Sophie explores Halloween
Yes, that’s right, it’s spooky season again, with Halloween — or Hallowe’en if Dame Isadora is reading this — on Thursday next week, then All Saints Day on Friday and All Souls on Saturday, ending with Guy Fawkes/Bonfire Night on Tuesday the week after.
Regular readers of this blog will suspect that I go a little weird around this time of year. I have drawn the Halloween spot before and on each occasion it’s taken me off into creepy territory.
In 2020 that was The Golden Bough and a (very) troubled pre-war radio programme. The following year it was Svengali with some very jolly Halloween decorations from my neighbourhood to lighten the mood. (Svengali became something of an obsession, until I took myself to task, to be honest.) There is just something about this time of year that lures the ghoulies and ghosties and long legged beasties out of my subconscious and onto the page.
Spooky Sunlight
Maybe it’s the light. In the south of England, where I live, this is mostly a depressing bleary grey. But then it will suddenly turn into a storm-bright spotlight, lasering through a ceiling of thick cloud.
And then there’s that low evening sunlight that hits you straight in the eye, sometimes without warning, and immediately follows up with torrential rain.
Dangerous stuff, autumn sunlight. It can make you see stuff that isn’t there.
Poets on Autumn
Well, of course, there is early Autumn. Keats had that down to a tee with his “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. But pretty much only the mists are left by the time we’re approaching Halloween.
R S Lowry, in possibly my favourite poem ever, comes closer to what I’m feeling right now. His last few leaves are “braiding the cuffs of the boughs with gold” while a bird preens “in the lawn’s mirror”.
But that last phrase elicits a sliver of unease, of doubt, even. How is the lawn a mirror? Frosty? But frost is opaque. Shiny after rain? But even wet grass won’t reflect. Yet the bird is seeing something. And so is the poet.
For the poet (and this reader) the moment is a wonder to remember. Definitely not dangerous. But not entirely of this world either, I think.
Robert Frost goes further into the Unknown Sector. He actually tries to bargain, or at least plead, with the elements. He’s desperate for them to slow down:
O hushed October morning mild,And there it is again, that hint of something a little more than natural which the poet wants to find.
But Frost is not wholly serious and claims he’s asking on behalf of the grapes still on the vine. [Clearly not in England] “Hearts not averse to be beguiled” is ironic as well as demonstrably true.
Spooky Beguilement
Which brings me back to my on-going confusion about Halloween. I understand its origins in folklore and various mediaeval ideas, I think. The Eve of All Saints Day, followed by All Souls is definitely a reminder of our spiritual existence, followed by our mortality. Change is coming and we can’t avoid it!
The wall between states of being shrinks for everyone at the end of life. Does it also shrink for everyone at the same time on Halloween?
If that’s the theory, and it seems to me it is, why on earth have a party? For there’s no doubt, Halloween today is a party, with LOTS of chocolate, and clusters of small children in various spooky costumes calling on neighbours to collect the loot.
Adults celebrate Halloween too, and not always in fancy dress with witches’ brew cocktails, doing woo woo noises (and other things) when the lights go out.
Only yesterday I saw a Facebook post on “My Top 5 Halloween ReWatches.” That sounds to me like popcorn and wine with a few mates. Or maybe even a binge session of horror films just with cocoa and the cat. (Subtract “horror” and I could go for that one myself.) Halloween we’re told, from pumpkin to artificial cobweb, from ghost to witch, is FUN.
Spooky Botanicals
Even Kew Gardens is joining in this year. According to their website it’s for the first time. And I have to admit, it does sound cool.
They’re aiming for spooky but they do say the darker the evening gets, the spookier it gets. Actually, there are three levels of spookery:
Daylight (ends at 6.00) for the ankle biters; Twilight from 6 -7.30 “the scare level ramps up a notch”; 7.30 onwards, it’s Moonlight for the hard core horror fest folk. Well, actually they claim it’s “as scary as it gets (but still suitable for all).”
Visitors are promised “flickering flames in the fiendish fire garden” with the usual supporting cast of ghouls, bats, witches, spiders and grinning pumpkins.
There’s clearly a bit of son et lumière too. Their website says, “Could it be a trick of the light or do things really go ‘bump in the night’?”
Bung in the hot toddy and/or the “devilishly decadent hot chocolate” that you can find along the way, and it sounds like a pretty fun night, even to me – at least, if you’ve got a warm fire to come home to. And if you’re shivering before you get home, it will be because of the cold night air and October winds, not fear of the unknown.
Fear or No Fear and the Art of Fun
So what are we doing here? Today’s Halloween is clearly NOT aimed at scaring the living daylights out of small children. Still less are we expected to ponder our own mortality.
Is it fear as entertainment? Well not if the Kew Gardens’ admirable programme is anything to go by. Though I suspect the binge horror film fans might have a sleepless night or two among their number.
It’s not even the Ghost Train experience, first imported to Blackpool Pleasure Beach in 1930 and subsequently copied, much reduced, by every pier and funfair for 50 years and much loved by mystery writers.
I actually rode on a Ghost Train as a (pretty stolid) child and failed to scream once, in spite of my father’s best efforts at shivering. I have been scared at places of entertainment, sometimes even by the performance. But not by shrouded figures and recorded screams. I definitely did not – and still do not – enjoy being scared.
Is it the possibility of being scared that grabs us then?
Do we create clearly “scary stuff” for the children, so that they shall recognise how phony it is and NOT be afraid?
And then try the same thing on ourselves, as it were, as a challenge to the universe.
I don’t believe in ghosts and demons. I can create this stuff myself. (The skeleton is a photograph I took myself today of a truly imaginative collection of hellish creatures outside a local house. The greenery is their window box. When I caught sight of him, he did make me do a double take, I admit.)
So there, Universe or the Beyond or whatever you are, now do your worst! Is that what the householder felt? Or wanted to feel? Or wondered if he would feel?
I was startled and recoiled. But I don’t think it will give me nightmares. But we shall see.
My Halloween Story
So this brings me full circle, back to feeling a little weird, a little unsettled, maybe a little excited by this time of year.In other words, Halloween gives me the creeps.
I don’t go to Halloween parties. And I supply chocolate to smalls only when their parents have alerted me that they will come trick or treating. The parents presumably surround them with enough love and sugar to keep evil at bay.
But when I was researching this I looked into my files. A long time ago, it seems, I started to write a short story set at Halloween. I had forgotten. Don’t think I’ll do that again.
It was set in wartime and told in the first person. So I probably wrote it when I was in my twenties and trying to emulate Mary Stewart. The narrator was a struggling writer, picking up occasional jobs to keep body and soul together while she wrote her masterpiece.
One job she picked up was for a man who ran a catering company. Having agreed to cater a birthday party at Denham Studios, he discovered that it was at Halloween and had to be suitably themed. His wife, who normally undertook decorations and oversaw the waiting staff, flatly refused to be involved.
The narrator, Can Do personified, takes it on, collects a bunch of waifs and strays to help, borrows a car-with-not-very-legal-petrol, and sets off.
And they get lost in the fog and unfamiliar lanes. Something moves among the dripping trees…
And that’s all I have. It’s hand written. Maybe I had so throughly frightened myself, I decided to stop. But it certainly grabbed me as I read it this week. Turning over the last page and finding that there were only three more lines made me yelp with frustration.
So what do I do about that? Bury it? Put it in pending? Burn it? What would you do?
Sophie
Remember, the clocks will have turned back by one hour at 2am on 27 October 2024.
Finish it, Sophie! We all want to know, now!
Thank you, Lesley. If the story comes, I don’t suppose I’ll be able to resist. Fortunately for the WIP, how this one ends hasn’t arrived yet.
Finish it, obviously!
Thank you Jan. Your vote is definitely counted.
Please, please finish it. Shame it’s not Bray Studios, home of Hammer Horror, but during the war the house was used as a duffle coat store for the army.
Well I sort of knew Denham Studios as a child, at least where they were and the pubs around them.
Bray is further along the Thames than I’ve normally ventured, and maybe spookier at the right season, as a result. But good to know Bray Studios’ wartime role. There’s probably a story in that, too. (When did the Army wear duffle coats? And where? Oh, Norway maybe?)
Apparently the duffle coats got wet and the floor collapsed under the weight! Sounds more Navy than Army… I may have read wartime and assumed army! Hammer didn’t start until 1951.
Finish it! (And, to get yourself in the mood, maybe read a couple of MR James’ stories?) (hahaha or one of mine – the one I wrote for Virago would really freak me now, she says, looking at the piano…)
Agree with everyone. Finish the story! Except you’d likely end by rewriting altogether. Spooky season seems to send people a bit crackers, but mainly for kids, I think.
At the church where my father used to go in his last years, on All Souls Day they used to read out the names of all who died that year in commemoration. Maybe all churches do it?
When you have finished the current WIP then you can finish your spooky tale…maybe as a reward (trying to be motivational here!). Great post, Sophie, just the right amount of unease 🙂
Oh please do finish it, but maybe not too scary. I don’t like any form of horror at all and don’t celebrate Halloween. I have only ever written one ghost story, but the ghost was a helpful one who saves a child’s life, my imagination goes into overdrive when it comes to scary stuff!