Telling ghost stories during the Christmas season, often around a crackling hearth, after the feasting and gaming, with the wind roaring outside, was a tradition of the British holiday season, in particular during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Outside of Charles Dickens, with his Christmas Carol, and his other lesser known works, no author was more well-known for the Christmas Ghost Story than Montague Rhodes James, a scholar of English Medieval Literature at Kings University, and whose best-known stories were collected in Ghost Stories of Antiquary. These tales were written to be read-aloud, before they were in print, each one of Christmas Eve, when members of the university staff would all gather in a room before a heath, the night wind and snow raging outside.
One curious thing regarding James, and which I only recently discovered ,was that he wrote around the time of the the first world war, the same era that another writer of weird fiction, Robert W. Chambers, penned his "King in Yellow." But unlike Chambers, whose tales took place during the same period in which he wrote, James set his tales in an early time, during the 19th and 18th centuries.
Perhaps the best known of James' tales was "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come To You My Lad." The story concerns a middle-aged gentleman staying in a hotel along the English coast. On one of his forays on the beach, he discovers a curious whistle with strange engraving upon it. Once back in his room, he examines the object further, and blows on it. Later, on the beachfront again, he sees (or thinks he sees) a strange white figure running in his direction. At the climax of the tale, he witnesses the bedsheets of an unoccupied bed rise up to form a "sheet phantom", the crumpled linen pressing into a hideous visage, the entity that the bizarre whistle has summoned.
This story was filmed twice, the first one in 1968, and again in 2010, the latter of which i haven't seen, at least that I can recall.. The 68 version stars Sir Michael Hordern, better known for his role as Brownlow in the 1982 version of Oliver Twist, and one late 70s adaptation of A Christmas Carol as Scrooge.
Another tale, "The Residence of Winchester," concerns a clergyman who has no biological children, so adopts the young son of his sister, a boy named Frank. Trouble comes when he mistakenly agrees to tutor the slightly older son of a Viscount named Saul. The two children appear to get along well, until one day they are witnessed engaging in some strange activity involving an unknown gleaming object, in which Saul knocks it from the other boy's hand. A prized black cockeral turns up dead, and it appears the boys killed it in some kind of ritual sacrifice. Frank soon sickens and dies unaccountedly, and Saul perishes mysteriously afterward. It is evident that the boys have been dabbling in the occult, though the details remain obscure; it's fairly obvious that Frank is more the innocent victim here, that he has been coerced, perhaps pressured into it, by Saul. In lots of stories, its often that the character of a rich and privileged background is the one who turns out to be evil, so no surprise. Anyway, fifty years pass by, and the manor's new residents find themselves plagued by mysterious entities and incidents. The upstairs room where the ritual took place is infested by strange red insects that the maids call "sawflies". A man venturing into the dark room at night feels (and partially sees) the horror of monstrously large version of the sawflies attacking his face. Later a young maid flees the selfsame chamber, the smaller sawflies clinging to her and getting in her eyes, which have to to be swatted off by a broom! The face of Saul is also seen at times pressing up against a window. Apparently it's the dead aristocratic boy's ghost, bound to the spot. The servants claim they feel sorry for him, but fear allowing him to enter. Perhaps it's his punishment in hell. It seems that the boys' occult experiment opened a portal to some netherworld, and that's where the demonic sawflies entered from.
Another tale, "The Tractate Middoth", concerns a mysterious Rabbinic tome that somehow contains the will and testament to an estate of a young woman and her daughter who have been ousted. Mr. Garret is propriator of a great library in which the book resides. He is visited by a man named Eldred, whom it is later discovered is inquiring after the book so he can destroy it (or at least the page containing the will ), so he can assume control of the estate himself. All this while, a mysterious man appears in and about the library who appears to have a face of woven cobwebs! Garret also learns that the ghost of an unpleasant clergyman has been reported wondering the area, and that this man was buried in a large underground chamber, seated upright in a chair, according to his own instructions! Garret finds that the book in question is missing from the library shelf, and has been shipped to Eldred. He tracks the man down on foot after dark, and nearly catches him in the act of ripping out the page with the will. But before he is able to intervene, two black hands, seemingly formed of cobwebs, reach forth out of the shadows and strangle Eldred. A mass of cobwebs and spiders is found on the spot. The librarian returns the intact tractate to the mother and daughter who are now able to inherit the estate.
In seems that many of James' weird stories revolve around forbidden or cursed objects, and forbidden knowledge, serving as a "Warning to the Curious." Interestingly, four of the numinous entities contained therein were featured in "The Dragon's Bestiary" section of Dragon Magazine #251, back in the bygone 90s (Sorry, I haven't yet read the one about the "living hair"). The sheet phantom of Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You," is a form of the "Death Linen," which according to the article can assume a number of shapes. The "web specter" is clearly the entity from "Tractate", and they're assuming that the man who was buried sitting up, was in fact, a wizard, or some other practioner of the occult, and that he and the man of woven cobwebs were one and the same.
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