Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to the strange and unusual podcast early and ad-free right now.

Join Wondry Plus and the Wondry app or Apple Podcasts.

You're listening to a morbid network podcast.

And not too distant past.

As winter settled its oppressive darkness, like a damp, cold, heavy blanket across the land.

Families began to find themselves huddled together in their homes, around a fire, for larger portions of the day.

After the hard work of summer and the harvest season, winter was when everything slowed down.

And as the nights grew long, this was a time spent mainly indoors.

Without modern heating systems and with little to insulate them from the cold winds,

howling just outside their walls, families gathered around the fire,

and the ambience created by the flickering flames in dark gloomy rooms, back in them to tail ghost stories.

The custom of telling winter's tales is not known to most of us today,

but it was a custom that stretches back hundreds of years.

And more often than not, these winter tales turned to horror.

In 1589, the English playwright and poet Christopher Marlow wrote,

Now I remember those old women's words, who in my wealth would tell me winter's tales,

and speak of spirits and ghosts that glide by night.

During the time of the year, wind darkness rained,

and shadows startling and distorted were thrown about by a home's fire playing tricks on the mind.

As each room seemed to suddenly fill with dark, ominous spectres creeping along walls.

So it's no wonder that winter nights were once filled with ghost stories.

Winter was also the time when illness and death was most rampant.

...