Montague Rhodes James.
For whatever reason, Christmas Eve is -- after Halloween -- the holiday most associated with ghosts.
After all, the song that extols how this is "the most wonderful time of the year" includes among all the celebratory activities the telling of "scary ghost stories."
Consider that the best-known story set during Christmas, Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," begins with the words "Marley was dead, to begin with," with the aforementioned Marley being one of the spirits that visit Ebenezer Scrooge one Christmas Eve.
And one of the greatest ghost stories of all time, "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James, opens with "The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child."
One of the best practitioners of the classic ghost story was M.R. James, who would compose a new story to be read to friends during the Christmas season -- some of which, such as "Casting the Runes" or the wonderfully titled "O Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad," have become famous through film and other adaptations.
To get a taste for James' work, here's a link to the Guardian's website, where novelist Ruth Rendell reads James' "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook."
It is full of this author's distinctive touches -- slyly humorous asides, innocuous statements that contain a little frisson of terror, all of which build to a moment of real shock and horror.
Rendell's accent, with its slight lisp and brisk, no-nonsense delivery, adds to the atmosphere of the tale, gently and convincingly leading the listener along on this very pleasantly frightening path.
"Canon Alberic's Scrapbook."
