the 'real' hautes that inspired this year's BBC Christmas adaptation of Ghost Story

This year's BBC Christmas Ghost Story is an adaptation of EF Benson's 1912 tale of vampire horror and haunted dream, called The Room in the Tower.

The unnamed narrator begins the story by talking about a recurring nightmare that he suffered for 15 years. In his dream, he was invited to the Stone family residence. Sleep begins pleasantly, with card games, cigarettes and lightweight conversations. But there's always a twist when the family's terrifying matriarch, Mrs. Stone, tells the narrator that he will now be taken to his room for the night – the titular tower room. Upon entering the room, he is overcome with extreme terror and wakes up before he sees the object of his fear.

One stormy summer day, while visiting a friend, the narrator stumbles upon the same house he has seen in his dreams at least once a month. Sure enough, he is led to a room in the tower, where he finds a hideous portrait of the demonic Mrs. Stone. At his request, the portrait is removed from the room, but it leaves captivating blood stains on the narrator and his friend's hands. However, during the night, the narrator's sleep is once again disturbed by a revealed nightmare.

Many ghost stories take place in bedrooms. One of the first ghost stories adapted for BBC television was a novel by MR James. Oh, whistle, and I will come to you, my boywhich depicts a bumbling scientist terrorized in his hotel room by a ghost, literally in the sheets. Horror is born from the twisted inversion of what we expect to see and experience, and because the bed should be the place of ultimate safety, it can be distorted into a place of existential fear.

Sleep is also a state of pure helplessness. Those few breathless seconds after waking up from a nightmare remind us how vulnerable we are. No supernatural story from the early 20th century describes in a similar way how a restless dream can haunt us. Room in the Tower.

Benson grew up with ghosts. His father, Edward Benson, was Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a good friend of the writer Henry James and allegedly told his son a terrible story he heard that later turned into James. Screw rotation (1898).

Benson's mother was Mary Sidgwick, whose brother Henry was a founding member and first president of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). The purpose of the SPR was to investigate strange and paranormal phenomena, with particular emphasis on thought transference (or telepathy), visions and hallucinations, and ghosts and hauntings.

Founded in 1882, the SWP began almost immediately to collect huge amounts of data in the Hallucination Census. They sent a questionnaire to the public and over several years received thousands of responses, some with fascinating anecdotes about being terrorized by ghosts and monsters in the middle of the night. The SPR collected them in an 1894 issue of its magazine.

Reading them in the lightweight of the Room in the Tower, it seems that Benson also knew what it was like to be haunted by hallucinatory sleep disorders. He may even have drawn direct influence from some of the anecdotes. The narrator of The Tower Room, who is visited by a vampiric monster at the end of the story, describes himself as “paralyzed” – the typical feeling of sleep paralysis, often accompanied by terrifying hallucinations.

In Benson's story, the narrator sees “a figure that leaned over the edge of my bed.” In the SPR census, a respondent called Miss HT describes a terrifying visit similar to Benson's narrator's experience. She wrote that she saw the same figure three times, while the narrator kept having the same nightmare. It happened the same way every time; she believed she woke up, and saw a shimmer in the air that gradually solidified. Paralyzed, she couldn't move or scream to defend herself as the shape “became a mist, then transformed into a dark, veiled figure that approached me” and leaned over the bed. Finally the paralysis lifted and the figure disappeared just as Miss HT held out her hands towards it.

Both Census and Room in the Tower show that ghosts don't have to come from cemeteries, Gothic houses, or local legends. Often the most terrifying encounters, the experiences that prove most fruitful in ghost stories, are those that our sleeping minds conjure up on the ethereal border between sleep and wakefulness.

The Room in the Tower will air on BBC One on Christmas Eve at 10pm and stars Joanna Lumley as the terrifying Mrs Stone. For those of us who are prone to restless sleep, this can be a nightmare of our own.

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