Mars—News, Views and Commentary
Chris Friend, January 15th, 2026
Usually we connect ghosts to Halloween, but there is considerable ghostly folklore connected to the Christmas season. Long before Tim Burton's Nightmare before Christmas the dark winter months had a real connection to both the winter gloom and Yuletide spirits. This is the likely source of why Dickens placed his ghostly visitors in the Christmas Carol.
One reason with the winter solstice being the spooky time is that it's the longest night of the year and made a good time for werewolves, ghosts, and dark characters such as Krampus, The Knecht Ruprecht, and Belsnickle to wander about looking for potential victims.
One of the oldest legends connected to the winter solstice is the Wild Hunt. The Wild Hunt features an entourage of ghosts, demons, and wild hell hounds. In the Christian era the hunt was led by the devil himself. Other versions have it led by the ghost of a man who preferred to go hunting instead of going to church and thus was condemned to lead this spectral troop of Yule tide boogey-men. During the Christian era the holiday monsters were Grinch-like monsters out to ruin the sacred traditions that became associated with the winter solstice. With this came stories of Saint Nicholas being followed by Yuletide monsters like Krampus.
The Greek Callicantzari were holiday werewolves out to ruin the fun. Some lore have that if you stand on a church porch at midnight on Christmas Eve you will see apparitions of those people who may die in the coming year.To look inside an abandoned church on Midnight on Christmas eve, one might see the very devil himself calling out the names of those persons who
would die in the coming year.
In the Middle Ages the rural peasants would meet at a crossroads to listen to the ghosts predict what might come in the New Year. There is much folklore about supernatural activity to be experienced at those places we ‘billies call spook roads. Crossroads being thresholds between four directions also make them uncanny places during uncanny times such as Halloween or the night of the winter solstice. The Wild hunt is said to come up from the underworld and enter from these spook roads. Many traditions such as putting up mistletoe over doorways was also a way to discourage holiday mischief and ward off the jealous spirits of the dead. The use of all evergreens may be a relic of warding off those demons connected to the blight of winter. And to finish with, I need to remind people that it was traditional to tell ghost stories on Christmas Eve. Many a Victorian household had horror tales being told by the raging fire of the hearth. And so it goes.
Chris Friend is a popular writer from Parkersburg, West Virginia. He has been a contributor at Black Petals for many years, with his column, "Mars."
