Christmas is a focus for paranormal activity. Not because ghosts feel festive. Because that's when people gathered. Where people gathered, tragedies happened. And Christmas tragedies leave a particular kind of mark.

The Victorian papers loved a good Christmas ghost story and printed whatever came in. Some of these accounts stretch back centuries. Others happened in 2015. A flooded cellar photographed on Christmas Day shows a pair of child's legs with no child attached. A family spots a tall hairy figure by a Nottinghamshire road on their way home from a party. The strange hasn't stopped happening. We just stopped paying attention.

Here are five documented hauntings from our book Christmas Ghosts that occur specifically during the festive season.

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1. The Mistletoe Bride of Bramshill

Bramshill House in Hampshire. A bride on her wedding day suggests a game of hide and seek. She climbs into an old chest. The lid snaps shut. It locks.

They searched for hours. Days. Years passed. When they finally found her, only bones remained inside her wedding dress. Now she wakes guests in the night. A grey lady drifts through the library. A green man with no legs hovers by the lake. In the 1970s, a security guard saw a man in a flannel suit walk straight through a wall. But it's the bride people remember. Still trapped. Still searching for the party she left behind.

2. The Sandringham Lamplighter

Even the Royal Family isn't immune. As Christmas approaches at Sandringham, the activity starts. Footsteps echo through empty corridors. Heavy breathing fills a second-floor room. Christmas cards move on their own. Lights flick on and off.

Staff have seen him. A figure with hollow eye sockets. Some say he's a young lamplighter who died during his rounds years ago. Others claim he's connected to a nun who met a tragic end after being seduced by a monk on the grounds. Whatever he is, he's drawn to the decorations. To the preparations. To Christmas.

3. The Devil at Cromwell Bridge

Stony Hurst, Lancashire. On Christmas Day, the Devil himself is said to cross Cromwell Bridge. Locals have whispered about it for generations. The rule is simple: if Old Nick looks you in the eye, he takes your soul.

No one knows how the tradition started. No one knows if anyone has ever been taken. But people in Stony Hurst don't cross that bridge on December 25th. Not if they can help it.

4. The Headless Coach of Penryn

Cornwall. Around Christmas, a coach thunders through Penryn pulled by headless horses. The coachman has no head either. The whole procession tears through the streets at impossible speed.

The warning is specific: don't stare at it. If you lock eyes with the headless driver, you'll be whisked away to the nether realm. Witnesses over the years describe the sound first. Hooves on cobblestones that shouldn't be there. Then the shape of the coach, darker than the night around it.

5. The Fish of Bradwell

This one is strange even by ghost story standards. Lumley Pool in Derbyshire. A murdered girl haunted the neighbourhood. Her spirit was so persistent, so troublesome, that a local wiseman named Master John transformed her into a fish.

Every Christmas Day, a spectral fish appears in the pool and nearby wells. The murdered girl, still trapped. Still visible. Just in a different form. People visit on December 25th hoping to catch a glimpse of her scales breaking the surface.

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Bonus: The Legs in the Cellar

Christmas Day 2015. The Craven Heifer pub in Rawtenstall, Lancashire. The cellar flooded overnight. The landlord went down to photograph the damage for insurance. When he looked at the picture later, a pair of child's legs stood in the water. No child attached. No explanation. The image exists. The legs are clear. No one knows whose they are.

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