Winter’s Ghosts – Chilling Tales for Christmas

Who doesn’t like a spooky read for Christmas or during these darkest days of winter? And I don’t mean what we normally regard as horror. For me, a ghost story is more subtle than that. It’s something that makes you shiver a little rather than jump out of your skin, it’s that feeling we all get of being haunted, of something ‘not quite right’ but we can’t put our finger on it. Gothic style ghost stories are a particular favourite of mine and writer friend, Alyson Faye, and last year we came up with the idea of each writing a ghost story in this vein and then finding two other female ghost story writers from the past, stories which are often overlooked. Needless to say, last year came and went and we weren’t able to put this idea into action.

Then Aly raised the idea again recently and trawling through my files, I found an old story which I had never done anything with which could be developed to fit the theme. Dead Man’s Fair came about as a result of reading a true story set in the small market town I moved to with family when I was 17. My parents still live there and so I regard it now very much as my ‘home town’. The book in question was ‘A Night in the Snow – The story of a struggle for life on the Long Mynd‘ by Rev E Donald Carr, first published 1865. This tells of the minister’s journey overnight on the Mynd during a particularly violent snowstorm. In its pages, there is mention of the folk who travel across the hills to the market in Church Stretton and how this became known as Dead Man’s Fair because some never made it. I took that environment and created a new story of that title, following a young drover, already suffering loss, as he makes his way to the town for that infamous market.

Can you imagine walking along the Long Mynd during a blizzard? I remember some particularly cold times in Stretton and I certainly wouldn’t want to go up there. If you want to find out a bit more about this area of South Shropshire, go here.

Then Aly provided, as always, a wonderful gothic story (this really is her genre), Chilled to the Bone. A delightful tale of greed going wrong. And I adored how Edgar Milner, of Milner Manor, dressed up as a female ghost in order to to get his hands on an inheritance. His prancing and preening made me smile, but yes – the story does turn dark. Ghosts don’t take kindly to this sort of thing.

Aly then read stories from a number of earlier female writers and sent me those she thought suitable to pair with our modern takes and to that end we included A Strange Christmas Game by Charlotte Riddell and The Triumph of Night by Edith Wharton, together with a biography of each.

Winter’s Ghosts has been put out as ebook only at present and is available here. https://mybook.to/WintersGhosts. Cheaper than a coffee why not grab a copy? (Sorry about the unintended rhyme!)