Profs & Pints Nashville: When Christmas Summoned Ghosts

Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “When Christmas Summoned Ghosts,” on the centuries-old English tradition of telling terrifying tales during the holiday season, with Stephanie A. Graves, lecturer in English at Vanderbilt University and scholar of horror.

[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7.]

Sure, it can be nice to give presents or sing carols at Christmastime. But when was the last time you gave someone the gift of being scared out of their wits?

Come to Nashville’s Fait La Force taproom to rediscover—and perhaps help revive—the venerable English custom of telling ghost stories during the season’s long nights. Your guide on this spooky journey, Stephanie Graves, has given fantastic Profs and Pints talks on horror films, and she promises to delight her audience in tracing the origins, peak, and legacy of spooky Christmas tales.

While Charles Dickens’ ghost tale, A Christmas Carol, is well known, many people are unaware that it’s part of a narrative tradition dating back centuries. As Graves will explain, it’s rooted in fireside tales of sprites, goblins, and other Yule monsters told at least as far back as the fifteenth century as a means of passing dark winter hours.

The development of accessible and popular print culture helped such tales spread far and wide, and nineteenth century Victorian England fully embraced the Christmas ghost story as a way commingle Christmas festivities with the eerie allure of the supernatural. Often read aloud in homes or shared at social gatherings, such ghost stories became a key part of Christmas entertainment, blending the coziness of holiday gatherings with an unsettling air of Gothic mystery.

Graves will discuss how such stories often featured ghostly visitations, moral lessons, and themes of redemption, reflecting the era's fascination with the afterlife, spiritualism, and the darker side of human nature. Leaning into the Christian ideology that undergirded Victorian society, they reinformed the idea that Christmas is a time for reflecting on past deeds and embracing the possibility of change. Dickens was joined by authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Walter Scott, Arthur Conan Doyle in popularizing and capitalizing upon such tales.

You’ll learn how the tradition of the Christmas ghost story remains influential in holiday storytelling, inspiring both writers and filmmakers to this day. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)