Episode 30: A Very Merry Ghostmas | Show Notes
Amanda’s Notes
The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Stories
https://theconversation.com/why-ghosts-haunt-england-at-christmas-but-steer-clear-of-america-34629
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230623330_2
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/los-feliz-murder-mansion
“There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long long ago…”
Opening this up with a quote from the introduction Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Stories Volume 1: “To capture the Victorian ghost story experience is to whisper it by candlelight, to feel the tendrils of December’s chill reaching from the darkness”. I won’t spend this whole episode reading from this introduction, which is perfect for a quick primer on the evolution of ghost stories in Victorian England, but I couldn’t resist that quote! I really need to get the other volumes, I spent last December reading one story per night and it was just delightful.
This beginning is so disjointed. Turns out finding Christmas ghost stories from the US is trickier than I thought it would be! Could be me failing on search term bingo but such is life. I do have some fun tidbits about ghost stories in Victorian times though if you don’t have too much background there, is that ok? Kind of stepping on your toes there.
The Christmas literary annual came into popularity in the 1820s/1830s. These anthologies of poetry and prose came out in December, as you would expect, and were incredibly popular. And while they weren’t exclusively horror, ghost stories were definitely among the most popular. And fun fact! It’s estimated that as many as 70% of these Christmas ghost story authors were women!
Now, that’s not to say that the ghost stories published at Christmas were necessarily Christmas ghost stories. For an example I believe you’ll know Corinne, Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Pit and the Pendulum” was first published in the literary annual “The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1843”. So I’m imagining picking up a literary annual before Christmas Eve in 1842, then gathering in the sitting room with your family, nothing but firelight from the hearth and a few candles keeping the winter darkness at bay, experiencing that story for the first time as the most gregarious member of your family reads it out loud. The light flickering across faces as everyone imagines the pendulum blade coming closer and closer. That’s the sort of Christmas spirit I’m here for tbh.
Now, because I’m me. I couldn’t help but briefly include an allegedly true American Christmas ghost story that every true crime podcast on the planet has already covered: The Los Feliz Murder Mansion in L.A.
December 6, 1959, Harold Perelson murdered his wife with a ball peen hammer, brutally beat his teenage daughter, then killed himself with a combo of water, acid, and tranquilizer pills. I’ll let the true crime peeps go into the speculated reasons why because again, everyone and their brother has covered this case seven ways to Sunday at this point. We’re going to focus on the aftermath.
One year after the murder the home was sold to a couple who only used the over 5,000 sqft mansion as a storage facility. It’s said that they never even bothered changing the Perelson’s decor. Their son inherited the property in 1996 and also used the home entirely as storage.
Now, as you might imagine, an abandoned mansion with a tragic history invites all sorts of people to try to come inside, or at least a peek. And what people claim to have seen is eerie. Allegedly when you peer through those windows that haven’t been cleaned in decades you can see the stack of Christmas presents neatly wrapped under the decaying Christmas tree, waiting for the Perelson children to open them on Christmas Day. People who say they’ve trespassed claim to have seen a shadow moving in the house, or to have felt a presence watching them.
The property was sold in 2020 to a real estate investor who plans to renovate it finally so the unchanged family decor should be a thing of the past, though whether the ghosts evict themselves along with the stack of presents or stay to greet the new residents remains to be seen.
Corinne’s Notes:
Sources:
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2021/12/16/ghost-stories-for-christmas
https://carterhaughschool.com/10-spooky-ghost-stories-for-christmastime/
https://www.history.com/news/christmas-tradition-ghost-stories
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks08/0801051.txt → The Kit Bag
Okay first things first–I owe a huge amount of gratitude to Aaron from The Appalachian Folklore Podcast and need to issue a correction. During our last episode on Fakelore, I asserted that Welsh and English traditions like Mari Lwyd and The Hunting of the Earl of Rone are examples of fakelore. That is 100% incorrect. I misunderstood what I was reading and drew incorrect conclusions, and for that I apologize. I’m still very much a novice, and I’m grateful that Aaron was kind enough to provide links to help me better understand the topic. So, thanks Aaron!
Now! On to on-the-record proof that I willingly read ghost stories for this dang podcast! As we’ve already mentioned [I’m assuming this- Amanda does thrilling amounts of research], Christmas/the solstice/winter in general is a popular time for the sharing of spooky stories. Which totally makes sense to me- it gets dark early, and I get the appeal of sharing stories around the fire, even if I prefer wholesome and heartwarming to gruesome and terrifying because I’m a PANSY. And it’s a liminal time as you pass from the darkest days of the year and on towards the spring equinox and increasingly brighter days.
The Victorian era was a real heyday for spooky-ass tales at Christmas, especially as industrialization made books, magazines, and newspapers something that anyone could own. As History.com’s article on the subject puts it, This gave Victorians the opportunity to commercialize and commodify existing oral ghost stories, turning them into a version they could sell. Honestly, this in particular really reminds me of how the tradition of playing Hyakumonogatari in Japan combined with the development of printing presses made books full of ghost stories from Japan and abroad insanely popular, too!
According to Drs Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman, folklorists and founders of the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic (side note: I’ve been eying their courses for like a year now, I may finally invest in a couple for 2023…), another reason for the growing popularity of all things creepy and occult in the British Empire was “...that ghost stories offered fantasies of destabilization of the powerful, at a time when the British empire was at its height. And part of it is simply that legends are powerful ways of dealing with anxiety AND having fun, and they always have been!” While I might not agree that ghost stories are fun (again, I’m a coward lmao), I can absolutely understand wanting to imagine the mighty being toppled!
Fortunately for me, the tradition didn’t catch on quite as strongly in the United States. According to The Smithsonian Magazine, we can blame this on the Puritans. We can blame just. So Very Much on the Puritans for our weird-ass culture.
So in the spirit of the holidays, I read some Victorian ghost stories, one of which I will attempt to summarize! I was even good and DID NOT cheat by just summarizing A Christmas Carol badly.
First off, I read The Kit Bag, published in 1908 by Algernon Blackwood.
In this, our protagonist is a young lawyer who’s just successfully defended an accused murderer (who’s described as having a “bat-white” face, and I’m gonna have to look up bats in the UK because when I think bats, I think brown), and is getting ready to spend the Christmas holidays skiing and having fun in the Alps. He realizes he doesn’t have a “kit bag” (google tells me it’s similar to a duffel bag), and his senior partner at the law firm offers to have one dropped off at his home for him.
Our good dude gets home and gets the promised kit bag from his landlady, who’s received it for him, and gets to packing. Gotta love someone who waits ‘til last minute to pack. Couldn’t be me!
Anyway, this man fits HEROIC amounts of stuff into the bag- seriously I’m jealous of the capacity of this bag- and very quiet sounds from the rest of the house start to set him on edge. Y’all let me just say that Algernon Blackwood is good at building a sense of apprehension. Just. Listen to this sentence: “It is difficult to say exactly at what point fear begins, when the causes of that fear are not plainly before the eyes.” At one point, he thinks the way the bag has sorta folded on itself as he packs looks like the alleged murderer he defended. Then he thinks he sees someone on the landing of his building, and hears what sounds like someone stealthily making their way into his room. And YALL I HATE THIS. I READ THIS LATE AT NIGHT AND IT WAS AN MISTAKE. Instead of like. Calling the cops, or whatever. Our dashing young lawyer dude GOES INTO THE ROOM??? But of course it’s empty because we have to build that tension. BUT the bag isn’t where he left it! Dun dun duuuuuuun! He’s all like, “no, this is fine, everything’s fine” and goes to his sitting room to calm down by the fire. But of course instead he’s consumed with all the horrific imagery from the trial and is just completely spooked. But we’re British so he’s just gotta stuff all that shit deeeeeeep down and turn it into an ulcer later. He finally goes back to his room and GUESS WHAT THE BAG HAS MOVED AGAIN and it kinda looks like someone just hid behind it???? (seriously though, how big is this bag and where can i buy one??). He looks around but doesn’t see anyone but oh hey is there a bloodstain on that bag? In his panic to get away because he’s freaking right the hell out now, he manages to hit the light switch. This leads to scrabbling to turn the light back on, where he internally debates actually turning the lights on or not because you know what? Sometimes the dark is better because you can pretend everything is fine. He manages to turn the lights back on and SEES THE MURDERER IN HIS ROOM! He does what any sensible person would do and faints from sheer terror.
The next morning his landlady finds him and is like, “...did you not go to bed? Are you sick? Also your boss sent someone over.” The guy the boss sent over is EXTREMELY apologetic because whoopsidoodle, we didn’t bring over your boss’s spare kit bag! Just realized it! We accidentally gave you the kit bag that the alleged murderer’s victim was found in, sorry! Oh btw, the guy y’all defended killed himself as soon as he was released and left a note saying he’d rather be put away in the bag, the same as he did the woman he killed. And that’s just??? Where the story ends??? I hate it and if I have to know about it you have to, too.
