous century. “Someone in the Lift” isn’t jsut a ghost story, it’s a very effective horror story.

It takes place at Christmas in a hotel. The Maldons, father, mother, and son Peter are staying at the hotel due to an unexplaiined domestic crisis. Young Peter sees someone in the lift when it comes down to the ground floor. The lift in this case is an old-fashioned elevator with two glass paneled doors, it should be noted.

The strange thing about this figure is that only Peter can see it, and only when he is with his morther, never when he is with his father. Continue reading →

I’m going to try something this year.  One of the Christmas traditions in England is telling ghost stories. The best known example of this is Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. That’s not the only example. The practice was most popular during the Victorian era. It declined after World War II. I first heard of ghost stories at Christmas in the song The Most Wonderful Time of the Year. 

I’m gong to combine this tradition with the Twelve Days of Chritmas.

Sort of.

The Twelve Days of Christmas start on December 25 and run until Jnauary 5. The ghost story tradition (as leas4t as I understand it) leads up to December 25.

What I’m going to do is look at twelve ghost stories set at Christmas, but I’m going to start now and run through the end of the year. They won’t be every day, of course. I’ll try to stay away from the ones that are the msot well-known and choose some that readers might not be as familiar with. I night even throw in one of my own. If the spirit moves, of course.

(I have not forgottten The Starmen of Llyrdis by Leigh Brackett. I finished grading exams today. I’ll tabulated and upload them tomorrow, then get back to the book.)