R. Michael Burns

Once upon a time, it was tradition to tell ghost stories around Christmas. This is the origin of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” and the reason for the line “There’ll be scary ghost stories” in the song “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”

What follows is my first effort at telling a Christmas ghost story of my own. It’s a side story to my unpublished novel Laughing Teddy (a book about a haunted toy store moving into a small Colorado mountain town), but I believe it stands well on its own.

It was originally published in the e-zine New Myths. It’s one I’m quite fond of, both eerie and sad…

So put on some classic Christmas songs (my top choice would be the Judy Garland version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”) and enjoy…