Christmas at Colonel and Lady Garrison’s house is all warmth, laughter, and parlour games, until the evening’s “entertainment” arrives: a small, shabby medium with disconcertingly sharp eyes.

The guests settle round the table for an amusing bit of spiritualism. As the lights dim and the control takes over, the party games curdle into something closer to an inquest, and the most unwelcome of visitors finds its way back.

First published in The Sphere on 20 November 1935, “The Man Who Came Back” was collected in The Floating Café and Other Stories (Jarrolds, 1936). It has since reappeared in several modern anthologies of seasonal supernatural tales, including the British Library’s Sunless Solstice: Strange Christmas Tales for the Longest Nights (2021).

Margery Harriet Lawrence (1889–1969) was an English writer who moved with ease between ghost stories, occult fiction, romance, and crime, and whose work was widely read in the inter-war decades. She is now best remembered for her Club of the Round Table tales and for Dr Miles Pennoyer, her “psychic doctor” occult detective, whose cases draw heavily on the spiritualist beliefs she embraced in later life.

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