Phantoms of Christmas Past: Festive Ghost Hoaxes, Ghost Hunts and Ghost Panics

Folklorist and journalist Weatherhead (Social Panics & Phantom Attackers) packs this brief, entertaining survey with strange doings that took place around Christmas and New Year’s in the 19th and early 20th centuries. He mostly spotlights British Yuletide specters with evocative names like the Peterborough Poltergeist, the Dronfield Skeleton, and the Clanky Ghost of East Barnet. Among them is “notorious man of letters, priest, dandy” and inventor of the index, William Dodd, who was hanged for forgery in 1777, and whose spirit took to haunting the holidays of the Burrows family of Uxbridge; as well as Richard III, who, according to the West Midlands Farmers Gazette, appeared to Bill Chesterton of Tinsel Lane on Christmas of 1921 and warned him that woodsmen in the area must cease wanton deforestation or “dire misfortune will dog their footsteps.” Along with retellings of these spectral phenomena, Weatherhead investigates the incidents’ likely folkloric origins or scientifically plausible explanations—including cruel hoaxes, yellow journalism, mass hysteria, and hallucinations (he suggests that the same waking-dream, sleep paralysis phenomenon that is described as alien abduction today was attributed to ghosts during this period). This spooky dip into the arcane world of Christmas spirits will make for a diverting stocking stuffer. (Sept.)