Ebenezer Scrooge is a cold, tight-fisted old miser who has no use for Christmas and even less for the people around him. On a bitter Christmas Eve, he rebuffs every kindness and retreats alone to his chambers, where he receives a chilling visitor: the ghost of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley, bound in heavy chains forged by a lifetime of greed. Marley brings a warning, that Scrooge will be visited by three spirits before the night is through. Dickens's enduring 1843 ghost story opens on a haunted, frozen night, with one hard-hearted man about to confront everything he has become.