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GALLEY BEGGAR POCKET GHOSTS

TURKEY, BAUBLES AND JINGLE BELLS ARE ALL VERY WELL – but there’s no better Christmas tradition than the ritual of telling a gripping festive ghost story. Galley Beggar Press are delighted to revive this popular tradition in their Pocket Ghosts range – a  series of beautiful, collectible books featuring some of the finest stories in the genre. 

Shaped to fit into the snuggest  stocking, Galley Beggar Pocket Ghosts are the perfect gifts for anyone hankering for  some extra Christmas chill and spookiness – as well as a pleasure to read year-long.

CHARLES DICKENS, THE SIGNALMAN

‘So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy, deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world.’ 

Charles Dickens’s last great ghost story is also his most personal, inspired by a terrible accident on a train he himself was riding on. He revisited this haunting memory on the figure of a railway signalman, who hears bells ringing in his signal box when no one else does, who sees a figure no one else can see… and who, following those ominous signs, always witnesses horrible incidents. ‘I am troubled, sir,’ he cries. ‘I am troubled!’ But what exactly is it that is so troubling the signalman? … And what does it want?

MURIEL SPARK, THE LEAF-SWEEPER

‘Perhaps you don’t know how repulsive and loathsome is the ghost of a living man. The ghosts of the dead may be all right, but the ghost of mad Johnnie gave me the creeps…’ 

So speaks the narrator of Muriel Spark’s haunting tale, ‘The Leaf-sweeper’, before going on to recount the disturbing and mercilessly witty story of a certain ‘madman’, Johnnie Geddes – a man hell-bent on outlawing Christmas – who meets the most terrifying of all apparitions: himself.

ELIZABETH GASKELL, THE OLD NURSE’S STORY

‘One fearful night, when the snow was lying thick and deep, and the flakes were still falling – fast enough to blind anyone who might be out and abroad – there was a great and violent noise …’

Hester, a teenage girl, is left in charge of a young child in a cold, gloomy manor house under the looming shadows of the Cumberland fells. She hears strange organ music playing, but everyone tells her the sounds aren’t real. She is forbidden from visiting the mysterious East Wing. She is desperate to keep her young charge safe from some unknown disaster, one she feels sure is coming, and – as the terrible events that have happened in her new home become clear to her – she is increasingly unable to do so…