Christmas is here! Well, not quite, but for most of us the excitement of the festive season tends to start in earnest when November becomes December. Christmas is also a time that is associated with ghost stories every bit as much as Halloween for reasons that I hope to explore in future posts. For the moment, given that authors as esteemed as Charles Dickens and M R James made it their policy to write Christmas-themed ghost stories, I thought that I would share with you one of my own contributions to the genre of the seasonal chiller. The following extract from The Secret of Thorn Lodge (click to read!) is another unpublished short story from the world of Ghosts in the Cloisters. It is the tale of two students who arrive at an ancient country house just in time for Christmas. Needless to say, Thorn Lodge hides more than one nasty secret and this is one holiday that will prove anything but festive for the young couple. I hope everyone who reads the extract gets a pleasurable shudder, which is of course the response I’m hoping for!
PS Tune in tomorrow, same place, same sort-of-time for a post on the darker, pagan origins of the Yuletide season!
Ghost Cities 
Shudder achieved.
Glad to hear it 🙂