10 Classic Scary Stories to Read for Christmas (That Aren’t ‘A Christmas Carol’)

It’s not a tradition that’s much followed today, but in the Victorian era, gathering around the fireplace on Christmas Eve to tell ghost stories was one of the mainstays of the holiday period. How the connection between Christmastime and the supernatural originated is debatable, but some historians believe the roots of this tradition likely lie a lot further back than the 19th century.

The winter solstice, just a few days before Christmas Day, has long been considered a time when the barrier between the world of the living and the world of the dead was at its weakest, and as our Christmas festivities aligned with this ancient pagan holiday, it’s likely this tradition was simply passed down from one era to the next. 

Some spooky tales from local Christmas folklore continue to be circulated in many places today. But aside from unending adaptations of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, nowadays festive ghost stories aren’t quite as much of a part of the holidays as they once were (regardless of what the lyrics to Andy Williams’ The Most Wonderful Time of the Year might say).

But if you’re on the lookout for a chilling wintertime tale, Ebenezer Scrooge’s festive redemption isn’t the only one on the bookshelf. Here are 10 other, less well-known, spooky classics to take a look at this Christmas. 

1. “The Ash Tree” by M.R. James
2. “The Kit-Bag” by Algernon Blackwood
3. “Between the Lights” by E.F. Benson
4. “Smee” by A.M. Burrage
5. The Haunted Man by Charles Dickens
6. A Strange Christmas Game by J.H. Riddell
7. Number Ninety by B.M. Croker
8. “All Souls” by Edith Wharton
9. “The Ghost’s Summons” by Ada Buisson
10. “The Shadow” by Edith Nesbit

“The Ash Tree” by M.R. James

Montague Rhodes James, better known as M.R. James, was an English scholar and medievalist who served as Vice-Chancellor of England’s illustrious Cambridge University in the mid-1910s. James’s work and research as an academic remains significant today, but it is as a writer of ghost stories that he is perhaps best remembered, and he published several volumes of his creepy tales—many of which he related to friends and family on Christmas Eve—throughout his life. 

“The Ash-Tree” is an especially unnerving tale that was one of eight stories James included in his first collection of spooky stories, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, in 1904. The story begins in the late 1600s, with the trial and eventual execution of a mysterious woman named Mrs. Mothersole, who is accused of witchcraft in a remote village in the rural east of England.

Her mysterious last words, “There will be guests at the Hall,” soon prove ominously true when the local squire who brought charges against her dies at his home under questionable circumstances.  

“The Kit-Bag” by Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Blackwood was one of the best-known writers of supernatural stories in the early 1900s, and later became known in his native U.K. as a broadcaster who would read spooky tales on British radio and television.

“The Kit-Bag” was one of his earliest published stories, which appeared in the December edition of London’s Pall Mall literary magazine in 1908. The story concerns a young English barrister who, in the aftermath of a gruesome murder trial at which he was called upon to defend the murderer, begins to pack a bag in preparation for a much-needed Christmas holiday—only to discover things may not be quite as they seem. 

“Between the Lights” by E.F. Benson

The English writer E.F. Benson is perhaps best known for his comic Mapp and Lucia series of novels, which satirized the lives of the upper-middle classes in 1920s and 30s England. Alongside his comedic writing, however, Benson wrote a number of supernatural stories, publishing several anthologies throughout his life.

“Between the Lights,” first published in Benson’s 1912 collection The Room in the Tower and Other Stories, is set in a quintessentially spooky mansion in the English countryside at Christmastime, where one guest begins recounting a terrifying vision. 

“Smee” by A.M. Burrage

Alfred McLelland Burrage became well known in the early 1900s as the writer of a series of detective books for boys published under the pseudonym Frank Lelland. But it is as a prolific writer of ghost and supernatural literature that he is arguably best remembered today.

His 1931 tale “Smee,” first published in the anthology Someone in the Room, is a classic example of a story-within-a-story, in which a party guest on Christmas Eve recalls a Christmas from years earlier where a group of 12 friends found that a mysterious 13th had joined a game of festive hide-and-go-seek.

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The Haunted Man by Charles Dickens

Clearly, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol isn’t the only 19th-century festive ghost story, but neither is it the only such tale Dickens himself wrote during his lifetime.

“Christmas is a time in which … the memory of every remediable sorrow, wrong, and trouble in the world around us, should be active with us,” realizes the eponymously haunted Mr. Redlaw in the last of Dickens’s five Christmas novellas, 1848’s “The Haunted Man.”

The tale features a man haunted by an apparition that looks like his exact double; live performances of the tale in Dickens’s day proved a sensation thanks to their use of a “Pepper’s ghost”—a theatrical technique that allowed the story’s ghost to be projected live onto the stage. 

A Strange Christmas Game by J.H. Riddell

Charlotte Riddell was an immensely prolific Victorian writer of ghost stories, who (due to the male-dominated nature of the publishing business at the time) published most of her tales under a variety of pseudonyms; J.H. Riddell, the name under which she published A Strange Christmas Game in 1863, was actually that of her husband.

The story concerns a brother and sister who inherit a supposed haunted mansion, at which the original owner long ago suffered a mysterious fate following a festive game of cards. 

Number Ninety by B.M. Croker

The prolific Irish-born author Bithia Mary Croker was arguably best known in the 19th century for her romantic society dramas, many of which were set during Britain’s rule of India (and which proved so popular that even the Victorian prime minister William Gladstone was once spotted reading one). Much of her shorter fiction, however, comprised a great many wintertime ghost stories, including the fiercely unnerving tale of Number Ninety.

The title is the number of a supposedly haunted house in Charleston, South Carolina, in which a friend of the narrator, John Hollyoak, gamely agrees to spend Christmas night both to prove the nonexistence of ghosts and to dispel the local rumors of its haunting.

Hollyoak, however, soon discovers that the house’s spirits are very much real, but rather than be put off, he confronts them and then bravely returns to Number Ninety the following night to get to the bottom of the haunting—at which point things do not quite go as he had expected… 

“All Souls” by Edith Wharton

Although it’s not set at Christmastime (the story takes place in a bitterly cold weekend at the end of October, hence the title), Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome author Edith Wharton’s 1937 short story “All Souls” has enough wintry chilliness in it to suit a fireside retelling.

The tale concerns a woman named Mrs. Clayburn, who is rendered bedbound in a large country house while recovering from a twisted ankle. She awakes one morning to find the rest of the house deserted, with her staff and doctor nowhere to be seen—and a perhaps mysterious presence in their place. 

“The Ghost’s Summons” by Ada Buisson

The English writer Ada Buisson (sister of the suffragist and Australian women’s rights campaigner Leontine Cooper) is relatively little known today—a fact not helped by her life being tragically cut short by her death in 1866, at the age of just 27.

In her all too brief lifetime, however, Buisson wrote a number of short stories (as well as the novel Put to the Test), many of which were published in the Victorian literary magazine Belgravia—among them the chilling tale of “The Ghost’s Summons.” 

Published posthumously in 1868, Buisson’s story begins with a young doctor sitting down to a meagre meal alone at Christmastime, when a mysterious pale-looking stranger arrives at his surgery convinced that he is going to do that evening at precisely 1:00 a.m. The patient offers the doctor an opportunity he finds it impossible to turn down: for a fee of £1,000, all he needs to do is wait by his bedside to attend to his death.

When the fateful hour arrives, however, the doctor witnesses something more terrifying than he could ever have imagined.

“The Shadow” by Edith Nesbit

English Victorian author Edith Nesbit, or E. Nesbit as she tended to be known, is today best remembered as the author of several classic turn-of-the-last-century children’s stories, including Five Children and It and The Railway Children.

Alongside her children’s literature, however, Nesbit also wrote several classic ghost stories, including the chilling “Man-Size in Marble, ”and the festive tale of “The Shadow.” 

First published in 1905, “The Shadow” begins at a Christmas party, where a group of women are telling one another appropriately spooky tales. When the women invite the housekeeper Mrs. Eastwitch to join in with their game, however, she regales them with a tale of a mysterious shadow that haunted the home of an old friend, and which, it soon transpires, might not entirely have been left in her past.