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A Christmas ghost story

By Jeff Mariotte

I don’t know if Charles Dickens originated the Christmastime ghost story with his “A Christmas Carol” or if that subgenre of horror predates him, but by now it’s a grand tradition, familiar to generations of horror writers and readers. It’s common in Britain to read ghost stories around the fireplace during the holidays, and the BBC once ran an eight-year program adapting some of the Christmas ghost stories of M. R. James. I have a friend who used to write a ghost story for his wife every Christmas season; some of these stories were published in places like Night Cry Magazine, I believe, back when there was such a thing.

Since it’s almost Christmas, I’ll tell you a ghost story of my own.

Many years ago, I moved with my family to Germany because my father, who worked for the Department of Defense, was transferred to the city of Worms (the Germans pronounce it Vorms, but we who’ve read our Lovecraft know better) to work at the U.S. Army base there. Worms was a fascinating place to live. It was captured by the Romans in 14 BC, and built up in typical Roman fashion. I used to be able to touch, on a daily basis, a high, arched wall built by Roman hands. The town’s historical museum was full of artifacts from that era and others. The Worms cathedral, the Dom, was begun in the 10th century, and my high school graduation was held inside. Worms is also famous for the ill-named Diet of Worms (although there were, in fact, many of these, and the most notorious one is the Reichstag of 1521, at which Martin Luther was proclaimed an outlaw after his speech refusing to recant his religious beliefs).

But I was talking about ghosts.

We moved there shortly before the beginning of my senior year of high school. My older brother was away at college, so it was my parents, my little sister, and me. We arrived in Germany a few days after the terror incident and killings at the Munich Olympics, and the country was essentially an armed camp.

For the first month or so we lived in a hotel while looking for a more permanent home. After that, although we still had not found our own place, a co-worker of my father’s offered to let us use his house while he and his family spent some months stateside. We took him up on the offer and moved out of the hotel. I offer this perhaps excessive detail so you’ll know that by the time we moved into the house, I was no longer suffering from jet lag or the tension of moving to a strange, new country with heavily armed troops and police everywhere. I had started school, I had lived in Europe before. For the most part I was fairly well settled in.

The house we took over was small for us, with only two bedrooms. My parents got one, and my sister the other. I was to sleep on a long, comfortable couch downstairs. I would essentially have the entire finished basement to myself, with its own bath and a couple of rooms, but no real bed.

Except that first night, when I went downstairs and tried to sleep, I could not. I was tense. I had that skin-prickling feeling of being watched. I got up, turned on a light, tried to read for a while. Soon I’d get sleepy, I told myself, and it would all be fine.

I didn’t. I got out of the makeshift bed, wandered around, tried to look out the little ground-level windows to see if there really was someone looking in at me. I wasn’t simply tense. I was genuinely frightened. My skin was crawling with fear.

Finally, I gave up trying to fight it and went upstairs. Curled up on a much smaller sofa and fell fast asleep. In the morning, my parents found me there, without even a blanket or pillow.

For the rest of three months we lived in that house, I never felt comfortable in that basement. I went down occasionally, if I had to. I didn’t stay any longer than necessary, and I never again tried to sleep down there. Even though I was a teenage boy and my privacy, up in the living room, was nonexistent, I couldn’t bring myself to shift back down. The upstairs sofa was small and stiff, while the downstairs couch was longer than me, and plenty comfortable. It was the basement that was wrong, not the furniture in it. When we finally moved into an apartment of our own, just before Christmas, I heaved a sigh of relief and was thrilled to have my own room again.

That’s it. I never saw any apparitions, any spectral figures, or heard the clanking of chains or eerie howls. I never forgot about the basement, but I didn’t obsess on it, after we were gone. I might have just decided that the feeling I had there, the sensation that the place was just bad in some way, was simply teenage hormones gone amuck in some way.

Except that years later, after I was living in California and my parents had moved to South Carolina, I was visiting them during the summer and the subject of that house came up. I mentioned the basement, and how I had never liked it, and my mother said, “Of course, that murder took place there.”

I had not heard about any murder. It turned out that she didn’t hear about it for at least another year after we left the house, long after I had returned Stateside for college. She had never thought to mention it to me before. Worms was not a big city, and homicide was almost unheard of there, only a handful over the course of the 20th century.

One of them—the harsh, nasty bludgeoning of a teenaged boy by an older man who had tried to imprison the boy—had occurred in that basement.

The basement that felt bad, that felt wrong, in some chilling, terrible way.

Electrical impulses? The soul of the victim, looking for justice or some elusive peace? The memory of violence living on in the bricks and floors and glass that made up the basement?

I don’t know. I won’t even speculate.

But I always hated that place.

Happy holidays, and a Merry haunted Christmas to you.

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