A Halloween Tale

So about 20 years ago back in school I went downtown with a couple of friends on Halloween, we were kicking around town including cruising through a little boutique looking for costumes.  On the way in one of my friends had been telling us a really twisted story about slaves and whippings in old New Orleans and we’d finally told him to shut up.  While in this little store our friend sees some books on the shelves and grabs one fairly randomly and opens it up to a section on slaves being whipped in old New Orleans, the coincidence was really creepy and out of nowhere I found myself saying, “don’t wake me up.”  That was equally as bizarre and we blew it off and moved on to another store where we found costumes.

As we were driving around to get lunch and head back to my apartment my other friend began to tell us about how he worked for the Edgar Cayce Foundation back in Virginia.  One of the things they regularly did was to go to cemeteries and turn tape recorders on until the tapes ran through.  What the foundation was attempting to record were Electronic Voice Phenomenon or EVPs.  When doing recordings in cemeteries and haunted places at times inaudible sounds occur on the tapes that are interpreted as voices, some of these are really eerie when they seem to answer questions people have asked out loud.  Well on one of these occasions my friend and his buddies were setting up for the EVP recording session when my friend heard a sound.  He walked over toward the sound and saw a girl and a guy arguing, the girl sitting on a crypt stone.  Suddenly, the guy reached out and slapped the girl and walked away and she sat there weeping on the stone.  My friend then walked over to see if she was ok when the girl suddenly vanished.  We laughed about the story and then got back to my place.  Later that night we went out to a mildly amusing party that lasted too long and decided with a couple of girls we knew to go back to my place and have some pizza and beer.

We got back to my place and put the pizzas in the oven and opened the beers, we started talking and someone turned on the TV, it was about 2:30 in the morning.  No one was paying much attention at first and then slowly one by one people started focusing on the TV, there was a young girl sitting on a stone crying and a young man walked up to her to see if she was ok, and she vanished.  The scene ended with the camera panning back which made us all aware that the stone had been a cemetery crypt.  At that moment my friend who’d told us the story earlier grabbed the remote and shut off the television.  He was white as a ghost and obviously shaken up.

The girls wanted to know what was going on and we relayed the story I’ve just told and they laughed it off, even as one of the girls was checking the TV Guide only to show no listing for that time or channel.  The pizzas were ready shortly after and very quietly we ate and everyone went home.  The next day I called the television station and they assured me, they were off the air at 2AM.  They might not have believed the story initially, but two of the girls called the station as well, one getting furious and screaming at the station manager that it was not a funny joke.  To this day bringing up this story has a visible effect on my friend and if he’s reading this now, sorry buddy.

Halloween, the Devil’s Holiday?

Now several years ago working at a college I won’t name I had several of my Christian student raise a stink over the fact that we were celebrating Halloween by decorating the office.  Their main objection was that we were celebrating a Satanic Holiday.  I disallowed their complaint and did a quick history lesson with them about Halloween.  So here in a little more detail with a few links are, as best as I can figure out, the origins of Halloween.

First the date is essentially another co-opted Celtic Pagan holiday that Christians took over.  Early Christians very smartly incorporated their traditions onto Pagan holiday dates, also often incorporating some of the traditions as well as a way to more easily gain Christian converts.  It worked, there are a lot more Christians than Pagans running around these days.  The holiday the Christians stole was Samhain which was a harvest festival that was also rumored to be a time when the past, the spirit world and the present often co-mingled.  A link to the history of Samhain is below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samhain

There is an even tighter connection to Christianity and Halloween thanks to early Christians, most religions and cultures have a day where they celebrate the dead.  Another Pagan festival Lemuria a time in which the Pagans drove the unwanted spirits from their homes occurred on May 13 which the Christians co-opted it in the 7^th century to  be All Saints Day, you can read more about Lemuria below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_the_Lemures

Then to try to drain the strength out of the Samhain holiday the church moved All Saints Day to November 1^st and it became known as All Hallows Day, thus turning the evening of Samhain into All Hallows Evening and eventually shortened to Halloween.  So this is the origin of the name of Halloween and how the holiday kept it’s connection to the dead.  Priests also asked the faithful to pray for souls in Purgatory during this time, so on Halloween, poor children would beg door to door for soul cakes, and in return they would pray for souls in Purgatory.  Sounds a lot like trick or treat.

So where do our iconic Halloween images come from?  Witches are an easy one as this comes from the witch scares, particularly in the 1600s.  The things associated with their homes make up the cliché witch, the hat was what a country woman’s hat looked like in 17^th century Europe, cauldron’s were fireplace cook pots and brooms of course were part of the household.  Finally cats, well heck, single outcast women living alone always have cats, even today.

The rowdy and masked elements of the holiday most likely come from rowdy All Hallows Eve beggars who drank ale as they went door to door and as the night wore on got more demanding and caused trouble, masks helped retain their anonymity.  Guy Fawkes lent some help to the mask bit as his November 5^th attempt to blow up parliament was celebrated each year with masks and fires.

As immigrants came to the new world they brought snippets of their individual traditions around this holiday to the new world and they were incorporated into Halloween celebrations.  At the time of the Civil War, the massive amount of death as well as people lost, not knowing if they were dead or alive led to many ghost stories related to the missing and dead from the war.  Add into this mix the Bogey, brought by Scots from their lore and legend and now we get the Bogey or Boogeyman.  The Jack O’Lantern mythology comes from Europe as well and transforms from kids hollowing out turnips in Europe and uses what was more at hand in the US, pumpkins which are harvested the same time of year.  A link to some of the legends and history of the Jack O’Lantern is below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack-o’-lantern

Additionally Scots and Irish immigrants also brought the begging and rowdy prank filled Halloween celebrations of the old country with them.

The turn of the twentieth century saw artists starting to use the images of fear, ghosts, skeletons, witches and devils.  All which drew from the images of death, ghosts wrapped in their death shroud, pumpkins carved to resemble the rigor mortis smile and triangle nose area of a corpse.  This really finalized the look of Halloween that we still have today.

Halloween has also at times gotten out of hand with pranks that derailed street cars, release livestock, and as most of us aware even continues to this day in places like Detroit where hundreds of fires often occur over the three night period referred to as devil’s night, a link covering the history of devil’s night is below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil’s_Night

As a response to the vandalism and rowdiness of Halloween cities began looking for ways to distract and engage kids on Halloween.  So up came Halloween parties, costume contests, parades and bobbing for apples lots of the Halloween standards we all know.  Finally, in the early 20th century people began doing open houses where they gave away treats to keep from getting pranked on Halloween and thus the phrase and the tradition of “Trick or Treat” was born.

Fun Friday: Stupid Things People Believe!

Ok, not sure all of the items in the article fit this bill but some certainly do, an interesting look at how Americans think about the world around them none-the-less, happy Friday, enjoy!

http://www.bspcn.com/2010/08/20/the-9-stupidest-things-americans-believe/