Thanks to the influence of Victorian and Edwardian era writers of spooky tales like M.R. James and Charles Dickens, Christmas in the British Isles has long been considered an apt time for the telling of ghost stories. In Dickens’s own best effort, A Christmas Carol, he has his Ghost of Christmas Future appear to Scrooge dressed eerily like so:
It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible, save one outstretched hand. But for this, it would have been difficult to detach its figure from the night and separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded.
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