Spook me with winter themed short horror stories!

December 1, 2023 10:47 AM

I've spent this fall reading autumnal ghost stories with friends - we all had a great time. There must be spooky stories with snow and ice queens and frostbite - help me find them! Anything goes, as long as it can be read aloud in one sitting.

If you have a really good winter-themed story that isn't spooky, I'll be glad to hear about that too.

posted by luminary to Media & Arts (11 answers total)

Christmas horror stories are very traditional, including what is plausibly the first novel in English, as well as a topic of Winter Evening Conversations that Defoe mentions in his essay on apparitions, and an accompaniment to Christmas parlor games as in this mid-18th C. collection.

A bunch of them are collected in this front-page post, which links to further history in the article "Why ghosts haunt England at Christmas but steer clear of America." Many of those stories probably have relevant imagery, and Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Old Nurse's Story" stands out among them.
posted by Wobbuffet at 11:08 AM on December 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

Jeanette Winterson's Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days is a delightful plum pudding of a book with wonderful short stories-- some of them in fact spooky-- along with reminiscences and, yes, recipes. Her account of Christmases spent with her great friend and fellow author Ruth Rendell alone is worth getting the book for.
posted by BibiRose at 11:19 AM on December 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

Frederick Forsyth's "The Shepherd" is a spooky AF Christmas Eve story (though I wouldn't really describe it as horror). You can listen to the traditional Canadian dramatized reading by "Fireside Al" Maitland here [30 min audio].
posted by heatherlogan at 12:59 PM on December 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

You may enjoy The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert W. Service.
posted by HarrysDad at 1:41 PM on December 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Have you looked at any of the British Library's anthologies of horror stories? I enjoyed reading Sunless Solstice, there's another called Haunters at the Hearth that I can't vouch for.
posted by sequel at 5:33 PM on December 1, 2023

There are two stories in Stephen King’s collection Night Shift that take place in snow — “Grey Matter” and “One for the Road.” Both are horror stories, but the first one is very funny. The second one is not.
posted by holborne at 6:53 PM on December 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

A perfect answer: High Spirits, a collection of Christmas/Solstice-themed ghost stories by Robertson Davies.
posted by ovvl at 7:46 PM on December 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

To Build a Fire by Jack London
posted by rongorongo at 3:54 AM on December 2, 2023

"The White Haired Children" in Ruth Ainsworth's children's book The Phantom Cyclist is a creepy little tale. (The book is from the 70s. MeMail me if you want a scanned copy of the story.)
posted by cocoagirl at 5:43 AM on December 2, 2023

More straight up horror than ghost story: Lucky Girl, How I became a Horror Writer by M. Rickert. She has some other holiday themed horror, too, but I haven't read them.
posted by gideonfrog at 7:03 PM on December 2, 2023

Just came across this one: The Winter Spirits: Ghostly Tales for Frosty Nights.
posted by paduasoy at 2:02 AM on December 13, 2023