✥ For the sixth year in a row, the lamp is sponsoring a Christmas ghost story competition in the spirit of Dickens and M. R. James. When we say “in the spirit of,” we do not have in mind wan pseudo-Edwardian pastiches of James and others; we mean stories that “succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours,” stories with contemporary or near-contemporary settings that achieve effects similar to those sought by the genre’s masters. This year we feel it is important to point out that Christmas itself is entirely incidental to the contest; the stories need not necessarily be set on or around or even mention the Nativity.
The winner of this year’s competition will receive one thousand dollars, and his or her story will appear in the Christmas number of the magazine. At least two runners-up will receive three hundred dollars each and have their stories published online during Christmastide.
The rules are as follows:
1. The contest is open to all writers aged eighteen and older. With the exception of the lamp’s editor, any judges involved will not be aware of the identities of the authors before assessing their work; they will examine entries “blind,” without regard for previous publications, background, etc.
2. The prize is for stories no longer than ten thousand words. There is no minimum length.
3. Stories, while obviously intended to be frightening, must not contain obscene or indecent material.
4. Stories must involve the supernatural, however sensitively portrayed or faintly suggested.
5. Stories must be written in English.
6. Stories must be original, which is to say, they must not have been published previously, either in print or in any public online forum. Stories written with the assistance of a large language model will not be considered.
7. “Simultaneous submissions” are not permitted.
8. Only one story per entrant is allowed.
9. Entries may be submitted by email to boo@thelampmagazine.com (.doc, .docx, or .rtf only: .pdf attachments will not be read). Biographical information limited to a single sentence should be contained in a separate document.
10. Entries should be formatted in Times New Roman with single line spacing. Do not include tab stops, indents, headers, footers, page numbers, or illustrations original or otherwise. A title will suffice. Epigraphs are also permitted.
11. Submissions must be sent by midnight Eastern Time on October 1, 2026, in order to be eligible.
12. Both the winner and at least two runners-up will be notified at a date to be announced later. No other editorial correspondence related to the contest will take place. The decision of the judges is final.
✥ In our Trinity 2026 issue, we asked readers to send in lists of things that fascinate and repel them. Thank you to everyone who wrote in. Here are some of our favorite entries:
Things that fascinate me: the melancholic romance of the émigré, the Wild Geese, the Jacobites, Charles X dying in Czechoslovakia, the last of the imperial Russians in Paris and New York, the Duke of Berwick, Bonnie Prince Charlie; Spanish Holy Week confraternities; Marian apparitions; priest hole–ridden English manor houses stunted in their growth by recusancy fines; the American Southwest, the red dirt and rocks, the secret rites of the Pueblo and Hopi in their forbidden kivas; vampires; the decadent, blood-drunk Aztec Empire with Montezuma dreaming of his own doom before the arrival of Cortes; Creole cultures; the lost churches of Byzantium hidden in the mosques of Istanbul; cavalry charges; genetics and genealogy; Venice; pre-Haussmann Paris; Ptolemaic Egypt; dragons; the fae; the Oath of Fëanor; ghost-infested castles; nineteenth-century spiritualism and spirit photography; the Civil War; angels and fallen angels; the hands of the priest at the moment of consecration; Wolfe and Montcalm both dying at the Plains of Abraham; scrapbooks and paper ephemera; my children and the things they find fascinating.
Things that repel me: marijuana; digital gambling, especially sports gambling; anti-natalism and people who dislike children; A.I.-generated “art”; peas, beets, and squash; Masonry, Jacobins, Philippe Égalité and Cromwell; wet leaves; space; the bottom of the ocean.
—Amanda Piccirillo
Things that fascinate me: the Shakespearean authorship question; historic downtowns of Midwestern towns; the casual conversation of old men with each other; pre-modern family life; baking bread; sacred polyphony, especially sung by non-professionals; the seasons, especially spring; my children as adults; old houses; courage.
Things that repel me: recreational drug use; amusement parks and shopping malls; horror films; trimming the fat off raw chicken; ugly churches; politics; fluorescent lights.
—Sibyl Niemann
Things that fascinate me: Joan of Arc; the Great Lakes; Detroit, Minneapolis, Chicago; cemeteries founded in the nineteenth century; Poussin; Marriages: Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Phyllis Rose and Laurent de Brunhoff, Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina, and too many others to list; Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, and other Muslim megacities; Vincent Ferrer; Nancy Mitford (letters, histories; I don’t care about her novels or her sisters); outdated encyclopedias, institutional histories, newspaper archives; Brutalism; the Grand Tour; forgotten wars, closed cities, demilitarized zones; mountaintops.
Things that repel me: liars; whiners; space travel; two-factor authentication; drunkenness; video calls; mice, rats, cockroaches; Repulsion.
—Ian Crown
