Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon.
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Admittedly, that's not strictly speaking true. A click on this link here will whisk you to numerous ancient musings that have skirted upon the topic,
However, what is true is that I've never launched a post directly dedicated to the festival itself. Therefore, here is that post.
My earliest memory of Halloween is of blundering around our back garden, in the late 1960s, carrying a turnip that had a scary face carved into it and a blazing candle inside. There were none of those fancy pumpkins, back then. We had to make do with turnips, just as our primitive ancestors had. I would assume this was in either October 1968 or 1967 because I know I was elsewhere on October 31st, 1969 and I would, surely, have been too young to remember it if the year was 1966 or earlier.
Other childhood memories are of bobbing for apples, scrying with a mirror, and even breaking out the Ouija Board to see if contact could be made with the spirits of the dead. Reader, I can reveal that no contact with the dead was ever established.
That was at home. In primary school, we were encouraged to cut out cats, bats, and witches on broomsticks, from black paper, and hang them from the ceiling.
And, of course, we were taught how to make witches' hats from black paper, then encouraged to wear them on the way home from school.
When it comes to culture, the things I most associate with the event are, inevitably, John Carpenter's Halloween movies but, of that multitude, the only one that's ever grabbed me is Halloween III which bears no resemblance to the others and may or may not have been written by Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale.
I also associate the date with Ghostwatch, BBC One's 1992 broadcast that purported to be a livecast from a haunted house. It all ended with Sarah Greene missing, presumed dead, and Michael Parkinson alone in a possessed TV studio. It was all fake but that didn't stop large numbers of people believing it to be true and phoning in to complain, making it the most complained about TV show in British history.
I associate no songs with Halloween. In fact, off the top of my head, I can't even think of any songs that have the word in the title.
I associate no paintings with Halloween.
Of course, I associate, a million and one comics with the festival, what with 1970s DC having churned out the likes of The Witching Hour, The Unexpected, House of Secrets, House of Mystery, Ghosts and a gazillion others.
As for what I'll be doing this October 31st, unless I can summon up the willpower to go out for the evening, I shall be doing what I always do and hide behind the settee, with the lights out, in case any trick-or-treaters come to the door. That way, I can save all my sweets for myself and not have to share them with anyone. After all, if Halloween has taught me anything in life, it's that the evil in my soul must be allowed free rein to express itself.
Those are my heart-warming thoughts upon the matter and I'm sure you have heart-warming thoughts of your own. Therefore, feel free to post your Halloween experiences, feelings, conclusions, remembrances, expectations, associations and anything else that might occur to you, in the space below.
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21 comments:
Who was it the other day asking for examples of being really, really lazy? Charlie maybe? Well I have a cracking example of my own.
Background first. I like frozen yogurts and I pop a yogurt carton in the freezer every day to eat the following day. Sometimes I find fruit in the fridge. If it's the right size (so chunks of melon, say, rather than whole apples) I'll tear back the yogurt lid and put some fruit chunks in the yogurt before freezing it. That's what I did yesterday.
Now for the lazy bit. I ate a satsuma today and ended up with a bit stuck between my teeth. That see through bit that encases all the individual sectors. You know the bit I mean. A bit of it always seems to get stuck. Anyway, what I should have done was to go upstairs to the bathroom, grab tooth floss and use it to remove the gunk. But I couldn’t be bothered to climb the stairs. So I opened the freezer, grabbed the frozen yogurt with its lid half off and used the lid as floss to remove the gunk. Then put the yogurt back in the freezer with the lid still attached.
Halloween-wise it's quite quiet for us these days. Our kids and their mates are all grown up and don't come calling. Back in the day though….
We used to stay at home and let the trick and treaters come calling. Where we are there's no street lighting and there’s a tall fence next to our front door separating the front of the house from the back garden that extends all round the side. You've got the picture? Well I'd put a chair on the hidden side of the fence that I could stand on and when I heard trick & treaters coming I'd don the clown mask and stand on the chair ready to pop my head over the wall.
On one glorious occasion a couple of kids were standing outside out front door arraying about who should ring the bell. Ring the bell. No you ring the bell. No I did the last one YOU ring the bell. At which point I stick my head over the fence just a couple of feet away from them and say Come on, one of you ring the bell. They look up, see the clown mask and run off down the street screaming their heads off.
DANGERMASH!!! Holy moly you just triggered one of my favorite memories of me, my brother and my uncle. My uncle was very frugal tho he lived a solid middle-class lifestyle. He also never married, which could explain why some of his traits reflected out of the perpetual bachelor. Anyhow, he always kept a little thing of floss in this coffee table drawer between the chairs in the television room. One day I’m flossing, because guys can do that, in each other’s company, watching the TV, and he goes… Toss me that floss when you’re done. So I tossed him the little box of floss, and he said no I just want the stuff you’re using… it’s still good.
Steve -
Halloween III was indeed written by Nigel Kneale but it was heavily rewritten to add more action and gore, so he disowned it. He was quite tetchy about the experience but to be honest, he was generally quite tetchy about a lot of things.
It is great though.
I didn’t see Ghostwatch until it came out on DVD, but I found - and still find - it genuinely unsettling.
I only have one real memory of Halloween, and that’s when a bunch of us 11-12 year olds went trick-or-treating back in 1983. It was in the wake of ET, but the tradition hadn’t really caught on in the UK yet so we were given fairly short shrift.
They do trick or treating on my street now, though it’s quite civilised: you only get a knock on the door if you leave decorations out front. We used to stock up on sweets and dole them out but we can’t be arsed any more.
I'm probably completely wrong (being no expert) about this, but in the UK, I thought Mischief Night (for Trick or Treating) was November 4th.
I never did Hallowe'en stuff at home - but at school, like Steve, I vaguely remember cutting out witches from black paper (or something).
I perhaps associate Rentaghost with Hallowe'en, even though it was on the rest of the year, too. I suppose the Peanuts stuff about the Great Pumpkin springs to mind, too!
Phillip
Phillip, yes, Mischief Night is traditionally on November the 4th.
I've just remembered another Halloween memory. And that's the BBC's Nationwide "news" show doing a report, on October 31st, 1976, about the Hexham Heads. It involved two brothers finding a pair of mysterious stone heads and taking them home. From that point, people in possession of the heads were plagued by poltergeist activity and even werewolf encounters. The report was genuinely terrifying.
Wikipedia's artile on the heads: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexham_Heads
As a kid in the mid-late 1960s we used to have a Halloween party at school. Before the party we would make cut out bats, skulls etc or we would have paintings that we specially created during our art period hung up in the school gym where the party would be held. As it was in Scotland, I remember that we were read the Robert Burns poem, “Halloween,” or “Tam O’Shanter” as a scary treat by our teacher. At the school (or at a house party) who can g forget to traditional games we were forces to play including dookin’ (or bobbin as others called it) for apples, a feat undertaken by leaning over a large tub of cold water hands tied behind our backs trying to catch an apple with our teeth (with your pal usually dooked you under the water) - alternatively you could wimp out and try and spear an apple by dropping a fork from your mouth. My favourite game involved treacle covered scones that were hung on a length of string with the treacle scones fastened and dangling from it. You would kneel beneath the string with hands secured behind your back (I’m suspecting our teachers were into bondage ) and tried to bite from the sticky scone as it smacked your face. I also seem to remember toffee apples being handed out.
Like Steve we didn’t carve pumpkins instead we (well our dads) carved turnips (or “tumshies” as we called them back then) with evil looking faces with a candle placed inside to illuminate them. The main event was deciding what costume to make (you didn’t buy them in shops back then) most costumes were usually versions of witches, ghosts or cowboys – once decided we went “guising” door to door – in those days to get a treat you had to recite a poem , perform a song tell a joke etc in order to get some fruit, monkey nuts , sweets or if you were really lucky a threepenny piece or a sixpence.
Songs: I seem to remember Monster Mash being played a lot at my primary school Halloween parties. After the party when we went home (in the Scottish TV area at least) I vividly remember watching cartoons after (or was it just before) the 6pm news that had a spooky theme including Caper the friendly ghost, a particularly funny and spooky Porky Pig & Sylvester the cat cartoon and a Tom & Jerry Halloween cartoon ( I have this picture of Tom “kick starting witches broom like a motorbike).
Steve, 'Halloween' by Sonic Youth is a song with the word 'Halloween' in the title.
Not being keen on slasher-type flicks, Halloween III is the only one of those films that really does anything for me, although I am a little ambivalent about it.
I like the idea of the fella who sells kitschy Irish-themed tat using it to resurrect Celtic culture (the fragment of Stonehenge in the microchips was a nice touch, a nod to its true origins). But for some reason the film made him and his company the villains, which spoils it completely.
Interestingly, Oíche Shamhna - the eve of Samhain - is a public holiday in Ireland, and this year a new one was set up for Imbolc, meaning that now all four of the seasonal festivals are officially marked. So we're kind of getting there anyway...
Fun fact: October 31st is also Reformation Day, making the anniversary of Martin Luther nailing some bit of paper to the door of a church in Germany and kicking off the whole prod thing.
-sean
*marking the anniversary
-sean
My only childhood memory of Halloween occurred in 1978 when there was a Halloween party in the village hall. I and my next-door neighbour Martin were 12 and another boy, John Williams, was 13. We weren't allowed into the party because they said we were too old so we hung around outside causing a nuisance until they relented and let us in.
I have no memory at all of anything else Halloween-related during my childhood years so if anything did happen I've completely forgotten about it!
Steve, I must shamefacedly admit that I was one of the viewers fooled by Ghostwatch in 1992. I genuinely had no idea it was supposed to be a drama and I assumed it was real.
It's interesting that Matthew saw Ghostwatch on DVD because I recall reading that Ghostwatch had never been repeated and never released on DVD!
Colin -
I don't think was ever repeated on TV [for obvious reasons], but the BFI brought Ghostwatch out on DVD in the mid-2000s and then someone else got the rights and released it again.
And it's just come out on a new special edition on Blu-ray.
I think I'm going to watch it again this Halloween. It's been a while.
Colin, I didn't know it was fake when it started but I quickly became suspicious as it progressed.
Charlie does have memories of Halloween from his youth, but really nothing at school. While every year we dutifully passed oout Valentine's Day cards to each other in February I don't recall any such tradition at Halloween involving costumes or candy.
Funny thing for us, up north, was that it could be snowing, raining hard and near freezing, or 80 and dry.
And as I've shared before, one Halloween around 1969 when I was 10 years old, my 8 year old brother had taken some eggs from the fridge, to properly reward homes not handing out candy. We launched the eggs and sure as hell we busted a window because the eggs were hard boiled. (That was back before double and triple pained, tempered glass... just plain old glass windows in them days.)
The USA does have that quaint story about the WAR of the WORLD'S radio broadcast from Orson Welles around 1935?
But I honestly never met anyone who experienced it first hand. IIRC it was mostly a north-east USA phenom?
I suspect most americans never heard of it until a made-for-TV movie came out in the mid 70s about it. Once that happened, everyone knew about it.
Actually, I need to ask my kids, born around 1997, if they know about this? Wonder if it's one of those stories that came, flooded popular consciousness, and went?
Wow, where to start?
My earliest Halloween memory is of participating in a costume parade around the school when I was in kindergarten, wearing a Casper the Friendly Ghost outfit.
Over the next several years I went trick-or-treating regularly, usually with a few buddies. One memory that still stands out was Halloween night- probably about 1971. We went to a house that turned out to be full of teenagers/twenty somethings; all of the hippie persuasion. They had the whole scene going- incense, lava lamps, black light posters. Well, the tripped out young lady who answered the door did indulge us some candy, but I think my pals and I were more unsettled by that group than by anything else we encountered that night.
Nowadays each Halloween we set aside treats hoping for visitors (choosing candy we enjoy, as we will end up with most of it). We always watch "The Great Pumpkin", and often follow that with "Young Frankenstein". Makes for a fun evening...
Favorite spooky song: "Dead Man's Party" by Oingo Boingo
Favorite spooky comic: "Night of the Laughing Dead" (Man-Thing #5)
Charlie, a few years ago there was a documentary on BBC radio about the War Of The Worlds broadcast which claimed that the panic caused by the broadcast had never happened and was invented as a publicity stunt.
Phillip and Steve, I've never heard of Mischief Night on November 4th! Could it be just a North of England event?
Maybe Mischief Night is Northern, if non-Northerners are unaware of it. Regardless, it's celebrated more in the the breach, than the observance (idiots throwing fireworks, etc.)
Another Northern tradition (Geordie) is "First Footing", whereby - in the New Year - if the first person to step foot in a house is a dark haired man, it's lucky. I'd never heard of this tradition, until I read one of my deceased Geordie auntie's letters to my father. According to the internet, "First Footing" is a Scottish thing (but maybe there's some overlap, with Geordieland.)
Steve - Speaking of the North, the Hexham Heads were/are a staple of Fortean Times, being recycled over & over again!
Phillip
Redartz - "Night of the Laughing Dead" - Fool-killer, a ghostly clown, and lines like "with my soul at the mercy of the critics" - a classic!
Phillip
I'll get my coat!
Phillip
Summary of a legendary Usborne classic! For those who remember - and, the uninitiated...
The World of The Unknown:
GHOSTS
pages 1-3: Introductory stuff, About this book, Credits, Contents
page 4: What is a ghost? Tom Colley's ghost, Warding off ghosts
page 5: Types of ghost, Ghosts of the living, Purposeful ghosts, Duties of a ghost,
Poltergeists
pages 6-7: Ghosts of long ago
pages 8-9: Strange Customs:
Keeping lemures at bay, Outwitting a rhea's ghost
Nailing down the afrit, Befriending the ghost of a bear
Flogging the graveyard ghost
pages 10-11:Where ghosts gather
pages 12-13:Phantoms of the Sea:
Captain Kidd's ghost, the unluckiest ship afloat, the haunted submarine
pages 14-15: Unlikely ghosts:
The talking mongoose, the Phantom hound, the ghostly lift
pages 16-17: The haunted house
pages 18-19: The village with a dozen ghosts
pages 20-21: Ghosts around the world
pages 22-23: Ghost hunting:
Ghost hunting equipment, Professional ghost hunting, Animal investigators
pages 24-25: Ghost stories explained:
Knockings at Netherfield, Ghosts from under the ground, Spectres of the Brocken
pages 26-27: Clever fakes:
Ghost-faking equipment, Photographs of the dead
pages 28-29: Sense or nonsense?
Who believes in ghosts? Two types of ghost, Ghosts of living people, Mystery
photographs
pages 30-31: A glossary of ghostlore
pages 32: Index, Going further
Phillip
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