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A Twelfth Night Feast: 'The King drinks' by Jan Steen (1661) Royal Collection (Public Domain)

Twelfth Night Ghost Story: The White Lady Of Flamborough

In the spirit of Twelfth Night one of Ancient Origins Premium’s favorite storytellers Charles Christian, entertains with his Father’s Ghost Story:  I may have mentioned before I am sufficiently ancient to recall the Christmastides of my youth. I grew up in the 1950s on the Yorkshire coast, in the town of Scarborough, when television was not the pervasive force it became in later decades. When people, as the old cliché holds, still made their own entertainment. Later on in an evening, with the main lights switched off and perhaps only a standard-lamp in the corner of the room and some candles on the mantelpiece to provide any illumination, we would sit around an open coal fire and there we would tell ghost stories. We would also munch on nuts and dried dates and, in the case of the adults, sip medium-dry Amontillado sherry. I would probably be drinking Dandelion & Burdock-flavored fizzy pop.

It was mainly my grandmother and any visiting uncles staying with us over Christmas season who would hold forth with the stories, however I do remember the year my father told a ghost story. It was during a Twelfth Night party and it was a story he himself had been told many years earlier by one of his great-uncles. To this day I still do not know whether it classes as true ghost story – or just a spooky coincidence.

Sampson Christian holding the author’s father Jack Christian circa 1923 (Image © Charles Christian)

Sampson Christian holding the author’s father Jack Christian circa 1923 (Image © Charles Christian)


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