As long as I can remember, Halloween has been my favorite holiday. I love the faintly foreboding, sombre mood; the crisp season, with its electric atmosphere and stirring winds; the vibrant colors; and the big, inventive cast of characters. I’m an artist myself and find the run-down, Victorian haunted houses and the cemeteries threaded with mist to be an inexhaustable source of inspiration. When I grew up, though, Halloween didn’t have much to offer me. I was in it for the magic and the creativity, not the grown-up chills and thrills. I went on to college, earning a BA in History and, then, an MA in Art History. Despite my degrees, it did not occur to me that Halloween, too, has its own history. Now it’s so obvious.
This epiphany struck me when, as a graduate student, I began working at a local historic site. Nothing high profile, just a governor’s mansion dating to the early 1800s and a hodgepodge of ordinary nineteenth-century farmhouses and outbuildings that were relocated to our park. Our staff was tiny, but mighty. There was little research on the families who lived in our homes and no context for the decades in which they lived, so we headed to libraries, courthouses, and research centers. We learned about life in its quotidian detail, such as when pre-prepared foods were introduced, how ingredients were measured, what varities of apple trees were prevalent in our region, the impact of the of the sewing machine, the impact of the steel plough. In other words, the history of everything people touched or did in their daily lives. Every little thing did, indeed, have a story to tell and lessons to teach.
One day our supervisor informed us that we each needed to propose a new festival to be held at the facility—gulp. I started thinking about the local storytelling festival we had hosted in one of our barns; that led me to the germ of an idea—ghost stories. I believed the community would welcome a Halloween event for families, not a pants-wetting haunted house or a “haunted” tour of the site, but something fun and thoughtful.
Researching the history of Halloween (or any holiday) in the mid-1990s was a challenge. Little existed in the way of serious scholarship. Lesley Pratt Bannatyne’s work from 1990 examined how the diverse religious affiliations of the American colonies impacted their attitude towards Halloween. She also inventoried an array of harvest-time festivals that might have fed into the American Halloween of the late nineteenth century. In 2000 Diane Arkins explored the customs of Halloween in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through material culture, (postcards, books, etc.). Finally, in 2002, Nick Rodgers provided a professional historian’s view of Halloween in Canada and the US. Long after I left my job, Lisa Morton, in 2012, released a study of Halloween practices in the British Isles. This meant I had to update my content several times, but I was thrilled to have more reliable information to build upon. What was the point of transmitting inaccurate content?
Over the course of the year, the park’s new Halloween event took shape. For six or seven years storytellers spun their magic in the barn, followed by a presenter on the superstitions related to nocturnal animals. Girl Scouts manned stations where kids made miniature brooms, hollowed out turnip lanterns, and removed corn kernels from the cob with our nifty, nineteenth-century corn shelling machines. A local mortician in the St. Louis Morning Society—a group that reenacts nineteenth-century funeral, mourning, and memorial practices—provided tours of the house, adorned as if a family member had died, (minus the corpse). My supervisor led tours of the family cemetery, complete with buggy and coffin. A convincing and convinced fortuneteller offered readings for the brave. Our volunteer blacksmith traced some common symbols and terminology back to the study of alchemy. My teammate (and close friend) shared traditional herb lore and provided a how-to on tea leaf reading. With my back to the glowing kitchen hearth and surrounded by children sitting on the floor in their costumes, I related the history of Halloween and invited them to participate in several of the fortunetelling games popular in the eighteenth century. We laughed together about traditional pranks, were enchanted by lighted walnut shell boats, and marveled at the ability of blackberry brambles to keep vampires at bay.
The mood of our event alteranted between sombre and festive. It provided a rare opportunity to gently touch on the taboo topics of grief and death. I would love to know how the now-grown children in attendance felt about the experience. I hope they were entertained, a little dazzled, and, perhaps, even comforted. Many of the children we met had experienced loss, and not merely of short-lived pets. I hope that by acknowledging the presence of death in their lives and by placing grief in an historical context, we made them feel less alone. My staff and my volunteers prided themselves in a respectful and sensitive approach to the topic. We did not sensationalize death. We did not need to. It is compelling on its own.
When the county gutted the historic sites of their staff, I had to move on. Shortly thereafter, I had children of my own and I wanted to share the magic of our park event with them. I staged my own parties for the children of close friends. My desire to keep things interesting from year to year drove me to conduct more research. At some point, I decided to write a book.
From my interviews with local news stations about the park’s Halloween festival, I knew that the interests of the general public and the interests of academics don’t necessarily overlap. I was asked questions like, “Why do witches wear pointy hats?,” “Why do they fly on broomsticks?,” “Why are black cats considered unlucky?,” and “When and why did people start trick-or-treating?” Some of this content is buried in academic books on witchcraft, without really being directly addressed. Some of the content involves popular culture and children’s book illustration and, for that reason, is overlooked by academia. Rarely are the answers simple or tidy. In some cases definitive answers are impossible, leaving us with only informed conjecture. Regardless, the answers, such as they are, pepper a variety of sources and almost surprise me when I find them.
Writing the book has brought the old magic of the park’s Halloween event into my home. My children have helped me test crafts and recipes and have given me feedback on vocabulary and ease of comprehension. They bubble over with terrific ideas, as well. My husband set up this website for me and loves to hear about the startling things I learn nearly every week. It is a creative process that has swept in the entire family; it’s a good madness.