During the Victorian age, it was tradition to tell each other a ghost story during cold, dark, wintry nights. Now, a Liverpool-based arts organisation are resurrecting the practice. This is the third year that Community Interest Company ArtsGroupie have brought Christmas past to the present day with a forgotten festive tradition.
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00:00During the Victorian age it was tradition to tell each other a ghost story during cold,
00:05dark wintery nights. Now Liverpool based arts organisation are resurrecting the practice.
00:10This is the third year that we've done ghost stories for Christmas and we're trying to
00:14revive the Victorian tradition of telling tales around the warm fire because now we
00:20can stay around the warm fire and stream and watch endless box sets etc but nothing quite
00:25beats that kind of being scared on a dark night, candlelight.
00:29City interest company Arts Groupie have brought a Christmas past to the present day with the
00:34forgotten festive tradition.
00:36What's great is we're starting to have repeat people coming back and we're becoming part
00:41of their Christmas tradition so it's something we're going to be doing next year and the
00:45year after and it's just an alternative to walking around in the cold, shopping and buying
00:51things that you don't really need.
00:53Probably the most famous Christmas novel of them all, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
00:58is essentially a ghost story.
01:00That tradition was carried on later by the likes of M.R. James who used to read and write
01:05stories and then Susan Hill who of course wrote The Woman in Black and then up to speed
01:10now you've got Mark Gatiss of League of Gentlemen who have revived the ghost stories for Christmas
01:15on the television by adapting classic stories.
01:19They're also encouraging us to do the same this festive period.
01:22Last year as part of an Arts Council England funded project we ran a ghost story for Christmas
01:27competition which was fantastic and we got so many great entries and the top three are
01:32available on our website.
01:34Arts Groupie will be reading ghost stories on Thursday 19th December in the Hornby Room
01:38at Liverpool Central Library.
01:40What we do is we take a classic story but we also inject it with some modern stories
01:45as well, some contemporary modern stories that are around Liverpool and locality because
01:51there's lots of spooky things in Liverpool.
01:54As my nan used to say, it's not the dead you should worry about love, it's the living.