“So the dead have the same power as fairies, and live in the same place. On May Eve and November Eve the dead and the fairies hold their revels together and make excursions together. If a young person died, he was said to be called away by the fairies. The Tuatha may not have been a race of gods, but merely the early Celts, who grew to godlike proportions as the years raised a mound of lore and legends for their pedestal. So they might really be only the dead, and not of superhuman nature.”
—Ruth Edna Kelley, 1919
“The experience of Halloween may be regarded as a potential context for the spirituality of remembering.” – Robert A. Davis & Leila Dudley Edwards, “Children and Spirituality in the Context of a Traditional Festival: Halloween,” 2010
This spring I attended Transworld, the world’s largest professional trade show for haunt industry professionals, where for five days thousands of set decorators, prop makers, sound designers, and special effects artists demonstrate the latest in scare technology. The Pennsylvania-based Witch Doctor Designs drew a crowd with their display of “actormatronics,” props that combine sophisticated animatronics with live actors to produce convincing effects. For the Transworld demo, a rotating series of young men and women fed themselves, smiling, into the Mulch King 5000, an extremely realistic-looking woodchipper that would then appear to “shred” the actors, spewing out fake blood and gore, as the actors disappeared down a chute into a concealed compartment below. The effect was really marvelous, far exceeding anything you can accomplish with a dummy or mannequin. In his YouTube walk-through, the founder of Witch Doctor Designs explains, “Basically what we're doing is simulating the real-life experience of somebody getting pushed and stuffed into a woodchipper and ground out the other end.”
How did Halloween go from engaging with the universal experience of death to the very particular experience of being stuffed into a woodchipper?
We’ve talked about Halloween as a “liminal festival,” one that straddles the border between life and death, with its many related polarities: summer and winter, light and dark, sowing and harvesting, fertility and decay. But Halloween plays with another boundary, too, that between public and private, strangers and friends. In other newsletters I’ve written a bit about trick or treating and the claims of others, but today I wanted to think about the fear of two particular groups of strangers, our ancestors and our children.
In 609, the Catholic Church rechristened the Pantheon in Rome to the Virgin Mary and all Christian martyrs. The new Feast of the Martyrs was originally held on May 13, the last night of Lemuria, the Roman festival of the dead. In 835, Pope Gregory IV moved the feast to November 1, a date long associated with the Celtic pagan holiday Samhain, as a celebration of all Christian saints. (Some historians suggest it was moved to undermine paganism by co-opting Samhain. A more practical reason might have been that the fall harvest could better feed all the pilgrims who streamed into Rome for All Saints Day.)
Meanwhile, in the sixth century, a separate practice began in Spanish and then in French churches and monasteries of praying for the souls of all deceased Christians, not just martyrs and saints, and usually in the spring. In 998, the French abbot Saint Odilo of Cluny instituted an annual mass at his monastery for “the souls of the faithful departed” that was soon adopted throughout Western Europe. In the 11th century, All Souls was moved to the day after All Saint’s Day—that is, to November 2. According to Saint Odilo, anyone requesting a mass for a dead loved one was required to make an offering to the poor, further cementing the holiday’s links between private grief and public obligation. The twin holidays, All Saints and All Souls, were among the most important days in the medieval Church calendar. In the words of historian Nicholas Rogers, the twin holidays “affirmed the collective claims that the dead had on the living.”
Throughout Europe, communities embroidered their own local traditions onto the standard practice of alms and prayers. In Naples, charnel houses were thrown open on All Souls’ Day so people could visit the bones of their deceased family and friends. The houses were decked in flowers and the bodies dressed in colorful robes. In Brittany, people processed through graveyards, sprinkling graves with holy water or milk. Sometimes food, drinks, and items of clothing were left out for the dead. In other cities and towns, civic leaders provided bonfires and refreshments for the overnight vigil. Sometimes they also provided entertainment; Rogers notes that in the London parish of St. Mary Woolnoth, “five young garlanded women were hired in 1539 to play harps by lamplight.” Wealthy citizens gave food or money to the poor in exchange for their promise to pray for souls in Purgatory.
Soul-caking, a precursor of trick or treating, is one of the earliest documented Halloween activities, discussed in a 1511 festival book, an illustrated pamphlet produced to commemorate a holiday or large public event. Comfortable households would bake soul cakes, traditionally “small round seedcakes made with spices and with currants on top.” (Though the festival book dates from 1511, the citation—”we rede in olde tyme good people wolde on All Halowen daye bake brade and dele it for crysten soules”—implies it was already an old practice.)
These cakes were distributed to the poor in exchange for their promise to pray for the souls of the dead. In this exchange, households who distributed cakes pledged their support to the poor, and soulers pledged their support to the community of the dead as well as to the living who mourned them. According to some traditions, for each cake that was eaten, one soul would be released from Purgatory. The cakes themselves were considered to be good-luck tokens, and often children would save them instead of eating them. (“One woman in Whitby was said in 1817 to have a soul cake that was a century old.”) It became, according to Rogers, “an important occasion for soliciting food and money from rich neighbors during the bleak winter months.” While soulers might be any age, souling was particularly popular among children, teenagers, and young adults, and so the youngest members of the community extended their imaginations to those who had left already, extending a hand to elders who had gone on ahead of them into the world beyond.
Halloween in the early Church was dedicated to the departed souls of friends and family. This changed with the Protestant Reformation. Because Protestants did not acknowledge Purgatory, it made no sense that dead souls would be hanging around after they died. Any spirits that lingered around during Halloween, then, would be evil, malevolent spirits, not the souls of the Christian dead. In some places, Halloween was disallowed, but in other places, the holiday absorbed this new dimension, becoming associated with witches and demons. Traditions that were once about calling the dead to you now became about repelling evil spirits: instead of bonfires used to light the way home for departed friends, these same fires were now said to repel demons. (In some Catholic countries, Halloween still retains its original aspect. In France and Spain, people sometimes visit family members’ graves on Halloween to pray and leave tokens of remembrance; in Mexico, the holiday Dia de los Muertos, usually celebrated on November 1 and 2, combines a similar remembrance of the dead with joyful celebration of their continued connection to the living.) In England, bell-ringing, processions, and other celebrations of All Souls’ Day were banned on and off throughout the 16th century (All Saints’ Day remained, though observed in a more restrained way). Not surprisingly, Hallowtide traditions were most popular in places where Catholicism held on the longest, usually those most distant from London.
While Catholic practices surrounding All Saints and All Souls were waning throughout England, a new holiday rose up to replace them: Guy Fawkes Day, commemorating the foiled Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when a group of conspirators including Fawkes attempted to blow up the Houses of Lords in protest of James I’s suppression of Catholics. The anniversary of the plot—and the torture and execution of Guy Fawkes—was instituted by Parliament as “a holiday forever in thankfulness to God for our deliverance and detestation of the Papists.” A major national holiday celebrated on November 5, Guy Fawkes largely superseded Hallowtide. Many of the same traditions carried over, however, largely unchanged. Bonfires continued, now used to burn effigies of Fawkes and the Pope. Souling gave way to groups of young people going door to door asking for kindling for bonfires or money to buy fireworks. What changed, however, was the explicit connection between what we owe to the living and what we owe to the dead. Guy Fawkes Day shifted the season’s focus from the mystical to the worldly. In 1647 Parliament banned all fall festivals except Guy Fawkes Day. Bonfire Night, as the night of November 5 became known, all but totally replaced Halloween in England, though it continued in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, its otherworldly associations largely intact.
So where did our dead go? Banished from Halloween, exiled from the community they once shared from the living, they were truly lost. No longer familiar spirits, they became malevolent ghosts, the strange souls of the unmoored dead, loosed from the bonds of affection.
So here we find a bit of the connection between Halloween, ghosts, and wickedness. But it’s humans and not ghosts we suspect may feed us into woodchippers. To the demonic and ghostly associations with Halloween, we find associations with human crimes, too, from poison candy hoaxes to mass media stories about murdered coeds. By the middle of the 20th century, Halloween was primarily, maybe solely, a holiday about fear. It’s not surprising, then, that frightening urban legends and superstitions would accrue around the day that “celebrated” both Satan and serial killers, combining our fears of supernatural horrors with grisly crimes.
I’ve written elsewhere about the connection between destructive teen pranks and American-style trick or treating, which was originally created specifically to offer children a less destructive way to mark the holiday. Incidents of dangerous or criminal pranks did indeed fall off following the invention of trick or treating and supervised Halloween parties in the 1940s. However, by the late 1960s, these effects seem to have worn off. In Detroit, the night before Halloween, known as Devil’s Night, was reserved for pranks. Like everywhere else, Detroit’s Devil’s Night activities escalated from childish mischief to serious vandalism and arson. Similar events took place in Flint, Michigan; Camden, New Jersey; and Bell County, Kentucky. In 1983, there were almost 1000 fires set on October 30. In 1986, the mayor of Detroit instituted a curfew on Devil’s Night and deputized more than 10,000 volunteer policemen to patrol the streets that night in addition to 11,000 full-time officers. As Rogers says, “Fire buffs flocked from far afield to watch the flames. Cameramen even flew in from Japan to televise the event. And an Israeli author named Ze'ev Chafets, who had been present at Devil's Night in 1987 and knew the area from his youth, described Detroit as a drug-ridden, arson-happy American Beirut in a best-selling exposé of Mo'town.” It goes without saying that this sort of racist gawking at the predominately Black residents of Detroit further cemented the association between Halloween and violent lawlessness in the minds of middle-class white suburbanites hundreds or even thousands of miles away from the Devil’s Night fires.
To this racist fear of “urban” crime was added a generalized fear of teenagers. Rising divorce rates, more single-parent families, and more mothers working outside the home meant more young children were enrolled in daycare and older children, so-called “latchkey kids,” were coming home after school to empty houses. Instead of being cared for by parents or other relatives, children were left with strangers, where they were believed to be vulnerable to everything from kidnapping and molestation to recruitment into Satanic cults. I’ve written about Halloween urban legends, stranger danger, and hoaxes before, but in the 1970s and ‘80s, rumors of poisoned candy and razor blades in candy apples took place against a backdrop of anxiety and mistrust, the widespread sense that the people around you were faceless strangers at best, actively malevolent at worst.
This fear of strangers harming children was matched by a second fear, that your children might become strangers themselves. What did latch-key children do when they were home alone all afternoon? Take mind-altering drugs? Listen to heavy metal or rap music, with its glorification of rage and violence? Play Dungeons and Dragons, a gateway to dabbling in the occult? Dangerous groups were out to recruit teenagers, whether criminal gangs or deranged cultists. The world of teenagers was increasingly unknowable, not only because parents were away from their children all day but also because the world their children inhabited was so unfamiliar and inaccessible to adults, all the more so when it involved new technology like video games and internet message boards.
Americans feared the influence on young minds of everything from TV commercials to secret messages embedded in popular songs. Your perfectly nice, normal-seeming neighbor might be a communist or a Satanist, a serial killer or a pedophile. D.A.R.E. suggested “peer pressure” was responsible for drug addiction, in a mechanism very much like occult initiation: an innocent but naive teenager is pressured into taking a single hit of an illicit drug and instantly turns into an addict. They are possessed as if by malevolent spirits; their body is no longer their own.
All of these fears, of random violence and evil strangers and teenagers lost to their families, gripped Americans year-round, but at no time did they coalesce more perfectly than at Halloween, now a celebration of wickedness and deceit, where trick or treating left young children subject to the depredations of strangers and pranks turned older children into terrifying strangers themselves.
For hundreds of years, Halloween has been associated with fear of the other, the living and the dead. But trick or treating, above all, is about reaching for the other side, to the weird and the uncomfortable, both bodies and souls. To be dead is to be exiled forever in an another country, and yet on October 31, their spirits hover close, right there at the door. Open up.
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