Christmas has traditionally been a time for ghost stories.

In the modern era, this was arguably set in motion by Charles Dickens and his perennial classic A Christmas Carol, in which miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is persuaded to change his ways thanks to the visitations of three spirits (four, if you include his erstwhile business partner Jacob Marley).

No doubt the tradition goes back far beyond that, Christmas coinciding, or thereabouts, with mid-winter and the longest night of the year... who knows what terrifying tales our distant ancestors told each other around prehistoric campfires to try to make sense of their world?

More recently, in the 1970s, the BBC broadcast an annual Ghost Story for Christmas, largely based on the eerie works of Montague Rhodes James, but also including Dickens' other supernatural work, The Signalman.

However, there is a perhaps lesser known Victorian author who created a body of work that is suitably scary reading for these long winter nights... and he's Bradford's very own.

Oliver Onions was born after Dickens' death but almost a contemporary of MR James - James was born in 1862, Onions in 1873. Onions was an old boy of Bradford Grammar School and left there in 1895 for the National Art Training School.

Upon his graduation he worked for three years as a press artist, specialising in drawings of the action in the Second Boer War. But the job of the war artist was being eroded by the widespread use of the new technology of photography, and Onions turned to the written word.

Onions' first novel was a non-supernatural effort, The Compleat Bachelor, which was initially serialised in Harper's Bazaar in 1900. He went on to write many, many novels and short stories across a range of genres.

In 1909 Onions married the writer Berta Ruck and lived with her in South Wales, where they had two boys, Arthur and William. In 1918 Onions legally changed his name to George Oliver, but continued to write under his original name.

He died in Aberystwith in 1961, and left a huge legacy of varied writings, the supernatural elements of which earned him great praise from the likes of fellow Bradfordian JB Priestley and master of weird fiction, Algernon Blackwood, who described Onions' story The Beckoning Fair One as "the most horrible and beautiful ever written on those lines".

In May 1939 Onions wrote an exclusive short story for the Yorkshire Observer, a forerunner of the Telegraph & Argus. It is a Christmas story, and we are proud to reprint it for the first time in the 75 years since it was written. Enjoy...