The stories are connected by a framing device in which the unnamed narrator attends a Christmas Eve dinner party at his uncle's house. After having eaten and drunk a large amount of alcohol, the guests, as was normal on Christmas Eve in Victorian Britain, tell ghost stories to each other. The narrator does not include all of the stories that are told that evening in the anthology. He has to leave two of them out because he does not understand them. The last story in the anthology is the narrator's own story of the ghostly experience that he has on that Christmas Eve, which ends with him making a public disgrace of himself.