“But something odd does happen here at Christmas time. When I first heard the story, I thought it was an old wives’ tale, but—well, these old houses—you hear strange things—” He lifted his shoulders and stared into the fire… From the troves of the British Library collections comes a new volume for Christmas nights—when the boundary between the mundane and the unearthly is ever so thin—ushering in a new throng of revenants, demons, spectres and shades drawn to the glow of the hearth. Included within are eighteen classic stories ranging from 1864 to 1974, with vintage Victorian chillers nestled alongside unsettling modern pieces from L. P. Hartley and Mildred Clingerman; lost tales from rare anthologies and periodicals; weird episodes from unexpected authors such as Winston Graham and D. H. Lawrence; stories simmering with a twisted humour from Elizabeth Bowen and Celia Fremlin and many more haunting seasonal treats. Tanya Kirk is a curator in the Printed Heritage Collections team at the British Library. She has previously edited the Tales of the Weird collection Sunless Solstice: Strange Christmas Tales for the Longest Nights in 2021 with Lucy Evans. INTRODUCTION Christmas has long been portrayed as an idealised time when we gather together and enjoy the pleasures of hearty food, entertainments and a blazing fire in the hearth. The oral tradition of using this cosy time of year to share ghostly tales is long-established, but the written tradition really took off in the second half of the nineteenth century—credited to a rise in literacy, changing print technologies and an increased circulation of popular fiction periodicals. One reason why ghost stories are so enjoyable at Christmas is that they subvert any comfortable domestic familiarity. Homely everyday objects and settings are rendered unfamiliar and uncanny. We feel pleasantly unsettled. The eighteen stories in this fourth collection of weird Christmas tales are drawn from across the spectral spectrum. The earliest dates from 1864, the first golden age of the Christmas ghost story, and the latest is from 110 years later, when belief in the paranormal had been overtaken by hard science, but our enjoy- ment of supernatural stories had not lessened. Here you will find well-respected writers known for their ghost tales, such as Amelia B. Edwards, W. W. Jacobs and Celia Fremlin. However there are also stories by authors better-known for an entirely different style of fiction—D. H. Lawrence, James Hadley Chase, and Winston Graham, for example. I’ve also included tales by two writers about whom we know little or nothing at all—namely E. S. Knights and George Denby. The subject matter of the stories is similarly wide-ranging, encompassing timeslips; ghostly retribution; portal fantasy; sinister carol singers; a possessed pantomime costume; body horror at a Christmas tree farm; and a Black Mass. It’s one of the great joys of editing collections of festive ghost stories to see the different inventively eerie ways in which authors use the genre’s traditional boundaries. Should you find yourself sitting by an open fire this Christmas, look into the flames and perhaps you will see a spooky shape or two, flickering there... Tanya KirK Lead Curator, Printed Heritage Collections 1601–1900