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World

The ancient roots of Christmas ghost stories

24 December 2023

6:00 PM

24 December 2023

6:00 PM

Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is either, depending on your perspective, the ultimate Christmas ghost story or a complete subversion of the genre – since the tale isclearly not about the ghosts, who serve as mere ciphers in a morality tale.

Yet in spite of the popularity ofthe book and its multiple TV and film adaptations, many people today are oddly unaware that Christmas was once associated, more than any other season, with the telling of ghost stories.

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