Overview: During the 19th and early 20th centuries, ghost hoaxes (dressing in a white sheet or a more elaborate costume) and scaring people were rife but seldom studied or written about.

These hoaxes frequently led to impromptu ghost hunts by hundreds, sometimes thousands of often drunk vigilantes (and hysterical panics) as rumors of the supposed ghosts would spread round the community.

Many of these ghost scares occurred during the Christmas and New Year periods, and this book explores twelve little-known episodes.

Verdict: Comical but sometimes dark and tragic with entertaining elements of horror and the bizarre, these true Christmas ‘ghost’ stories combine spooky local legends, mischievous hoaxes, and comical ghost hunts.

At the same time, dour psychic investigators compete with whimsical spiritualists and ghost flashmobs. A unique Christmas book, this is an ideal holiday gift for those interested in ghosts and other fortean phenomena, as well as weird histories and social panics.

OK, look, I know it is only late August as I write this review and Christmas is still a veritably long way off, but just holding this book, reading its title and the fact it is red in color all makes me sink into the idea that Christmas is actually here now and that this book is a must-read for such an occasion.

Folklorists use the word “liminal” when referring to the threshold of a border between the old year and the new, the land and the sea, sleeping and waking, and life and death, for this is where one world meets another.

This “liminal” threshold is where the border between reality and imagination comes into being along with, of course, truth and illusion coupled with life and death, all breathing within the past and the present.

To put it another way, the word “liminal” with regard its reference to a threshold, either in the physical world (as in a doorway between rooms) or in time (as in the time between the job interview and the job offer) can also include physical spaces such as tunnels, bridges, and elevators.

Because they exist in space, they tend to have a pre-determined beginning and end, and connect two pre-determined, concrete points. We may not always know what’s on the other side, but we trust the physical world to be there at the end of the bridge.

Indeed, it is these noted “liminal” spaces that are haunted by the phantoms in this book.

And so what makes these twelve stories scary is that the “liminal” spaces brought forth here are ones that when we ourselves cannot perceive the future our grounded belief system suddenly starts to second guess itself; allowing for uncertainty to creep in about what is, what should be, but most assuredly now seems is most definitely not.

For the record, these are all true stories of Christmas and New Year phantoms from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, the word Phantom was chosen deliberately for its ambiguity. And the ghost hoaxes here generally fall into three categories: playing the ghost, poltergeist jinx, and journalistic jokes.

About the Author - Paul Weatherhead is a native of the Calder Valley and was brought up in Hebden Bridge. He has a longstanding obsession with the weird history of the area leading to the first edition of Weird Calderdale in 2003 which went on to become a local bestseller. His research into Alan Godfrey’s alien encounter led to a deeper investigation into the phenomenon, which formed his Master of Arts dissertation about the philosophy of alien abduction. He lives on the hills above Hebden Bridge, UK.

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