“Marley was dead: to begin with,” begins Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the ghostly morality tale of miserly Ebenezer Scrooge who, through a series of encounters with spirits in the early hours of Christmas morning, realises he needs to change his ways.

It is an imagined story – there is no Scrooge and, unlike his unfortunate business partner, he is not dead. But that does not appear to have mattered to a vandal in Shropshire, where a gravestone of Scrooge used in a 1984 film adaptation has been smashed into multiple pieces.

The prop, a heavy piece of stone several centimetres thick engraved with the name “Ebenezer Scrooge”, has lain in the graveyard of St Chad’s church, Shrewsbury, since the movie 40 years ago starring George C Scott.

While Scrooge is definitely fictional, the stone may have belonged to an unknown real person whose name was weathered away over hundreds of years, according to a BBC interview with Martin Wood, Shrewsbury’s town crier, who was a body double in the film.

It can be seen in the scene where Scrooge, described by Dickens as “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner”, is taken to the grave of an unloved man by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come and discovers it bears his own name.

Town council clerk Helen Ball said the prop was a popular attraction in the village. “It’s one of those things that is very dear to everybody’s hearts,” she told BBC Radio Shropshire. “When you look at the Facebook messages that people put on yesterday, it’s united a community in terms of the disgust that somebody can do that.”

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She said: “Maybe if it’s someone in their drunken revelry, they might have posted it on Facebook or something, and maybe somebody with a bit of conscience might let us know who that is.

“Or equally,” she said, providing a potentially satisfying ending, “the person who did it may have a conscience and decide to own up”.

Ball added, in true Victorian style, it would be a “good reason to bring the stocks back”.