Scary ghost stories … for Christmas? There’s a long tradition and it goes way beyond Krampus

By now, you should be completely bonkers, sweaty with exhaustion, short on cash, driven to madness by the holidays. It’s freezing, the day becomes a colorless European art film at three in the afternoon, the approach of winter is feeling like a reality, meanwhile Paul McCartney won’t shut up about simply having a wonderful Christmastime, simply having a wonderful Christmastime, simply having a wonderful Christmastime, simply having a wonderful Christmastime …

Your eyes are red and white candy spirals, your brain is mince pie, and Elf on the Shelf, having glared at you for weeks, has returned to his desk job with the surveillance state.

We know horror at the holidays. Feeling scared and unsettled at Christmas is an old-school tradition. As in, a prehistoric, pre-Christianity, winter solstice kind of old-school tradition.

We just rarely think of it as horror.

But next time you hear “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” when Andy Williams gets to the third verse, after marshmallows for toasting and caroling out in the snow, just before he sings of the glories of Christmases long, long ago: There are scary ghost stories.

Does that part ever raise an eyebrow?

Since when was telling tales of terror a must-do holiday tradition?

Since at least Victorian England. Though specifically, since about 180 years ago. That’s when Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” was first published, giving the then-waning Christmas holiday a kick in the sugarplums while also reviving an old English tradition of telling scary stories on Christmas. It is, after all, a ghost story, so rooted in our holiday fabric that we take for granted it’s full of moaning spirits, jangling chains and misers dragged to hell. Jessica Thebus has directed the Goodman Theatre’s “Christmas Carol” for the past few seasons, and yes, occasionally people do complain her version is dark and scary. “When they do I say, ‘You’re right, it’s a scary story, and it should be scary,’” she said.

Indeed, there’s an even older history linking frightful feelings and winter celebrations that predates Christianity and the establishment of any Christian holiday.

In other words, it’s not really counter-programming to open the new “Nosferatu” remake on Christmas Day, or set the latest installment of the “Terrifier” serial-killer flicks at Christmas, or find Chicago’s Christkindlmarket awash in demonic Krampus dolls. You might even argue that the image of a miserable, child-hating or murderous department store Santa Claus is perfectly in line with the holiday, more movie cliché than sick joke.

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“When I was younger, before I was aware of the history of the holidays, that Andy Williams ‘scary ghost story’ line would strike me as incongruous,” said Allison Sansone, program director at the American Writers Museum on Michigan Avenue. “My family didn’t tell ghost stories around a fire. I don’t know anyone who did. But you think about it: There are lots of good reasons for that line. Even ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas’ begins with a home invasion, right? You’re woken up in the middle of the night and you’re hearing some rattling on the roof. If this did happen, it wouldn’t take a lot to imagine what’s going on up there, and your first thought would never be: ‘Santa!’”

So a couple of weeks before Christmas, the Writers Museum hosted an evening of scary Christmas fun, including an open mic for frightening (or just less than merry) Christmas fables: One guest told the story of spending her first Christmas without her beloved grandmother; another told stories about pushing back on seasonal affective disorder.

The following night, at the Driehaus Museum in River North, each floor of the building was devoted to actors performing sometimes grisly, mostly unnerving Victorian ghost tales set partly during the holidays. Maria Burnham, a cofounder of Chicago’s Ghostlight Ensemble Theatre, which developed the one-night-only show, said it sold out within a few days: “The appetite felt obvious.” She had the idea for the event because, a few years ago, she began her own tradition of reading Victorian ghost stories on Christmas. She said she now has a reputation for pitching horror stories set at the holidays, from Krampus tales to a creepy ‘Nutcracker’ where the dolls are more zombies than soldiers.

“My experience is that we’re desperate for something fresh at the holidays,” she said, “and while I doubt Americans would ever embrace horror at the holidays the way Victorians did — too many here would see it as sacrilegious — I’m sending a receptivity.”

More evidence: Two days after the Driehaus, Martyrs’ in Lincoln Park, for the 12th year in a row, hosted an all-day Krampus bacchanal and parade — Krampus being, in case you weren’t aware, a sort of evil Santa’s helper, a horned Bavarian monster who haunts the Alps, ready to snatch misbehaving children. Once thought of as a Northern European curiosity, Krampus has become a growing holiday staple here in recent years.

It’s almost as if, after more than a century of twinkly, benevolent Christmases, we’re finally agreeing to allow in the unrulier, less consumer-friendly traditions of the season.

If so, strap in those reindeer:

Frau Perchta haunts the Alpine regions of Germany, ensuring that women have finished their spinning and weaving before the Epiphany on January 6; if they get slow and lazy, there’s a reason her nickname is “The Belly Slitter.” Wales has Mari Lwyd, a caroling tradition centered around a horse skull fixed to the top of a pole. Iceland — which goes all out on holiday beasts — has a cannibal witch named Grýla, prankish ogres called the Yule Lads and a Yule cat that eats children who forget to wear new clothes to Christmas dinner.

Italy gets La Befana, a witch who never seems to get nastier than leaving coal. Ukraine gets Christmas Spiders that spin webs in undecorated Christmas trees. Germany, Switzerland and Austria — which also receive more than their share of Christmas monsters — have the Night Folk, shrouded wraiths who pass through the countryside playing music. My favorite: Caga Tió, more strange than sinister, visits Catalan Spain. He’s a log who gets “fed” scraps of food by children all holiday season, until, come Christmas Eve, he is beaten with sticks until he poops out presents.

For the past decade, from his home in Crown Point, Indiana, English professor Craig Brewer has operated WeirdChristmas.com, an online archive of bizzaro holiday traditions and ephemera — “All things holly, jolly and odd-ly.” It began when he started collecting Victorian Christmas cards: “I had always thought of Christmas as a weird time — why suddenly do we believe in elves? The postcards were like a Victorian Instagram, but they didn’t have a sense yet of what images are supposed to go with Christmas, so as long as it also said ‘Merry Christmas,’ they would show all sorts of stuff. Just dinosaurs and ‘Merry Christmas!’ Or two kids staring at a dead bird in the snow, ‘Merry Christmas!’ I call one ‘Frog Murder Christmas’ because it shows a frog that has killed another frog and is running off with a sack. Victorians also got sappy, but their way of doing it was showing you a suffering child — reminding you that you had it pretty good!”

For years he’s been running a short-fiction WeirdChristmas contest — 350-word stories that play up the ghoulish side of winter holidays. This year, he received about 500 entries — “everything from the usual evil Santa Clauses to Santa facing climate change.”

The Victorian tradition of reading scary stories at the holidays, curiously, is partly owed to an American author, Washington Irving, whose early 19th century reporting from London influenced a young Dickens; Irving wrote of certain British holiday traditions “growing more and more faint.” The popularity of Christmas ghost stories in England, though, would wax and wane, yet remain fondly remembered enough that newspapers would run ghost stories on the holidays, and by the 1970s, the BBC created its annual “A Ghost Story for Christmas” show, which itself waxes and wanes out of popularity.

A decade ago, the Canadian publisher Biblioasis recruited the single-named cartoonist Seth to create a series of stocking-friendly Christmas books, each containing a single ghost story, with the goal of finally importing the Victorian tradition to North America. The series (also titled “A Ghost Story for Christmas”) took off and has since expanded to 20 books, including installments from Dickens, M.R. James, Edith Wharton and Elizabeth Gaskell.

“It’s a folk tradition,” said Seth, “but we don’t know exactly who started it or why, though if you think of people in a pre-industrial, pre-electric age, maybe in a wooded area or field at a cold time of year, it’s not hard to imagine why they might have scary thoughts.”

Those roots would be recognizable to anyone who hears the annual “war on Christmas” arguments. Before there was Christmas, there was the Roman festival of Saturnalia, and the year-welcoming Kalends. Both focused on feasting and parties, and overlapped with the period we now call the holidays. “But then Christian holidays begin getting overlaid on preexisting holidays, and early Christians start feeling ambivalent about the jollity and feasting and more pagan traditions,” said Maria Kennedy of Rutgers University, an expert on holiday folklore. “Christians want a solemn holy day but see a bacchanal, and the tension between those poles likely feeds into darker responses.”

By the end of the Middle Ages, unrulier winter traditions are giving way to more explicitly religious Christian observances, but the influence doesn’t vanish: “Many traditions come out of people in Europe employed in agriculture — then unemployed when the weather turns.” They wassail, going out into the fields to toast to the health of the crops. They later put on masks (called mumming) and roam from house to house, singing. Picture yourself late at night, sitting by a candle.

A group of strangers wearing masks knock at your door.

Now we call it caroling.

As in Oliver Cromwell’s England, many Puritan communities in New England banned Christmas. Though later in America, what comes out of those restrictions is rowdy for a time, closer to contemporary Halloween: Children in masks take to the streets, and adults, to avoid mischief, pay them off with treats. “Since this is a nation founded on rationalism, Christmas develops here as more aspirational,” Kennedy said. “If you’re good, Santa brings presents. Our darker side is closer to ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ than Krampus. We tell stories of very middle-class tragedies.” Not monsters eating children.

Except, as much as American Christmases are associated with the evergreen smell of toys, prosperity, family, brightness, charity and the prospect of being decent to one’s neighbor, the underbelly of poverty, stress, depression and loneliness remains.

Not everyone’s Christmas is jolly.

Ask Resurrection Mary, the famous Chicago ghost that haunts Archer Avenue: According to many popular retellings, she was attending a Christmas dance, where she was ignored, she left alone, so she walked along Archer and was struck by a car. The warm, cozy ideal Christmas is promised so relentlessly, it makes perfect sense for, say, pushback in the form of ghost stories, horror movies set at the holidays — “Silent Night, Bloody Night,” “Black Christmas” — or an occasional Krampus-themed holiday haunted house. Is there a Gen-Xer who wasn’t transfixed by Phoebe Cates in “Gremlins” talking about the night Santa fell in her chimney and broke his neck — Santa being her father?

Eventually who doesn’t wonder why we let a man sneak into our homes once a year.

Are those milk and cookies we leave a treat, or an offering to a watchful god?

In Thebus’s “Christmas Carol” at the Goodman, Marley grabs Scrooge by the neck and yanks a steel chain out of his spine. Her ghost of Christmas future is a funereal specter without a face, circled by dark moths. Thebus plays it like a nightmare.

“People tell me Dickens should be this or that, not so dark, not so political, but Dickens was complicated, and so is Christmas,” she said. “Any holiday ritual is about time gone by, people no longer here, memories of childhood. … At the holidays, we’re all haunted.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com