Oh, it is a stirring night in Ghostland, the night of December the
twenty-fourth!

Ghosts never come out on Christmas night itself, you may have
noticed. Christmas Eve, we suspect, has been too much for them;
they are not used to excitement. For about a week after Christmas
Eve, the gentlemen ghosts, no doubt, feel as if they were all head,
and go about making solemn resolutions to themselves that they will
stop in next Christmas Eve; while lady spectres are contradictory
and snappish, and liable to burst into tears and leave the room
hurriedly on being spoken to, for no perceptible cause whatever.

Ghosts with no position to maintain--mere middle-class ghosts--
occasionally, I believe, do a little haunting on off-nights: on
All-hallows Eve, and at Midsummer; and some will even run up for a
mere local event--to celebrate, for instance, the anniversary of
the hanging of somebody's grandfather, or to prophesy a misfortune.

He does love prophesying a misfortune, does the average British
ghost. Send him out to prognosticate trouble to somebody, and he
is happy. Let him force his way into a peaceful home, and turn the
whole house upside down by foretelling a funeral, or predicting a
bankruptcy, or hinting at a coming disgrace, or some other terrible
disaster, about which nobody in their senses want to know sooner
they could possibly help, and the prior knowledge of which can
serve no useful purpose whatsoever, and he feels that he is
combining duty with pleasure. He would never forgive himself if
anybody in his family had a trouble and he had not been there for a
couple of months beforehand, doing silly tricks on the lawn, or