HYPNOGORIA 197 - The Legend of Herne the Hunter

In this festive special we explore the legends and lore of Herne the Hunter. We examine his appearances in classics such The Box of Delights, The Dark is Rising and Robin of Sherwood, explore his connections with the Wild Hunt and Christmas, and untangle his history and folklore from Shakespeare, ghost stories, and the pagan wildwood.

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HYPNOGORIA 157 - A Night at the Theatre of Blood

In this special episode we pay tribute to the late great Dame Diana Rigg with a commentary on her favourite movie - classic horror Theatre of Blood (1973) in which she co-starred with Vincent Price, proving that Shakespeare can indeed be bloody good fun! 

DIRECT DOWNLOAD - HYPNOGORIA 157 - A Night at the Theatre of Blood

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HYPNOGORIA HOME DOMAIN - Full archive, RSS feed and other useful links

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FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - Beneath the Sheets

In previous editions of Folklore on Friday we have examined why ghosts are often pictured wearing chains or depicted as headless phantoms, and so now we shall round off this little series with a look at why exactly we so often picture spooks as sheeted shapes. Of all the depictions of ghosts in popular culture, phantoms appearing as sheeted shapes is surely the most common. But somewhat weirdly, while the reasons for this used to be rather well-known, in recent years the waters have become somewhat muddied.

In recent times I've seen numerous articles making the claim that depicting ghosts as sheeted forms is a relatively recent development. It is claimed that it is based on an old theatrical convention.  Allegedly in olden times, when ghosts appeared in plays and other stage entertainments, they were costumed in suits of armour. And why was this? Well according to the TV Tropes article on this subject (which appears to be the source for many of the pieces I am referring to), it was because -

"in Elizabethan England, armor was no longer worn in combat, and the costuming convention at the time was to dress characters in contemporary (Renaissance) clothing. So, by dressing a character in armor, the character was given an out of date look, and recognized as a ghost."

However by the late 18th and 19th centuries, or so this theory goes, audiences would no longer suspend disbelief in the stage ghosts because their armour made too much clanking and creaking. And hence costume designers cast about for a way of creating a costume that would suggest that the ghost was  incorporeal and ethereal. The solution they arrived at was to dress the actor in white sheets, which along with low lighting, would create misty figures and shapes on shape.

Now this is all very interesting, but once you start investigating the matter the theory collapses like an empty paper bag. To begin with, armour was still commonly worn in Tudor England - Henry VIII for example had several magnificent suits of armour made for his martial endeavours. And furthermore one only has to look at the Roundhead soldiers who fought for Cromwell in the civil war in the 17th century to see that armour was still very much in use a century after the Tudor era was over.

Hamlet and his father's Ghost by Henry Fuseli

Digging a little further into the origins of this theory, we find that the idea that all ghosts were depicted as wearing suits of armour is something of a misconception. Yes, one of the most well-known ghosts in literature is Hamlet's father, who does indeed appear in full battle dress. But if we go back to the text of the play, we discover that while the spirit of Hamlet's father does indeed appear dressed in armour at the beginning of the play, later on he reappears, but in a different costume. For in Act II scene IV, when Hamlet is confronting his mother and his father's shade appears again, the doomed Prince says -

Why, look you there look, how it steals away! 

My father, in his habit as he lived! 

And this is a key scene to understanding why the ghost was deliberately costumed in armour by the Bard of Avon in his first appearance in the play. When the phantom father is first manifesting, he appears in martial dress as he is seeking to combat a grave injustice (i.e. his murder) which is placing the kingdom under threat. However after Hamlet has taken revenge on his uncle (the villain of the piece) and is seeking to also punish his mother for her part in the murder, his father's ghost appears without armour to stay his son's hand; his dress signals that justice has been served and the ghost can now rest. 

Furthermore we discover that there are other ghosts in Shakespeare. And Shakespeare's other famous ghost, is the spectre of Banquo in Macbeth, and this shade isn't specified as wearing armour either. Nor do the ghosts who visit Brutus in Julius Caesar - indeed it would make no sense for a Roman spectre to appear in a suit of armour. Likewise in John Webster's The White Devil (1612) it would be nonsensical for the spectre of the murdered Isabella to appear in full plate armour. In a play from the 1580s, Dr Faustus, written by one of Shakespeare's contemporaries Christopher Marlowe, when our hero conjures up the ghosts of many different historical figures, but they don't all appear dressed in armour either. Rather they appear dressed in their own contemporary clothes.

In short then, what I shall term the armour theory collapses when you look into the range of ghosts and spectres in 16th and 17th century drama, for only a select few of these stage phantoms are kings or soldiers for whom it would be logical to depict as wearing armour. Furthermore Shakespearean scholars have written much on the technical aspects of staging plays, with John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London, in a 2016 article, theorising that "the actors probably – on the day-lit stage of the Globe – had their skin whitened with flour"

The Gambols of Ghosts by William Blake

So where did the armour theory come from? Well tracing my way through the perilous underworld of footnotes and references, the misconception appears to begin in an article entitled The Ghost in Hamlet by RA Foakes published in Shakespeare Survey: Volume 58, Writing about Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press 2005). In this piece Foakes examines the history of portraying the ghost of Hamlet's father, citing on the work Renaissance Clothing by Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, who document several reports of the ghost of Hamlet's father provoking laughter thanks to the noise made by the armour. Hence as a response to this, in the18th and 19th centuries, ditching the armour in favour of a lighter more ethereal looking costume came into fashion. However the key point here is that Roakes, and Jones and Stallybrass, were only speaking about one particular stage ghost, Hamlet's father. But it is thanks to some very careless readings of their studies that the historical evolution of the depiction of the ghost of Hamlet's father has been applied firstly to all stage ghosts, and then  to all popular depictions of ghosts in the eras discussed.

illustration by James McBryde for Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad

So why are ghosts depicted as wearing sheets? Occasionally I have seen the origin laid at the door of MR James, for in one of his most famous ghost stories, Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You My Lad a dreadful spectre manifests in a bed sheet. However here James was playing with the already popular notion of ghosts appearing dressed in white sheets, by having his malevolent apparition actually be a sheet with "a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen". Indeed the ghost as appearing as a white shape was very well-established by the 18th century, as can be seen in  the numerous spirits and phantoms depicted by William Blake, as well as in reports of hauntings such as the Cock Lane ghost and the case of the Hammersmith Ghost from 1803. In another of his tales, There Was a Man Who Dwelt By A Churchyard (which appropriately enough is actually James's guess at the ghost story Maxillius was going to tell in Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale) features another sheeted spectre, and James gives us the real reason why -

Have you ever seen an old brass in a church with a figure of a person in a shroud? It is bunched together at the top of the head in a curious way. Something like that was sticking up out of the earth in a spot of the churchyard which John Poole knew very well.

Now while we always think of burials and funerals as involving a coffin, this is a relatively new development. In ages past only the rich could afford a tomb or a coffin and most folks therefore were buried wrapped up in sheets, with more well-off folks being able to afford fine linen for their shrouds, but often wool blankets were used if they were poor. In fact in There Was A Man Dwelt by a Churchyard James details the funeral of the old woman who later returns from the grave, and tells us "She was buried in woollen, without a coffin."

Hence for many centuries, when people thought of the dead they thought of shapes wrapped up in sheets. Ironically had any proponents of the armour theory read a little more Shakespeare they would have found a passage that highlights this. In Julius Caesar, the Bard has Horatio deliver these lines (which were memorably quoted in one of the eeriest sequences in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) -

A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye.
In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mightiest Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets

Even more ironically, had anyone bothered to consult one of the original sources, they could have easily discovered the truth. For the matter was concisely and clearly wrapped up, if you'll pardon the pun, by Mr Peter Stallybrass himself - 

If you ask people today, when they imagine ghosts, they say they come back in sheets. But if you ask people why they were in sheets, most people don’t know. And they come back in sheets because you’re buried in sheets. So you come back in your shroud.

Peter Stallybrass in an interview with Penn Current in 2001 

 Frontispiece to Tales of Terror by Matthew Lewis, 1808 edition

FOLKLORE ON FRIDAY - The Toad Stone

As we saw last week, toad bones were highly prized for their alleged unusual powers. However in ages past, despite their unfounded and undeserved reputation as being poisonous predators, toads were sought out for another bizarre but commonly believed reason, which William Shakespeare alluded to  in As You Like It.  In Act 2, Scene 1, the Bard of Avon has Duke Senior say:

Sweet the uses of adversity.

Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,

Wears yet a precious jewel in his head

Yes, as strange as it sounds for several centuries a belief flourished which asserted that toad's heads contained a curious gem stone. Now aside from the monetary value of a jewel, these toadstones were also alleged to possess extremely useful properties. In the early encyclopedia, De Proprietatibus Rerum, written by the Franciscan scholar Bartholomaeus Anglicus in the 13th century, a toadstone was described as - 

A precyous stone somdeale whyte: other of dyuers colours. It is sayd yt this stone is take oute of a toodes heed... this stone helpith ayenst bytynh of serpentis & of creeping wormes: & ayenst venym. For in the presence of venym, yt stone warmyth & brennyeth his fynger yt towchyth him

Now this might seem to be absolute nonsense to the modern reader, but in earlier ages, when medicine was primitive, and poisoning was a common method of assassination, it is easy to understand why the idea that certain gems could not only ease, but also detect poisons, would be very appealing. Naturally it wasn't long before there was a flourishing trade in toadstones, and by the 16th century these gems, allegedly taken from the heads of amphibians, were being set in jewelry, most commonly rings, and were highly prized items. 

In later ages, their claimed magical properties shifted slightly. Presumably as the fear of being bumped off by poisoning receded, the toadstone became more generally known as a magical remedy, with  Thomas Lupton in his compendium of science and technology Thousand Notable Things, Of Sundry Sortes (1576) alleging that - 

A Tode stone (called Crapandina) touching any part be venomed, hurte or stung by Ratte, Spider or Waspe, or any other venomous Beast, ceases the paine and swelling thereof

What's more, being a tome full of handy practical hints and guides for the learned Elizabethean gent, Lupton handily gives us a method of making our own - 

A Goode way to get the stone called Crapandina, out of the Tode. Put a great or ouergrowne Tode, (fyrst brused in dyvers places) into an earthern potte, and put the same in an Antes hyllocke, & couer the same with earth, which Tode at length ye Antes wyll eate: So that the bones of the Tode and stone, wyll be left in the potte

As those of you who read last weeks article on toad bone amulets will recognize, clearly Mr Lupton (or his source) had read their Pliny. Various other writers and sages in later years would continue to recommend the "ante hyllock" method of extracting a toadstone, however obviously one expects there were many disappointed folks who found naught but ant-flensed bones when opening their "eathern pottes". And perhaps this is why seminal bestiary compiler Edward Topsell detailed an alternative and more arcane method in his 1608 work The Historie of Serpents - 

There be many late Writers, which doe affirme that there is a precious stone in the head of a Toade, whose opinions (because they attribute much to the vertue of this stone) it is good to examine in this place, that so the Reader may be satisfied whether to hold it as a fable or as a true matter, exemplifying the powerfull working of Almightie God in nature, for there be many that weare these stones in Ringes, being verily perswaded that they keepe them from all manner of grypings and paines of the belly and the small guttes. But the Art (as they terme it) is in taking of it out, for they say it must be taken out of the head alive, before the Toad be dead, with a peece of cloth of the colour of red Skarlet, where-withall they [sc. the toads] are much delighted, so that they stretch out themselves as it were in sport upon that cloth, they cast out the stone of their head, but instantly they sup it up againe, unlesse it be taken from them through some secrete hole in the said cloth, whereby it falleth into a cestern or vessell of water, into which the Toade dareth not enter, by reason of the coldnes of the water.

Very bizarre indeed I'm sure you'll agree! But no matter how strange and fruitless these methods of extracting the fabled stones from the toad's heads were, from the trade in toadstone jewelry quite clearly some one was managing to get them. However by the 17th century, some inquiring minds were begining to wonder quite where the toadstones were coming from. One such sharp fellow was Sir Thomas Browne, who in his 1646 work Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or Enquiries into Very many Received Tenets, and commonly Presumed Truths, wittily debunked many commonly held misconceptions and myths. In this work, he rigorously investigated the subject of toadstones, basically highlighting the anatomical and biological unfeasibility of such things existing before revealing his own conclusion on what they were, and even proposed a test for alleged toadstones - 

But these Toadstones, at least very many thereof, which are esteemed among us, are at last found to be taken not out of Toads heads, but out of a Fishes mouth, being handsomely contrived out of the teeth of the Lupus Marinus, a Fish often taken in our Northern Seas, as was publickly declared by an eminent and Learned Physitian. But because men are unwilling to conceive so low of of their Toadstones which they so highly value, they may make some trial thereof by a candent or red hot Iron applied unto the hollow and unpolished part thereof, whereupon if they be true stones they will not be apt to burn or afford a burnt odour, which they may be apt to do, if contrived out of animal parts or the teeth of fishes.

 The Lupus Marinus is of course Latin for Sea-wolf, the archaic name for a shark. However while Sir Thomas was on the right track, he hadn't quite found the origin of the toadstones, for indeed many of these alleged mystic stones would have passed his hot iron test. A later writer (whom we encountered while talking of another alleged magical item the Fairy Flag of Dunvegan),  Thomas Pennant came closer still in his epic work British Zoology (1766). Pennant wrote of the toadstone that - 

all its fancied powers vanished on the discovery of its being nothing but the fossil Tooth of the Sea-Wolf, or some other flat-toothed Fish. 

And hence as they were fossils, a toadstone could be subjected to Browne's test and not give off the tell-tale smells of burnt calcium and enamel which would signify a fake. However again, while Mr Pennant was close to the truth, he was just a shade away from getting to the bottom of this batrachian mystery. In fact, he was quite correct on all counts except identifying the exact species of  fossilised fish teeth.

Modern science has of course now given us the answer: toadstones were in fact the teeth from fossils of a species of Lepidotes which flourished in everyone's favourite ancient time zones - the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, when dinosaurs ruled the earth. And looking at the stony remains of these primordial piscines' jaws, one can see why they were passed off as toadstones, for in their shape and colouring, they do resemble the wart, knobbly hide of monstrous toads. 

CHRISTMAS SPIRITS - The Origins of Christmas Ghost Stories

There'll be parties for hosting

Marshmallows for toasting

And carolling out in the snow

There'll be scary ghost stories

And tales of the glories

of Christmases long, long ago…

So sang Andy Williams back in 1963 in his festive favourite It's the Most Wonderful Time Of The Year. And the lyric quoted above has caused much scratching of heads over the years, as not every one is aware of the old tradition of telling spooky tales upon a Christmas night. Indeed some have wondered whether the lines above are merely referring solely, in a hap-hazard fashion, to Dickens' A Christmas Carol. 

But of course there's more spectres abroad at Yuletide other than just Mr Marley and his crew. To begin with some of the finest ghost stories ever written were produced by MR James who notes in the preface to his first collection of tales, Ghost Stories of An Antiquary (1904) - 

I wrote these stories at long intervals, and most of them were read to patient friends, usually at the seasons of Christmas ...

And indeed from surviving diaries, letters and other items of supporting evidence that famous tales of his, such as Number 13, Oh Whistle & I'll Come To You and A School Story were first read aloud to friends over the festive season.

Furthermore, a little earlier at the turn of the century, Henry James began his classic novella of spectral terrors, The Turn of the Screw in the following fashion which shows the old tradition in action...

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.

And certainly the Christmas spirits enjoyed a veritable heyday in Victorian times. Supernatural fiction as a whole was immensely popular with the Victorians. Now we tend to think of the ladies and gentlemen of that period as being stolid, stuffy types, however this is something of a fallacy. For as Matthew Sweet makes clear in his excellent book Inventing The Victorians(St Martin's Press 2001) actually the contrary was closer to the truth - rather than staid and prim prudes, our bewhiskered ancestors were thrill-seekers. 

Victorian entertainment and popular culture was very much geared towards the concept of new sensations such as death-defying acrobatics, the delights of the music-halls and new pleasures ushered in by that era's boom in technology such as magic lantern shows and the pioneering stagecraft of magicians such as John Nevil Maskelyne and David Devant.

The Victorian period was an era of public crazes and fads, as the denizens of what was actually a forward-thinking and visionary society eagerly lapped up a succession of new thrills. With industrial technology, making printing cheaper than ever before, literature and the pastime of reading, once the preserve of the monied classes, boomed across all sectors of society. And coupled with crazes for esoteric subjects such as spiritualism, ritual magic and all things Egyptian, it is hardly surprising that this was a golden age too for supernatural and weird fiction.

In addition to an embracing attitude towards death, that to us who are uncomfortable with contemplating our own mortality, seems exceedingly morbid, it is no surprise that ghosts haunted all walks of life. For example, you may be surprised to learn that spooks and spectres were even a staple of Victorian pantomimes, alongside the traditional versions of fairy stories that are performed today. As William Makepeace Thackeray notes in his Roundabout Papers (1853) -

Bob and I went to two pantomimes. One was at the Theatre of Fancy, and the other at the Fairy Opera, and I don't know which we liked the best. At the Fancy, we saw  "Harlequin Hamlet, or Daddy's Ghost and Nunky's Pison ", which is all very well - but, gentlemen, if you don't respect Shakespeare, to whom will you be civil? The palace and ramparts of Elsinore by moon and snowlight is one of Loutherbourg's finest efforts.

Considering this popularity of all things spectral and the lasting influence of A Christmas Carol, many commentators and scholars noted Dickens' role in the association of Christmas and ghosts. In the anthology collection Ghosts For Christmas (Michael O'Mara Books Ltd. 1988), editor Richard Dalby notes that -

He began with a segment of the Pickwick Papers, 'The Story of the Goblins who Stole a Sexton' (told by Pickwick's friend Mr. Wardle of Dingley Dell), a prototype of the later full-length story A Christmas Carol with the immortal and repentant Scrooge based upon the sexton Gabriel Grub.

The immensely popular Christmas Numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round, both edited by Dickens, really popularised 'Ghosts at Christmas' as an annual event in the minds of the reading public.

Certainly Mr Dickens can be seen as the architect of many of the elements we most closely associate with the festive period today. For example, our idealised white Christmases, draped in snow and frost, originate with his stories about Yuletide, for while he was a child Britain suffered a mini-Ice Age and hence Dickens' formative Christmases were indeed white.

So then it is no surprise then that many have made the claim that the link between the spectral and the festive was forged by the great writer himself. As Mr Peter Haining, in the introduction to his collection of festive chillers Christmas Spirits (William Kimber & Co 1983), notes -

Yet despite the seeming timelessness of this tradition, it has to be admitted that the idea of creating ghosts stories especially for telling at Christmas goes back no further... than the time of Charles Dickens.

And indeed, many have claimed that there is no evidence of the tradition of Christmas ghosts stories existing prior to Dickens. However like the blankets of snow, surely this association was not the invention of Mr Dickens himself but another element of Christmas he grew up with. However according to scholars there is little evidence to substantiate this theory...

However some carefully searching of the shelves in my library uncovered a source that makes clear the tradition of telling strange tales of the supernatural around the Yule hearth did indeed exist well before Mr Dickens enshrined it in the Victorian Christmas.

Washington Irving in his 1819 book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., has his literary alter-ego visit an Englsih country house over the festive period in a section entitled Old Christmas. At one Bracebridge Hall, Crayon enjoys the hospitality of the Squire and enjoys a traditional English Christmas with all the trimmings. And amid the Christmas Day festivities is this -

When I returned to the drawing-room, I found the company seated around the fire, listening to the parson, who was deeply ensconced in a high-backed oaken chair, the work of some cunning artificer of yore, which had been brought from the library for his particular accommodation. From this venerable piece of furniture, with which his shadowy figure and dark weazen face so admirably accorded, he was dealing forth strange accounts of popular superstitions and legends of the surrounding country, with which he had become acquainted in the course of his antiquarian researches.

So then we can see that Christmas ghost stories would have been a traditional pastime in Dickens' childhood. But how much further back does the tradition go? 

Now for those who do not buy the Victorian/Dickensian origin theory, the competing contention is that telling ghostly tales at Yuletide is a surviving echoing of ancient Celtic rites. Now as I'm sure most of you will be aware, much of what we take to be part and parcel of Christmas comes not from the Christian religion but from a variety of pagan festivals that took place on the winter solstice such as the Germanic Yule and the Roman Saturnalia. Indeed when one begins to examine the ancient past, it seems that there has always been a holiday on the shortest day of the year which has involved fires, feasts, gift giving and bringing evergreens into the house. 

Now all these festivals revolved around the theme of bring light and life to the darkest time of the year, and as Terry Pratchett's memorable phrased it in his novel Hogfather, 'to persuade the Sun to do a decent day's work for a change'. Now it is assumed that during such ancient festivities, stories were told of gods and monsters which explained why the days would grow so dark, and our telling of ghost stories is an echo of these spiritual and religious recitations and rituals. 

However as plausible as this ancient pagan theory of Christmas ghost stories is, unfortunately any proper evidence to support it has melted away like snow on Boxing Day. And the standard scholarly view is that there is nothing to point to the existence of the tradition in pre-Victorian times. 

However as we have already seen, evidence from Mr Washington Irving shows that ghostly tales were being spun by the fireside of a Christmas night be nearly two decades before Victoria took the throne. Furthermore in his story, The Christmas Tree (1859), in a section often collected separately as Telling Winter Stories, ironically enough Mr Dickens himself gives us a clue to where we may discover how many Christmases ago the tradition truly stretches - 

There is probably a smell of roasted chesnuts and other good comfortable things all the time, for we are telling Winter Stories - Ghost Stories, or more shame for us - round the Christmas fire.

Now the important term in that above quote is Winter Stories, for this is no mere idly coined epithet but a specific phrase that has fallen into disuse and whose meaning has been forgotten. For a 'winter story' refered to a fantastical story and this term was in usage for centuries before Dickens. For example, a 17th century century philospher Joesph Glanvill, in his most famous work, the treatise on witchcraft (referenced by Poe in Ligeia and by HP Lovecraft in his Yule horror tale The Festival)  Sadducismus Truimphatus (1681) had harsh words for those who dismissed the existence of unearthly powers as "meer Winter Tales, or Old Wives fables".

Rewinding at little further back into the past, we discover this usage of the term was around in William Shakepeare's time. And this is why he titled his strange fable of magic and transformations, A Winter's Tale (1623).

For as Shakespearian scholar Catherine Belsey, in a fascinating article which considers Hamlet as a ghost story, notes -

Among the terms in circulation in the period for far-fetched narratives and improbable fables, one favorite was “a winter’s tale.” In the long, cold evenings, when the soil had been tilled to the extent that climatic conditions permitted, the still predominantly agricultural community of early modern England would sit and while away the hours of darkness with fireside pastimes, among them old wives’ tales designed to enthrall young and old alike.

Shakespeare even has one of characters in A Winter's Tale make the title's meaning clear, with Prince Mamillius proposing to tell the court a story -

A sad tale's best for winter: I have one
Of sprites and goblins...

And as it happens this tale which begins 'There was a man dwelt by a churchyard...' is clearly going to be a ghost story. And indeed many years later, that master of the Christmas ghost story, MR James made an educated guess as to the exact tale the young prince was to recount, penning a story of the same title (the text of which you can find here and my audio reading of it here) and appropriately enough was first published in the December issue of an Eton magazine Snapdragon in 1924.

Alan Koszowski's illustration for MR James' There Was a Man Dwelt By A Churchyard

And looking back to the century previous, we find the Bard of Avon's predecessor Christopher Marlowe using it in the same fashion. In his play The Jew of Malta (1589), he has a character Barnabus saying -

Now I remember those old women's words,

Who in my wealth would tell me winter's tales,

And speak of spirits and ghosts that glide by night

So then we can definitely date the telling of ghost stories as a popular winter past-time to the 16th century. And it seems a safe assumption that the spinning of such winter's tales was a popular part of the Elizabethan Christmas festivities.  And of course, considering the slower pace of cultural progress and linguistic evolution in Tudor times, we might posit that for the term 'winter's tale' to become synonymous with weird stories of the fantastic and phantasmagoric that the tradition probably stretches back at least a century further... 


However as yet I have not found any further historical evidence to determine this exactly. But regardless,  we can with a reasonable degree of certainly pronounce that the Christmas Ghost story has been with us at least since the times of good Queen Bess. And incredibly the tradition is now entering it's fifth century.

Of course these days it's a very different flickering light we gather around, late at night to experience the pleasant terror of a spectral tale at Christmas-time.... television.