Tales for Christmas Eve by Rhoda Broughton (1873)

 This is five shorter pieces - a couple classifiable as long stories, and the others novellas, broadly speaking. They also have a thematic connection with one another in that they all bar one have a supernatural bias. Positioned as they are before what signifies this genre with most modern readers, they will appear a little tame to them. The first, The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth is constructed of an exchange of letters between two society women where a new address of one of them is slowly revealed to be haunted - Broughton suffixes this one with one line: "This is a true story". The Man with the Nose is a novella of a young couple travelling in Europe, where the wife is disturbed by the constant popping up of a stranger with a pronounced nose, and an evil feeling about him, even in her dreams. The husband doesn't happen to note him, is disbelieving and leaves her in a hotel to return to Britain on business. She begs him to stay. When he returns, she is gone, never to be found. This one is prefixed with a claim of truth. Behold, it was a Dream! is a novella of a woman's journey to stay with friends, a couple recently married, to see their new home in the country. On her first night with them she has a premonitory dream about them being murdered by a farm worker with a sickle, in a grotesque sea of blood. She is horrified and makes plans to leave, completely unsettled, though the couple laugh it off and beg her to stay. On a journey to see around the farm before she goes she is startled to see a worker in the fields who is the spitting image of the man in her dream, and points him out to the couple. Despite their disbelief of her, after she has left for home, they fire him. She learns subsequently that the gruesome events of her dream have come to pass, as the disgruntled farm worker returns to the house to exact his revenge. This one has anti-Irish commentary which make it a problem. Broughton says in a last paragraph that this story is true in every respect except where it took place. Poor Pretty Bobby is the longest novella, and slightly more subtle. A young woman's sailor sweetheart returns to her in a dream, wet through, and she later discovers that this visitation occurred on the night his ship was wrecked. This is the only piece which doesn't have a claim of underlying truth attached. Under the Cloak tells the story of a wealthy woman and her maid on a train journey in Switzerland. They share a compartment with two gentlemen reading papers. The light is dim and they're not particularly visible behind their broadsheets. One of them finally lowers his paper and offers them an unknown drink from his flask. It becomes clear that it is some sort of drug, as the maid quickly falls asleep, and the woman becomes highly drowsy. She feels them attempting to remove her case of valuables from beneath her feet, and in a highly mixed and dubious state realises that the one who has never lowered his paper is in fact a dummy with fake hands, or someone rigged up in that way, wrapped in a heavy cloak. She eventually falls completely under the drug's effect, and wakes to find the man who revealed himself and her maid gone, but the strangely garbed figure still in his position. Summoning courage, she desperately scrapes at the mask she sees it has, and pulls away all the false paraphernalia, to find underneath her maid bound and gagged. This crime, she discovers later, has been perpetrated by a disaffected former servant of her husband. Again, this is suffixed with a claim of genuineness. Though these are very entertaining, they perhaps don't fully play to Broughton's strengths - in her novels she is able to probe emotion and character in a way that these don't allow.