🎄 Christmas Special Edition #2: American Christmas Hauntings

Tweo True Tales of Spirits Who Returned for the Holiday

In the Victorian era, America kept Christmas as a quieter holiday: firelit parlors, hymns in the hallway, evergreen over framed portraits of ancestors. Christmas carried a hush, a sense of connection to those already gone.¹ Some families believed that, for one winter night, the boundary between memory and presence grew thin enough for loved ones to return.

1) The Boston Christmas Séance — Beacon Hill, 1878

The Pembroke family of Beacon Hill were well respected in Boston society — prosperous, educated, and mentioned often enough in local columns to leave a faint paper trail behind them.² When the matriarch, Eleanor Pembroke, died of pneumonia in early spring of 1878, her absence reshaped the house in quiet ways. Her favorite chair — deep green velvet, curved mahogany legs — remained in the parlor, untouched and reserved.

On Christmas Eve that same year, the Pembrokes hosted relatives for supper. Silver was polished, candles burned tall, and music softened the paneled walls. According to the eldest daughter’s diary, written within days of the event, conversation stopped just before midnight.³

The empty chair creaked once, as if settling under sudden weight. The cushion visibly sank, as though someone had taken a seat. Witnesses later agreed on what followed: a faint scent of lavender and ash — Eleanor’s preferred perfume — drifted into the room, and the air cooled sharply around the chair alone.

No shadow appeared. No figure stepped out of the air. There was only the clear shape of a body in the velvet, the fabric pressed down by an unseen presence. One of the younger children is said to have whispered, “Mama?” before the adults urged everyone to remain calm.

The imprint remained through the night. When morning came, the cushion slowly rose back to its natural shape, as if someone had stood and quietly left the room. The diary entry ends with a single line:
“She came home for Christmas.”

No further disturbances were recorded in the house. No rapping on walls, no moving objects, no later séances. Just one Christmas visit that the family remembered for the rest of their lives.

2) The Christmas Mourning Portrait — Cincinnati, 1891

On December 25, 1891, the Whitford family of Cincinnati gathered in their parlor for a formal Christmas photograph — a common ritual among well-to-do Victorian families who wished to record their prosperity and kinship at the end of the year.⁴ Evergreen garlands framed the window; a polished piano reflected candlelight; everyone was asked to hold still for the long exposure.

Everyone, that is, except seven-year-old Grace Whitford. She refused to sit in the chair placed at the center of the composition. The photographer, increasingly impatient, asked why. Grace reportedly answered, “Because a lady is already there.”

The adults chalked it up to nerves or imagination and moved her aside. The photograph was taken without her in the frame.

When the plate was developed, the central chair did not appear empty. A translucent woman occupied the seat: hair in a high Victorian coil, dark dress with jet beading, narrow waist cinched by a corset. Her face was blurred most noticeably at the mouth, as if captured mid-breath or mid-speech.⁵

When shown the image, Grace identified the figure without hesitation as her grandmother, who had died five years earlier. The family, unsettled, allegedly burned the original print. However, two duplicates surfaced decades later in an estate auction, both dated Christmas Day, 1891, and both showing the same figure in the central chair. Photographic experts who examined the surviving copies argued that the effect did not match an ordinary double exposure: there was no sign of a second sitter, and the semi-transparent quality of the figure was unusually consistent.

The Whitfords never claimed a curse or misfortune linked to the image. What remained, instead, was a quiet conviction that someone they loved had chosen Christmas Day to sit among them once more.

A haunting, perhaps — but one rooted in family, not fear.

🎁 What These Stories Suggest About American Christmas Spirits

Both of these accounts describe spirits that return to houses, not graveyards; to chairs and parlors, not ruined abbeys or lonely crossroads. They seem drawn to the same spaces where they once lived, loved, and were remembered.

Neither case involves threats, dire prophecies, or violence. Instead, they suggest a different kind of haunting — one that marks Christmas as a night when absence and presence briefly overlap.

Whether one accepts these accounts as literal truth, misinterpretation, or something in between, they reflect a Victorian belief that certain nights concentrated meaning. For some American families in the nineteenth century, Christmas was not only a time for gifts and hymns, but a moment when someone long gone might quietly take a seat, or appear in a photograph, just long enough to be noticed.

📎 Footnotes

¹ Victorian American Christmas customs blended imported British traditions with regional practices, often emphasizing family gatherings, parlors, and remembrance of the dead. ↩ Back

² References to the Pembroke family and similar Beacon Hill households appear in late nineteenth-century Boston society pages and local directories, which help contextualize the setting of this account. ↩ Back

³ The description of the Christmas Eve gathering and the “chair incident” is based on a diary entry and later family retellings that preserve specific details about scent, temperature, and timing near midnight. ↩ Back

⁴ Formal holiday photographs were common in late nineteenth-century Cincinnati and other growing American cities, reflecting both social status and the importance placed on family portraits. ↩ Back

⁵ Accounts of the “mourning portrait” note that the image was considered unsettling enough to be destroyed, with surviving copies and later examination focusing on the unusual semi-transparency and identification by the child as her deceased grandmother. ↩ Back

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