Description

The Shrieking Skull & Other Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories by James Skipp Borlase

Trade Paperback – Valancourt Books – Nov 2022 – 191 pages

The first-ever collection of tales by the Victorian era’s most prolific author of Christmas ghost stories!

Move over, Charles Dickens! The author of “A Christmas Carol” may be the most famous writer of Christmas ghost stories from the Victorian age, but the king of the genre was James Skipp Borlase (1839-1909), who published dozens of them over an extraordinarily long career spanning from 1864 to 1907. This volume collects thirteen of his best from rare and obscure provincial newspapers in England and Australia, none of them reprinted in over a century.

Contains the following:
“Our Fellow Lodger; or, The Adventures of a Christmas Eve” (1864)
“The Fiery Skull: A Tale of Magic and Spiritualism” (1866)
“Bored to Death” (1875)
“The Steel-Bound Valise, or, The Murder at the Old Stone Cross” (1875)
“The Black Cat; or, The Witch-Branks of Loughborough: A Story of Two Leicestershire Christmas Eves” (1881)
“Twelve Miles Broad” (1885)
“The Weird Wooing; or, The Ghost-Guarded Treasure: A Tale of an Old-Time Christmas and New Year’s Day” (1898)
“Bride From the Dead: Tale of a Dreadful Christmas Wedding” (1899)
“The Shrieking Skull; or, Haunted Wardley Hall: A Tale of Two Lancashire Christmas Eves” (1901)
“The Spectre Horseman; or, Haunted Wye-Collier Hall: A Christmas Story” (1903)
“The Haunted Silk Mill; or, The Ghost-Guarded Treasure” (1905)
“Two Ghostly Swordsmen; or, The Duel on the Moor: A Christmas Story of Brandesburton” (1905)
“Tale of Two Christmases” (1907)