Hey, it's Brian, back with another episode for those of us getting an early start on the Christmas season.

And as we're still in that part of the season, where we're in a mix of Halloween and Christmas spirit,

I figured I'd come back with another ghost story.

This one again comes to us from my friends at Biblioasis,

who for the past several years have been helping

to revive that old Victorian tradition of ghost stories for Christmas. Every season, they publish

a set of three classic ghost stories decorated and illustrated by the acclaimed cartoonist Seth.

Today's story finds our hero alone on Christmas Eve and trapped in a boat that just may be haunted.

It's Christmas Eve on a Haunted Hulk by Frank Cowper.

I shall never forget that night as long as I live.

It was during the Christmas vacation, 1870-something.

I was staying with an old college friend who had recently been appointed the curate of a country parish,

and who had asked me to come and cheer him up since he could not get away at the time.

As we drove along the straight country lane from the little wayside station,

it forcibly struck me that a life in such a place must be dreary indeed.

I have always been much influenced by local color.

Above all things, I am depressed by a dead level, and here was monotony with a vengeance.

On each side of the low hedges,

lichen-covered and wind-cropped, stretched bare fields,

and above level of the horizon being only broken at intervals by some mournful tree

that pointed like a decrepit finger-post toward the east,

for all its western growth was nipped and blasted by the roaring southwest winds.

...