“It was about a fortnight before Christmas, when the days were at their shortest and darkest.” (Quotation page 129, from “Christmas Eve at Beach House” by Eliza Lynn Linton)

Content, Theme and Genre

This fourth collection of Classic Ghost Stories contains twenty-three stories by different authors, written in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. All stories take place during foggy winter days and dark winter nights around Christmas, where guests are invited to celebrate happy, festive Christmas days and New Years Eve in the beautiful manors and old country houses of their hosts. At this time of the year everything can happen, ghosts are to be seen, mostly unfriendly, and some of the invited guests might listen amused to the stories about haunted houses and rooms, definitely not believing in such supernatural things, and then may awake or not awake one morning, just having experienced otherwise, without any logical and possible explanation. “Much still remains obscure and cannot now be cleared up; for the only man who could perhaps throw further light on it is no longer with us.” (Quotation page 215, from “The Black Cat” by W. J. Wintle). Very interesting for me was the story “The Christmas Eve Vigil” by James Bowker, as I know the theme of the ghostly procession of figures towards a church, revealing the faces of the persons going to die during the following year, from a famous theatre play, “Der Müller und sein Kind”, written 1830 by the German writer Ernst Raupach.

Conclusion

A perfect collection for gripping, enjoyable reading hours during dark winter evenings.