It is 17 October. There are 14 days until Halloween.

Is there a better way to celebrate the season than by sitting around a fire and sharing ghost stories with friends?

Not ‘round these parts, there ain’t.

What’s even finer is that the seasonal sharing of ghost stories isn’t limited to just Halloween. No, sir! In England, the winter ghost tale is a long and storied (pun intended) tradition. What is Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol but a ghost story, albeit one with sticky, sappy center.

The premier writer of the spooky tale told during Christmas is Montague Rhodes James. A provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and Eton College, M.R. James entertained his students and friends every Christmas Eve with one of his tales. These stories were eventually collected in several books: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), and A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925). Though he was a serious academic and medievalist scholar, James is best remembered as the man who modernized the ghost story in the early 20th century.

It may seem funny to use that word – modern – when discussing James’s stories, because from our perspective, they seem quaint and cozy. Indeed, they are exactly what we mean when we say we long to hear an “old-fashioned” ghost story.

James jettisoned much of what had bogged down the genre since the Gothic period. His stories didn’t happen in a castle in the past; his stories took place in the ruins of that castle in the present. His protagonists are usually professors and/or antiquarians who find a clue to lost knowledge in an old book or manuscript or stained-glass window. This provenance gives the proceedings a sense of verisimilitude that makes the horror more tangible.

Quaint and cozy these stories may be, the reader of James’s tales considers them safe at their own peril. The horrors that stalk those pages are some of the most chilling in the history of literature. What is it that grabs ahold of the antiquarian looking for “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas”? James doesn’t say outright, but its “several…legs or arms or tentacles or something” do not seem human. James keeps the ghosts in his stories just out of the reader’s view. They are seen out the corners of the eyes.

“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to you, My Lad” is one of M.R. James’s best told and best-known tales. The main character, Parkins, is a Cambridge professor on a busman’s holiday of sorts. In the village of Burnstow, Parkins investigates a Templar ruin and finds a whistle. He blows it (natch), and sets in motion one of the creepier hauntings ever set to paper.

As with James’s other tales, the “ghost” (or whatever it is) is never truly seen. It is a shape on the horizon or seen fleetingly at a hotel room window. During the finale, James may be riffing ironically on the stereotypical image of the ghost. Whether it is intended as humor or horror, the end of the story will send shivers up the most jaded horror fan’s spine.

As is the case with much of what M.R. James wrote, there are several ways for us to enjoy his tale. The full text is here. HorrorBabble, of course, has recorded a splendid audio version. There is even an old-time radio adaption. Most famously, there is a BBC film adaptation made in 1968 and starring Michael Hordern as Parkins.

Enjoy…and keep your bedsheets tucked tight!