Christmas Ghost Story Collection: The Wind From Outside

Here is the print edition of my Christmas ghost story collection, released in 2020. It has been expanded with two additional stories written after the original release. This print edition is $12.00.

If you would like the pdf, free of charge, just email me and I will send it to you. Merry Christmas and Happy Yule!

Email for pdf: headofmimirblog @ g m a i l . c o m

The present collection is a series of supernatural stories written by Gregory E. Williams conceived with the long history of the Christmas ghost story as backdrop (the tradition predates Victorian authors like Dickens and perhaps even Christianity). The tales center around the strangeness of memory and the passage of time, intersected by queer history and identity. They circle around themes related to the last decades of the 20th Century, for example, the dawning of the millennium as a cultural event. Obsolete technologies like tape recorders and archived internet posts reappear and impinge weirdly upon the lives of characters.

As I wrote these pieces, I was struck by how alien the markers of the recent past can seem. On the other hand, the year 2000 really was a long time ago, and we are as if in an aftertime where past coordinates are increasingly obsolete, albeit hauntingly present. As I prepare this text for publication, we are in midst of a pandemic. The present also feels radically alien, and the future unimaginable. Researchers are looking into ways that the coronavirus ordeal is warping our experience of time. Duke University psychologist and neuroscientist, Kevin LaBar noted to Discover magazine, “I’ve experienced it myself. As this drags on, and as your day becomes very constrained by your limited environment, the days kind of blend together.” This is as good a time as any to indulge in some ghost stories for Christmas, that is, to give some regard to the looming, primeval night.

For more about the Christmas ghost story tradition, check out this link: https://weirdchristmas.com/2018/12/04/wc-podcast-12-victorian-xmas-ghost-stories/

Christmas Resources, Pt. 3

 Kindly see parts 1 and 2. 

This will be a quick post, as I have a new find here on the first of December, and it's a bit time-sensitive. 

Here we have the Hypnogoria Oldtime Yuletide Advent Calendar. This calendar is interactive, with each date on the calendar being a "door" leading to a bit of lore, available as text or short podcast. 

The calendar appears to be just the tip of the iceberg. The site is extensive and I have not yet had time to explore it. But beyond holiday content and the charm of the calendar format, the site's style evokes the old internet -- what one might have seen on Geocities or Angelfire. That may be enough to interest some explorers of the hauntological.