I captured this photo, here in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, right before Thanksgiving, and there’s just something spooky about it.

Maybe it’s the way the clouds, in their muted tones of gray and dusky blue, are smothering the light and muting the foliage in the landscape.

Or maybe it’s the way the clouds blanket the mountain with warmth, like a quilt, as if in preparation for the approaching cold.

Whatever it is…this scene brings to mind a passage from a collection of Christmas-themed Victorian ghost stories “Told After Supper” written by Jerome K. Jerome in 1891.

“There must be something ghostly in the air of Christmas–something about the close, muggy atmosphere that draws up the ghosts, like the dampness of the summer rains brings out the frogs and snails. And not only do the ghosts themselves always walk on Christmas Eve…for ghost stories to be told on any other evening than the evening of the twenty-fourth of December would be impossible in English society.”