Quill & Crypt

Folks in Victorian England were obsessed with Christmas — they reveled in it. After Prince Albert introduced the German tradition of the Christmas tree in 1841, the holiday exploded into a sensory feast. Homes filled with the scent of pine and fir; branches groaned under garlands of popcorn and cranberries, gilded nuts and gingerbread men. Greenery draped mantlepieces, gifts piled up and mistletoe invited stolen kisses beneath its waxen berries.

But alongside all this merriment ran a darker, stranger Christmas tradition — one that is almost forgotten today.

In Victorian England, it was customary to tell frightening stories at Christmas. These tales — often supernatural, unsettling and deliberately disturbing — were known as Christmas Crawlers, so named because they were meant to send a pleasurable chill, or “crawl,” up the spine.

I stumbled across the term while re-reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a novel more commonly associated with fog-choked streets than Christmas hearths — yet one that belongs squarely within this tradition.

Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is the most familiar example of a Victorian Christmas ghost story — but it is also the safest. Its spirits arrive to instruct, redeem and ultimately reassure. Scrooge reforms, generosity triumphs and the moral universe clicks neatly back into place with good old Victorian values.

Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, by contrast, offers no such comfort. Its horror is internal, corrosive and irreversible. Jekyll does not learn; he fractures. There is no redemption, only containment — and finally, annihilation.

By the mid-nineteenth century, rising literacy rates and a booming publishing industry created a huge appetite for cheap, sensational fiction. Publishers were quick to capitalize. Stevenson’s editor at Longman explicitly requested a Christmas “crawler” for the 1885 season — a story designed to unsettle readers gathered around the fire. Though Jekyll and Hyde ultimately appeared the following January, it was conceived as holiday horror.

The Victorians understood something we tend to forget: that fear, like joy, is best shared — and that Christmas, with its long nights and flickering light, is an ideal time to tell stories meant to unsettle.

So if you find yourself drawn to holiday horror (think Silent Night, Deadly Night), you’re not rebelling against tradition. You’re participating in it.

Or, to borrow from Emily Dickinson: “Because I could not stop for Death — He kindly stopped for me.”

The Victorians, it seems, wouldn’t have been too shocked if he arrived in a red suit and a sleigh — even if the reindeer looked a little… hungry…

And they would have been happy to hop on board.