'A Ghost Story For Christmas' 2024 To Adapt 'Man-Size in Marble'

One of the U.K.’s long-standing traditions is telling ghost stories at Christmas. The most famous, of course, is A Christmas Carol, in which a rich man is terrorized into paying his staff a living wage. However, Dickens was merely following a tradition older than he was; Victorian writers of all stripes, including Arthur Conan Doyle, regularly published horror stories to scare people for the holiday season. (This is partly why it took until the 21st century before the U.K. got into Halloween.) Since 2018, Mark Gatiss has been adapting these old-school Ghost Stories for the BBC to air at Christmas, and 2024 will be no exception, with Woman of Stone prepped to air in December 2024.

Gatiss began this project in 2013 with The Tractate Middoth, taking over from writers like Neil Cross, who has sporadically adapted these traditional tales for the BBC since 2004. The series went on hiatus after that, with Sherlock filling the gap, until 2018, when Gatiss returned to Ghost Stories with The Dead Room. Since then, except for the 2020 pandemic year, Gatiss has faithfully adapted a new short story every year, at first running through the best-known of M.R. James’ famous Christmas ghost stories from the interwar period before turning to Conan Dolye’s Lot No. 249 in 2023.

For 2024, Gatiss will adapt Edith Nesbitt’s famous 1893 story Man-Sized in Marble, rechristened Woman of Stone for modern viewers. In a statement accompanying the announcement, Gatiss revealed he’d long wanted to adapt the story, as Nesbitt’s tale was “the very first ghost story I ever read!”