Scary Christmas Stories: 3 Ghost Stories for Winter Nights

1. The Extra Stocking

Every Christmas Eve, Mum hung the stockings in a row above the fire: one for each of us, with our names stitched in red. Four stockings, four names. This year, when I came down for a glass of water after midnight, there were five.

The fifth stocking was old and faded, the wool gone thin, and the name on it was stitched in a careful, old-fashioned hand: Thomas. We had no Thomas. I stood there in the glow of the tree lights and watched the stocking sway gently, though the fire was out and the windows were shut.

In the morning, it was gone. I asked Mum about it, and she went very quiet. Then she took a photograph down from the top of the wardrobe: a boy of about seven in a paper crown, sitting on her knee in front of this same fireplace. “Your older brother,” she said. “He only had one Christmas. I never knew how to tell you.”

That night I hung a fifth stocking myself, a new one, and stitched his name on it as neatly as I could. On Christmas morning it was still there, and inside it, there was a small paper crown, folded flat, as if someone had kept it safe for a very long time and finally found the right person to give it to.

2. Carol Singers

The carol singers came every Christmas Eve at exactly ten o’clock: five of them, in long coats and scarves, holding lanterns on poles. They sang the old carols, the slow ones, and never knocked or asked for money. Gran always opened the curtains to listen but never the door.

This year Gran was in hospital, and I was minding the house. At ten o’clock the singing started. I opened the door to thank them, the way you do. The singing stopped. The five singers stood very still on the path, and in the light of their lanterns I saw that their coats were wet, though it had not rained, and their breath did not mist in the cold air.

“Is she ready?” the tallest one asked politely. I said Gran was in hospital and doing much better. The singer nodded slowly. “Then we’ll come back next year,” he said. “Tell her we asked. Tell her we’ll wait.” They turned and walked down the lane, still holding their lanterns, and the lights went out one by one as they reached the bend.

Gran came home on Boxing Day. When I told her, she held my hand for a long time. She said the carol singers had first come the winter her own grandmother died, and every winter since, and that she had always been careful never to open the door. Then she asked me, very gently, never to open it again either. Not until she told me it was time.

3. The Advent Calendar

We found the advent calendar in the attic of the new house: a wooden one, painted with a snowy village, twenty-four little doors with tiny brass handles. My sister was delighted. On the first of December, she opened door one and found a little wooden figure of a girl in a red coat.

Every day there was a new figure: a man with a lantern, a dog, a woman carrying a basket. My sister lined them up on the windowsill. By the twentieth, I noticed something. The figures looked like people from our street: Mr. Patel with his dog, the woman from the bakery, the boy next door. And the first figure, the girl in the red coat, looked exactly like my sister.

On the twenty-third, the figure was me. On the twenty-fourth, my sister opened the last door and found no figure at all, only a tiny wooden house, painted to look exactly like ours, with every window lit. She laughed and set it on the windowsill with the others, and all the little wooden people seemed to turn, just slightly, to face it.

That night the snow fell heavily, and in the morning our whole street was quiet and white, like the painted village on the calendar. My sister ran to the window to see the figures. They were all gone. But when I looked out at the snowy street, I saw a girl in a red coat standing perfectly still by our gate, waving, and for a moment I could not tell which side of the glass my sister was on.

Why Ghost Stories Belong to Christmas

Telling ghost stories at Christmas is a much older tradition than telling them at Halloween, especially in Britain. Winter nights are long, families gather indoors, and the turning of the year has always invited thoughts of those who are no longer at the table. Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), in which Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by Marley’s ghost and three spirits, is the most famous Christmas ghost story of all, and its success helped cement the custom.

The tradition continued with M.R. James, who wrote many of his ghost stories to read aloud to friends at Christmas while he was at King’s College, Cambridge, and with the writer Jerome K. Jerome, who gently mocked the habit in Told After Supper (1891). In 1971 the BBC began its occasional television series A Ghost Story for Christmas, often adapting M.R. James. Reading one of the stories above on Christmas Eve continues a habit at least a couple of centuries old.

How to Host a Christmas Ghost Story Night

Turn off every light except the tree and the fire. Choose one reader per story and keep each to about five minutes. Start with something gentle, such as The Extra Stocking, and save the most unsettling story for last. If younger children are present, swap in our scary stories for 10 year olds, which end reassuringly. For a classic in between, read a passage from famous ghost stories such as Dickens’s.

Scary Christmas Stories — FAQ