Tuesday 08 December 2026

Christmas Ghosts: the Tradition of Winter Tales

We’ve told supernatural tales at midwinter for a very long time. In this talk Kirsty Hartsiotis takes us back to the earliest winter tales of the Middle Ages and the age of Shakespeare and Marlowe. We then explore the lost years of the 17th and 18th centuries, where it’s often thought that Christmas wasn’t celebrated much – but ghost tales at Christmas-tide were very much part of the season.  In the 19th century many traditional Christmas ghost tales were collected, and even now it’s considered one of the spookiest times of the year. We draw on midwinter tales from all around Britain in this talk and explore links with European midwinter traditions. This is a special Christmas lecture that draws on Kirsty’s long experience as an oral storyteller and writer and teller of local ghost and folk tales. You may well come away with a shiver running down your spine and with seasonally spooky stories to share around your fireside at Christmas! 

Kirsty Hartsiotis was the curator of the decorative and fine art at The Wilson Art Gallery and Museum, Cheltenham from 2008 to 2023. She is currently a curator at Swindon Museums, where she also worked prior to 2008.  At Cheltenham she looked after the Designated Arts and Crafts Movement collection, which includes the important private press archive, the Emery Walker Library. She’s curated many exhibitions on the Arts and Crafts and Private Press Movements, including Ernest Gimson: Observation, Imagination & Making.  Passionate about sharing her deep love for and knowledge of the arts, she’s also a freelance researcher, currently researching Arts and Crafts war memorials and the work of Arts and Crafts designers in churches in the South West. She’s also been an oral storyteller for over 20 years, and has published a number of collections of stories. She’s the Editor of the Journal of William Morris Studies, and was the newsletter editor for Society of Decorative Art Collections. She is a regular columnist for Cotswold Life, and writes for diverse other publications on art history and folklore.