Halloween Folklore and Ghost Stories E-Book

Brice Stratford

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 376

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

"This book crawls into your psyche, peeling back the cosy layers of Halloween nostalgia to reveal its chilling roots in ancient horror." - Haunted magazine HALLOWEEN. The night when the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest. When ghosts walk and corpses writhe, and innocent souls had best beware. Let acclaimed storyteller Brice Stratford take you on a wild and witchy ride, fascinating and unnerving in equal measure, through the twists and turns of Allhallowstide, and the forgotten history of Halloween and the wider Hallowmas season. With ghost stories, ancestor worship, bone fires, otherworld pixies, Pagan belief and archaic, Christian mythology along the way, Stratford shares for the first time the deeper tales and stranger lore that lurk beneath the tricks and treats we know so well, and the ancient flame that keeps the Jack o'Lantern lit. Light the candles, lock the doors, and prepare to be unsettled. Are you sitting comfortably? Then let's begin.

Leseprobe

To LJRO,

The Pigheaded Bride of Brixton

Also by Brice Stratford

New Forest Myths and Folklore

Anglo-Saxon Myths: The Struggle for the Seven Kingdoms

Coming soon

Christmas Folklore and Ghost Stories

Anglo-Saxon Myths 2: Legends of the Last Kingdom

If you enjoy this book, why not also try the Finding Folklore podcast, at: www.findingfolklore.org

First published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

Text © Brice Stratford, 2024

Illustrations © Dominic Fry, 2023

The right of Brice Stratford to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 775 9

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

CONTENTS

 Prologue

  INTRODUCTION

1 What Makes a Halloween?

2 The Many Days of Hallowmas

  THE DEAD

3 They Say the Churchyards Yawn

4 The Genesis of the Haunted House

5 The Devil of Woodstock

6 The Richmond Ghosts

  TRICK AND TREAT

7 Gooding, Guising, Souling and Treating

8 Lest Some Thing Should Fetch Them

9 Soul, a Soul, a Soul Cake

10 Old Hob and the Cheshire Souling Plays

11 The Pig-Headed Bride of Pipe

12 Tricking, Mischief and the Lord of Misrule

13 For Whom the Gate Tolls

  THE FLAME

14 Bonfires, Tar Barrels and Tapers

15 Guy Fawkes Night Ghosts

16 Battle, Lewes and the Sussex Societies

17 Ottery, Hatherleigh and the Bridgwater Carnival

18 Groaty Pudding, Parkin, Toffee and Tharf Cake

  DEFENCE AGAINST THE DARK ARTS

19 Lating the Witches

20 The Fairbrother Suicide

21 Jack, Hob and Walking Fire

22 Turnips, Pumpkins and Punkie Night

23 Ring Bell, Turn Stone

  DIVINATION

24 Prying into Futurity

25 The Spalding Story

26 The Magic Spells of Hallowmas

27 Freeman, Hambidge, Old Devil

  BLOODMONTH

28 Martlemas Goose and Remembrance

29 The Martlemas Murders

30 St Brice’s Day

31 As Mad as a Stamford Bull

32 And the Rest

33 Some Final Hallowmas Tales

 Epilogue

PROLOGUE

Come all ye good people, surround the fireside,

And hear now a story of Halloweentide;

Of bonfires and pixies and still-walking dead,

Of lovers whose fortunes may this night be read,

Of all that has passed and all that will come,

In the witch-heavy hours ’ere the rise of the sun.

Anonymous verse, Hampshire, 1923.

This book is written with love, and an intention to dispel a number of lazy presumptions about Halloween that are parroted endlessly in almost everything written on the subject, but which simply aren’t true. They’re so familiar that they’re taken for granted: Halloween’s an American invention, Halloween’s a modern import, Halloween’s actually Samhain, etcetera, etcetera.

Hogswash.

This book is designed to tear off the plastic Americana of the commercial holiday and expose the pulsing, rotting flesh of the ancient British tradition that lurks within. It is unique, in that it does not focus on America’s modern Halloween, but on England’s – it does not dismiss the traditional forms as dead, but views them in the context of a living and intangible cultural heritage, with direct continuity from the past to the present and beyond. It alternates between history, storytelling and gonzo folkloristics – a fitting hotch-potch for such a strange season.

Halloween, for those who care to look, is dripping in historic and contemporary ghost stories, folklore and ritual. This book includes the best of those tales that I could find, many of which have not appeared in print before, but have instead dwelt strong in oral tradition from region to region, sometimes kept alive across a county, sometimes just a village, sometimes in a single school playground or the solitary branch of a thinned-out family tree.

There is a peculiar form of arrogant exceptionalism that the English seem particularly prone to, along the same lines as believing that everybody has an accent except for oneself. It instils a presumption that we are (or should be) somehow above folk culture, archaic ceremony, and weird tradition - that these belong to more sweetly primitive, foreign climes - they don’t know any better, after all, and so they can’t be expected to keep up with our superior levels of logic and reform. It is due to this post-colonial snobbery that anything which hints of rustic mystery or superstitious prehistory is dismissed as belonging to the Irish, Scottish or Welsh (at a push the Cornish or Manx) - as if such backwardness is only understandable in the so-called ‘Celtic’ fringe, and couldn’t possibly belong to our precious, streamlined, corporate-nowhere England.

Hogswash.

For beneath the anxious England of the office block and the focus group and the concrete university, there lies another England - an unselfconscious England, that does things because it always has, and doesn’t stop to justify or promote itself. It is the broad and ranging, ancient England of the pub and the crumbling chapel; of the allotment and the shire; the bonfire and the wassail. This England has been around for well over a thousand years, and I believe will still remain in another thousand, long after the shiny suits and flatpack personalities of ruthless progress have withered.

England is not too good for enchantment, and the English are not above the archaic; nor should we be. Unless otherwise specified in the text, every reference and ritual that follows, all examples and each piece of evidence, are explicitly English - and all the weirder for it.

The key reference books, for those interested in reading further, are The Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton (1996); British Calendar Customs – England, Vol. III by Wright and Lones of the Folk-lore Society (1940); and The English Year by Steve Roud (2006). For those interested in the American Halloween, I recommend Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night by Nicholas Rogers (2002). I have tried to specify the many, many other sources I’ve used in the body of the text itself, but if in doubt, check the above.

If anything you find within enrages or fascinates you, then do please get in touch to discuss it further.

Enjoy.

1

WHAT MAKES A HALLOWEEN?

What is Halloween?

First, the name. The general presumption is that the word ‘Halloween’ is simply a shortened form of All Hallows Evening, and so should properly be written as Hallow e’en. This may not be the case.

The word ‘Hallow’ comes from the Old English ‘Halgan’ (holy), and many older, provincial forms of the word Hallowtide (referring to the wider season) retained the ‘n’, as Hallantide or Hollandtide – in some examples, it is called Hallowen, and Hallowen Eve and Hallowen Day are referred to. The Halloween spelling, then, likely developed as a continuation of the linguistic Halgan/Hallan/Hallowen shift, rather than as a specific contraction of ‘evening’, or as a reference to a single day.

Originating in the dialects of northern England and southern Scotland, today the word ‘Halloween’ refers both to the night of All Hallows Eve (31st October), but also to the wider halo of the Halloween period – the word ‘Christmas’ is used in a similar way: for both the day and the broader season.

The preference for this specific form (where before there had been many local variants) began after the Scottish poet Robert Burns published a verse of the same name in 1759. It became hugely popular during the 1800s, and ubiquitous across the English-speaking world over the twentieth century.

All Hallows Eve is, of course, followed by All Hallows Day, which is then followed by All Souls Day. Known together as Allhallowstide, this triptych is a 1,000-plus-year-old Christian festival season, maintained still by the Catholic Church, to honour the saints without committed feast days, and to pray for them to intercede on behalf of souls in Purgatory. Continental Europe still observes it fervently, as do most other Catholic countries globally, and it is still defined for them today by church services and religious custom.

So. How did the Catholic All Hallows become the semi-secular, folk-spiritual, pseudo-pagan season of Halloween?

Contrary to popular belief and much misinformation, it was not invented by or imported from America, nor does it really originate in a pre-Christian ‘Celtic’ festival called Samhain (pronounced Sowen) or a pre-Christian Roman festival for the goddess Pomona.

When the English Reformation tore Catholicism from the state, and the Anglican Church divorced from the Pope, the official and authoritarian observance of All Hallows in England ceased.

But All Hallows did not die.

Instead, it forked off into a second form of observance. The rituals and the practices continued, still celebrated and performed by the common folk, but without the guidance or control of any church authority, and without restrictive interpretations or rigid explanations. It folkified into strange and distinctive, organic paths that were powered by The People, and which resulted in broad and beautiful divergences from region to region. Country lore and rustic superstition began to blossom, without any form of officialdom to uproot it when it sprouted; strange practices not sanctified by any Church started to spread. The customs around the dead crystallised and developed in instinctual folkways, varying from village to village and, truly unleashed from the religion that birthed and bound it, the British rewilding of All Hallows there commenced.

Over the 500 years that followed, so formed our modern Halloween. I do not mean that our modern Halloween is only 500 years old – the secular British Halloween is not a separate holiday to the historic Catholic Allhallowstide, any more than the modern Catholic Allhallowstide is. Both have direct continuity with the historic version, and both can claim those roots as their own.

English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh emigrants to America eventually took Halloween with them, of course, and (as often happens in America) the holiday became genericised, simplified and commercialised; covered in candy and nylon and popularised through Hollywood.

But it is not American.

In this book I will try to prefer Hallowmas and Allhallowstide when referring to the wider Halloween season, and All Hallows Eve/Day when referring to the specific dates. I’ll use other names as the mood takes me, however, so keep your wits about you.

Most calendars consider that Halloween is exclusively 31st October, but that’s a rare observance in practice. In England today (and certainly throughout my childhood), the main festivities tend to occur on the Saturday beforehand and then stretch on at least until the day itself (I write this on Friday, 27th October 2022 – tomorrow, the main village parties are all being held, and decorations will stay up through the 29th, 30th and 31st October, and most likely linger until Bonfire Night and beyond).

It is not unheard of (and in the United States it is established as the norm) for the entirety of October to be given over to the Halloween season. In Britain, it usually starts later, but often spills into the Guy Fawkes festivities of 5th November. Parts of the country take it even further, and still celebrate ‘Old Halloween’ at Martlemas, on 11th November.

For those unfamiliar, in 1752 Britain changed from the old Julian calendar to the current Gregorian calendar – in doing so, leap years were established, and everything was moved forward by about eleven days. As a consequence of this change in calendars, all festivals in the UK forked in two and now have the ‘new’ date of observance, which is the regular date associated with them, and the ‘old’ date, which is eleven days hence. Thus, the celebration of Halloween is expanded from 31st October all the way through into mid-November, with the season ending on St Brice’s Day (Old All Souls Day, 13th November).

British Popular Customs tells us that as far back as ‘the reign of Charles I [1625–49] the young gentlemen of the Middle Temple were accustomed to reckon All Hallow Tide the beginning of Christmas’, and Halloween plays this role still today: a liminal, transitional festival that carries us from the lazy late summer and early autumn harvest, through into the chill festivities of winter. It is no wonder that many of the traditional associations are shared, and that ghosts feature heavily across both (The Nightmare before Christmas being an obvious expression of this).

As the practices of Halloween vary from region to region, it is this inclusive, expansive Hallowmas season that I’m writing my book about – late October to mid-November, from around 28th October until 13th November. This, in England today, is the secular or folk season of Allhallowstide, within which we, of course, find All Hallows Eve itself, as well as All Hallows Day, All Souls Day, Bonfire Night, Martlemas, St Brice’s Day and more.

If any of these names are unfamiliar, fret not. All will be revealed.

2

THE MANY DAYS OF HALLOWMAS

The English Halloween Season, then, is made up of the following:

LATE OCTOBER – PUNKIE NIGHT

Punkie Night is a trick-or-treating custom in Somerset which has held various dates in late October, but is currently settled on the last Thursday of the month. It involves Jack o’ Lanterns made of mangolds (punkies), and a procession is held. Outside of Somerset, Punkie Night is usually just the day that the Jack o’ Lanterns are carved.

28TH OCTOBER – BAKING DAY

Though Halloween events and decorations are often unveiled throughout October (moreso the older the month grows), the 28th is the earliest specific day to have a Hallowmas tradition. This is the day that the batch cooking of soul cakes began (these will be explained later), to be ready for the festivities that follow.

30TH OCTOBER – MISCHIEF NIGHT AND RINGING NIGHT (THE FIRST)

One of two Mischief Nights, and two Ringing Nights. In some areas bells are rung and great noise is made, in others youths roam the community causing mayhem and playing pranks – convinced that normal laws do not apply until daybreak.

31ST OCTOBER – ALL HALLOWS EVE

The crux of it all.

1ST NOVEMBER – ALL HALLOWS DAY

The day follows the eve, as we all know, and thus All Hallows Day (also All Saints Day) follows on from Halloween proper. This is also All Souls Eve, and the observances between all three are very much shared – historically, All Hallows Day used to see more celebration than the Eve in England, and the trick or treating custom of Souling was often centred around it.

2ND NOVEMBER – ALL SOULS DAY

All Souls Day is here. Soul cakes are eaten, souling plays performed, Old Hob rides.

4TH NOVEMBER – RINGING NIGHT AND MISCHIEF NIGHT (THE SECOND)

The night before Bonfire Night is, just as the night before Halloween, both a Mischief Night and a Ringing Night, for exactly the same reasons and with exactly the same practices.

5TH NOVEMBER – BONFIRE NIGHT

Also Guy Fawkes Night or Fireworks Night. Effigies are burned on bonfires, fireworks parties are thrown, revelry and mulled drunkenness holds sway, and in some places (mainly Sussex and Devon), wild parades are still performed, with flaming tar barrels carried by brave young men or dragged along streets. The Shebbear Stone is turned, and we are all kept safe from the Devil.

11TH NOVEMBER – MARTLEMAS

Old Halloween, which some hold as the true date of the thinning veil. It is also properly termed St Martin’s Day, and in England we call it Martlemas and eat goose. Before daybreak Wroth Silver is collected, and later on Fenny Poppers are fired. Tying it back to the dead, this is also Armistice Day, in which we remember those who have died in Britain’s wars, with a two-minute silence held on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Parades and wreath-laying ceremonies at churches and war memorials are common. The nearest Sunday is usually Remembrance Sunday, on which similar services are also held.

12TH NOVEMBER – OLD ALL SOULS EVE

The old date of All Hallows Day and All Souls Eve, with customs repeated.

13TH NOVEMBER – ST BRICE’S DAY

St Brice’s Day, interconnected with Martlemas. Historically, the infamous Stamford Bull Run was held. The day is thus associated heavily with beef, and it is traditional to eat it – either stewed in beer or as a roast in the English style. In the old calendar this is All Souls Day and customs repeat, especially in parts of Somerset with connections to the historic Brice family. It is now six weeks until Christmas Day, and the Halloween season has concluded. Time to get ready for Yule.

To briefly summarise, then: celebration of the established Catholic Allhallowstide ceased to be controlled by the Church in England after the Reformation in the 1500s. Thereafter, it rewilded and strangeified, with different customs developing in different regions.

In 1606, Bonfire Night was established in England on 5th November, beginning a nuanced relationship with Hallowmas that I will detail later. Over the coming century, the word ‘Halloween’ began to form. In 1752, the change in calendar gave us a second Hallowtide, which sits alongside and melds with St Martin’s and St Brice’s Days on 11th and 13th November.

Over the 1800s the word ‘Halloween’ became known across Britain. Bonfire Night, by then the highlight of the Hallowmas season for many, reached such peaks of wildness that it had to be tamed - from around the middle of the century. This resulted in the division of a Mischief Night and Ringing Night immediately beforehand in some areas, and the creation of the Bonfire Boys and similar groups in Sussex. Bonfire Night was then secularised as the century progressed, and as the 1900s drew nearer Halloween was exported to America.

In 1919, Armistice Day was added to the cocktail, and in the 1980s (with the release of the film E.T.), a more generic and commercial Americanised version of Halloween was popularised, and celebrations became less regionally distinctive.

But what defines it? What actually is Halloween?

The season boils down to about seven elements, each of which has a committed section in the book that follows. Among these, there are an array of customs, themes and traditions that remain an intrinsic part of Halloween today, and which have been so for the 1,000 years or more since All Hallows first began.

The most important is death and The Dead. Alongside this, we find Trick (pranks, raucous revelry and misrule) and Treat (the giving of food and alms), The Flame (from bonfires to Jack o’ Lanterns), Defence against the Dark Arts (be they witches, spirits, pixies or worse), Divination (usually related to love and marriage), and finally, the late harvest and slaughter of Bloodmonth.

All seven arrive early, and all are recognised in the coming chapters. Other, more recent, innovations (haunted houses, pumpkins) remain rooted in these older associations, and as is so often the case, we find that the things we think at first glance are new are merely the latest incarnations of things far older.

It is this blend of custom, belief and superstition, at this particular moment of late autumn – that cusp between the life of harvest and the death of winter – that makes ‘Halloween’ an entire season as opposed to merely a day. Still, it exists again beyond that. It is a feeling, a concept, an aesthetic – one naturally developed and unselfconsciously self-aware.

It is the thinning of what we know to be thick and solid and safe; the strangening of the familiar and mundane. It is woven through the winter, and its tendrils reach past Christmas and into New Year, though at All Hallows Eve it is at its most unsoftened and intense, without the rich gifts and fellowship to counterbalance.

You would be forgiven for finding this an unfamiliar way of approaching the subject, but do bear with me, for I take you now beneath the hood of Halloween, into the deep, dark, cobwebbed recesses and dusty, forgotten nooks within, which remain in surprisingly good working condition, despite the generations they have spent obscured behind a mask.

Light the fire in the hearth, then, and pour yourself a glass of port. Make sure the rest of your household will not disturb you, nor friends pierce your quietude. Deactivate your telephone, check once more that all doors are locked, and step with me through the dust and ash and confusion of Allhallowstide, for speak we now of Halloween.

We shall begin, as all things do, with death.

3

THEY SAY THE CHURCHYARDS YAWN

They say the Churchyards yawn at Halloween, and do stretch forth their slumberers who onward creep, confused in waking dream awry; and thus, they say, the dead do walk.

Anonymous note from a commonplace book, Hampshire, 1789.

Halloween, from the very start, has been defined by death.

At Halloween today, as at Halloween five centuries ago, ghosts walk, the dead must be appeased, and contact with the otherworld is rife; it is the time when the bars that bolt the doors ’twixt life and death are slid back, that free movement between them may briefly reign. This is the very essence, the core of the season – this temporary melding of the present with the past.

Of the many and many customs and traditions that have accumulated at this date over the last millennium, all of them stem from this one core element of The Dead. I’ll detail each of these connections – some direct and obvious, some further removed – in turn, when I reach the relevant chapters. For now, we speak of the dead themselves, and Halloween’s relationship with them.

To do so properly, we first must speak of distant origins and dates, and other such dry things. We’ve established the broad evolution of Halloween, and now must dig into the roots. Forgive me, for we will move swiftly on to the good stuff, but this foundation is where our story starts.

The festival of All Hallows began, some time before the mid-fourth century AD, in the churches of the Mediterranean as a date to celebrate the uncountable numbers of dead saints who didn’t get a concerted feast day of their own. Though the date chosen for this was 13th May, over the next century different countries chose different times of year: in Syria, it was during Easter week, in Greece, the Sunday after Pentecost. In AD 609, however, the Roman Church formally nailed it to 13th May, and everyone else followed suit.

Except for us.

Approximately 1,300 years ago, give or take a lifetime, the Anglo-Saxon Church decided not to. Nobody knows why, or when exactly. All we know is that at some point in the 700s, by the time of Alcuin of York (AD 735–804), the English had bucked the international trend and started to hold All Hallows Day on 1st November, with the Eve on 31st October.

Thus it has been ever since.

The Irish and Scottish Churches did not, and for them, the All Hallows date remained as 13th May, with 1st November apparently already holding another event, generally known as Samhain (sowen). As this is just the Irish language word for November, however, it is hard to distinguish between references to a specific festival and references to the month itself.

A brief digression on the subject of Samhain.

Though an astonishing amount of fanciful stuff has been written about Samhain, there is almost no evidence whatsoever of its existence beyond the surviving name, and no hard evidence at all of what it consisted of. All references we have to a festival of Samhain date to well after the Christian period and well after the establishing of All Hallows on that date. There is almost no pre-Christian evidence at all, and none that indicates it had anything to do with the dead, witchcraft, magic, fire or the supernatural. The earliest traces of all these associations comes from the Christian festival of All Hallows itself, centuries later.

Much of the back projection of medieval Halloween onto a supposed pre-Christian festival comes from romanticism and a naive presumption that the Victorian Church must have been essentially the same as the medieval Church (and so all that is not comfortably Victorian must thus not be Christian). This combined with a hefty amount of anti-Catholic prejudice, specifically the Protestant slur that Catholics are pagan, and anti-Irish prejudice – whereby Gaelic people were primitivised as backward, ungodly and immoral. This is completely ahistorical. Not only is modern Ireland far more religious (and far more Christian) than modern England is, but Ireland was Christianised literally hundreds of years before England.

To get it into perspective, when England started holding All Hallows on 1st November, it was within living memory of our last pagan king (Arwald of the Isle of Wight, d. 686), and at a time when there would still have been practitioners of Anglo-Saxon paganism (we know such people existed during the time of Bede, who died in 735). Ireland at that point, conversely, had been Christian for almost 400 years, Wales for even longer. Scotland for about 200.

The churches who first mimic our November All Hallows are not Celtic or Gaelic, but German (specifically that of Alcuin’s close friend, Arno, Bishop of Salzburg, and another in Bavaria). The practice then appears to have spread through northern Europe, until in 835 Pope Gregory IV, through the Emperor Louis the Pious, officially announced All Saints Day as belonging to 1st November. As Hutton says, ‘this makes nonsense of [any] notion that the November date was chosen because of “Celtic” influence; rather, both “Celtic” Europe and Rome followed a Germanic idea [of Halloween]’.

There are plenty of stories in Irish literature that refer to events as taking place at ‘Samhain’, but they were written down in their surviving forms by Christian monks, hundreds of years after All Hallows was established. The bulk of the folklore was only recorded in the 1700s and 1800s, around 1,000 years after All Hallows, and these customs are mirrored by those recorded in English folklore of the same time, where there is no recorded history of Samhain at all.

Anyway.

By the 700s, England was holding All Hallows on 31st October/1st November, and by the mid 800s everyone else was doing likewise. At this point, it was nominally still about the saints.

A major anxiety of the time, especially in recently Heathen England, was that one’s cherished parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were now all suffering in hell due to their paganism. Thus, the notion of purgatory was established as an alternative to hell, and with it the ability for the prayers of the living to eventually rescue the Heathen dead from torment.

One of the key interactions that people had with saints, then, and one of the main practices of the All Saints festival, was praying to them for intercession on behalf of the souls of the dead, generally one’s ancestors or loved ones, to help those in purgatory achieve paradise. It is this element, in particular, that is considered heretical in Protestantism, and which resulted in the post-Reformation Church’s hand-washing of Allhallowstide.

Pretty well from conception, then, All Hallows had expanded beyond merely the saintly dead, to encompass all those whose souls might appreciate extra support. The addition of a committed All Souls Day was more or less inevitable. Much obscurity attends its origin, and all we can readily say is that various places in various countries soon began to celebrate some version of it, with varying degrees of formality – presumably designed, in part, to help refocus the attention of All Hallows back onto the saints themselves.

The Catholic tradition of the origin of All Souls is thus: a travelling pilgrim, on return from his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was caught in a terrible storm and forced to take refuge on a rocky island. There he found a wizened hermit, who told him that amongst the cliffs there was a deep chasm that opened up into Hell itself, through which huge flames ascended, and where the groans of the tormented were distinctly audible. As the tradition goes, the pilgrim then travelled to Odilo, Bishop of Cluny, to inform him, and Odilo took no hesitation in establishing the next day as All Souls.

The first formally constituted Soul Mass Day was indeed established by Odilo, Bishop of Cluny, in 998, but it was held in February (again, likely to try to distance the two observances). It is probable that the tradition was originally that Odilo himself had seen the hellmouth, and as tastes changed over the centuries this was pushed arm’s length onto a pilgrim, and then still further onto a hermit, turning it into one of the most influential friend-of-a-friend stories in history.

All Souls would remain variable and non-standardised over the next two centuries, during which time it gradually cohered to 2nd November, immediately following All Hallows, and combining with it to make Allhallowstide, the festival of the dead.

But when did they learn to walk?

This particular development is a strange one. The vast bulk of evidence for overtly supernatural associations dates to after the reformation, but there are hints here and there that such ideas may have already existed.

But you have, I feel, earned a break from this dense and vague tapestry of presumption and pedantry over fragments from a millennium past, so before we analyse the earliest trace of the Halloween undead, let us enjoy firmer ground and look at the most recent.

Let us discuss the haunted house.

4

THE GENESIS OF THE HAUNTED HOUSE

‘Beware all ye who enter here. Approach at thy peril. Knock and be damned.’

Whether it’s a domestic home that’s dressed for a party or trick-or-treaters, or one of a spate of more recent immersive scare attractions, a characteristic aspect of Halloween today is that of the ‘haunted house’.

The concept of a house that is haunted is, obviously, an old one. Supposedly genuine accounts of such things go back to antiquity, and acknowledged fakes likewise have been around for hundreds of years – since well before the eighteenth century we find records of criminals and smugglers confabulating them, encouraging superstition to discourage the curious from investigating their hideouts or stashes.

There are two key developments from this broader notion of ‘a house that is haunted’ to the modern Hallowmas stalwart. Firstly, there’s the point at which haunted houses become specifically associated with Halloween, and secondly, the point at which haunted houses become social opportunities and entertainment attractions rather than serious sources of danger.

Let’s start with the latter.

Ghost-themed illusion displays, designed to scare and thrill the audience, were a part of touring shows throughout the nineteenth century – initially in England, but spreading quickly to the rest of Britain and then on to America, themselves a logical enough development in the sideshow culture that had produced endless conjurors, magicians and freak shows across the West. From these scare displays came two fresh concepts: first the ‘haunted house’ attraction, and then the ‘ghost train’ ride.

A major element in the development of this show was the illusion known as Pepper’s Ghost, named after the scientist John Henry Pepper (1821–1900). It essentially involves a specially designed stage with a hidden room, which is separated from the main space by an angled sheet of glass or transparent plastic. Using bright lights, a figure in the hidden room will appear translucent and projected, via the angled glass, onto the stage. Though the reflective concept had been recognised since the Renaissance, it wasn’t until 1858 that an engineer named Henry Dircks would come up with the idea of building special stages to enable the effect to be performed on a human scale, and in turn, to produce a new form of theatre.

Dircks’s ideas were costly and impractical, however, and he found disinterest everywhere he went until he showed the concept to John Henry Pepper, in 1862. Pepper immediately saw the potential and went into partnership with Dirck, redesigning the system so that the entire effect could be produced by merely adding an angled sheet of glass to a pre-existing orchestra pit. In December that year, they gave the first public performance – a scene from Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man.

The effect was an instant hit, and ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ was soon touring the UK, then Europe, then America, in various guises and from different producers. A string of patent and copyright disputes followed, and it all became very acrimonious and bitter for all concerned. The illusion is still regularly used today, and remains one of the key approaches to presenting ghosts in live performances.

A little over fifty years later, in 1915, the first haunted house attraction was built, as ‘Ye Haunted Cottage’– a supernatural twist on the carnival fun house, by Orton & Spooner (the world-renowned Burton-on-Trent fairground ride manufacturers) for Flora Collins née Ross, the Wrexham-born wife of Walsall MP and funfair impresario Pat Collins.

Extraordinarily, this tiny original attraction (and bona fide piece of history) is still fully operational, and barring the odd period of maintenance, it has been in active use since it was first constructed over a century ago. Its various features (vibrating walls, uneven floors, unexpected puffs of air) are still entirely steam powered.

Today, this first ever haunted house can be visited at the steam-powered amusement park and museum, Hollycombe Steam in the Country, near Liphook in Hampshire (the fairground itself is actually in West Sussex) – they acquired it in 1991 and restored it in 2017. It still bears its original Edwardian design, with just a couple of additions made to the exterior in the 1920s and 1930s (Lon Chaney as the Phantom of the Opera, and Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster). Supposedly it has, in the intervening years, accrued an additional haunting: fairground workers have reported it mysteriously activating in the middle of the night, strange noises coming from it which aren’t part of its usual functions, and unfamiliar figures inside who aren’t supposed to be there.

Fifteen years later, English architect Joseph Emberton had the idea of expanding the static Haunted House attraction into a larger ‘dark ride’, in which the audience was carried along a specific, timed journey by rail. Dark rides were named not for any dark themes, but rather for the low lighting states they utilised. These were peaceful, gentle journeys through beautiful, exotic locations. They were well known in America, especially those made by the Pretzel Company, and a common example is the Tunnel of Love, or Disney’s ‘It’s a Small World’.

In England the potential for fear was first realised, and the world’s premier ghost train was built in 1930 at the Blackpool Pleasure Beach. It was a success. So much so that others soon followed at Dreamland in Margate, Pleasure Beach in Great Yarmouth and Pleasureland in Southport. In 1936, Blackpool Pleasure Beach commissioned Emberton to build an even larger, more extravagant version of his original ride, and success was cemented.

Over the following decades the ghost train and haunted house attractions became more and more popular, replicated across Britain, Europe, America and the world. The live actors and special effects of the earlier Victorian London ghost shows were soon introduced, and thus was born the modern scare attraction. Probably the most famous of these would be Disneyland’s ‘Haunted Mansion’, which opened in 1969 – a huge-scale version of Emberton’s Ghost Train concept, replete with Pepper’s Ghosts and other stage effects throughout.

But when, specifically, were they twinned with Halloween itself?

As these scare attractions had developed through the twentieth century, so too had domestic Halloween parties begun to echo them. Grotesquely carved mangold-wurzels and turnips had long been an element of All Hallows, with pumpkins added by the late nineteenth century, and these would all have formed some part of the standard decorations for Halloween. Masks (or ‘false faces’) and costumes were worn by this time, and their aesthetic would likely have been incorporated, and the divination customs that we’ll detail later indicate that candles and decorative foliage would have been present also.

It was inevitable that, as the haunted house/ghost train aesthetic was popularised, it spilled over into the domestic sphere, and the traditional parties and games of Halloween grew to encompass scares inspired by the increasingly familiar fairground attractions. But when did they first acquire their seasonal associations? How far back can we find evidence for haunted houses specifically at Halloween?

The answer is 1649, and the time has come to tell you the story.

5

THE DEVIL OF WOODSTOCK

In mid-October of 1649, a team of civil servants arrived at the town of Woodstock in Oxfordshire. It had been about eight and half months since King Charles I had been beheaded by the fundamentalist Puritan government who had now taken total control.

This team of surveyors had been travelling the land, recording and evaluating the late king’s holdings to ensure that all remaining royal pockets were properly picked and profited from. That which couldn’t be reused or sold was to be destroyed, and one of their first acts in Woodstock was to seek out and uproot an ancient tree in the high park, known to the locals as the King’s Oak (as it had been since time immemorial).

The royal oak was torn down, not merely chopped – no stump or remnant was allowed to be left as memorial to the recently purged kingship. The roots were dug up, and the workmen closely watched to ensure that none took wood away that could be used as relic or souvenir. The timber was then hacked to fragments and taken by the commissioners, on 16th October, to the King’s Estate and Manor House, where they took up lodging in order to start the meticulous work of accounting for the property of the deceased.

Captains Crook, Hart, Cockaine and Carelesse were the men responsible, and with their messenger Captain Roe, their secretary Mr Brown, and two or three servants whose names have not survived, they happily took up residence. The royal bedchamber and adjoining withdrawing room were converted into a dormitory and kitchen; the Presence Chamber was where they conducted their business and held their meetings, the Council Hall became a brewhouse and beer-cellar, and the grand dining room was turned into a log store, filled with the hewed remains of the ancient King’s Oak.

Having so thoroughly taken residence, the captains settled in for a well-earned rest in the newly defaced grandeur of the once-royal bedchamber. All went off merrily, bellies full of fine beer from the Council Hall, toes warmed by fire from the burning of the venerable oak. The next day, they woke and set about the business of their stay, as the servants finished setting up their offices and accommodation. Later they went to sleep, much as they had the night before. Initially.

In the middle of the night, they woke to violent knocking at the door of the bedchamber.

The men were gripped with a paralysing fear as, unseen in the pitch black, they heard the knocking stop, the handle turn, the door open and something enter the room. They lay awake, each of them, barely able to breath as the thing stepped heavy and loud about the bedchamber, pacing around the space for half an hour before stopping.

The beds they had salvaged from the rest of the house were large four-poster ones, and they slept in them two to a bed with the curtains down – more like tents than what we think of as beds. It was immediately outside the bed of Captains Hart and Carelesse that the heavy steps had stopped.

Writing this almost 400 years later, I can only imagine what might have been going through the minds of Carelesse and Hart as this unfolded. Being civil servants, of course, the men kept meticulous note of the events that would unfold, and it is thanks to the detailed journal they dictated that I can tell you all that I am about to so clearly. Though the material occurrences are described explicitly, the emotional trauma that resulted can be glimpsed only in the margins.

The thing that had stopped at the bed then crept beneath it. Though it behaved in the manner of a dog, it had the look of some strange bear, and was of a size far greater than either. From under the bed, it began to gnaw and bite at the structure from beneath, tearing and rending at the feather bedding itself. After an interminable period, the gnawing stopped. It was then that the bed was heaved up on one side, held a while, then dropped to the ground. And again. And again. Each time higher than before, sometimes one side, sometimes the other.

On and on this went for half an hour, until suddenly it stopped, and the thing moved on from Carelesse and Hart to crawl beneath the servants’ bed and do likewise, and then on to do the same to all who lodged in the withdrawing room. After more than two hours, the creature walked out as it had come in, slamming the door loudly, with inhuman strength. Throughout this time, not a single one of the nine men had said a thing, and each bed assumed itself to be the only one so assaulted.

Come morning light, the men told each other their experiences. They checked the beds and found the mats scratched, but the bed-cords whole. There was talk of it being a wild animal that had gained access somehow, but the quarts of beef stored in the kitchen area remained untouched, though fully accessible.

The next night was worse.

Just as before, they were woken in the wee small hours. They heard the great clefts of the King’s Oak dragged about and slammed down. They heard them roll, heavy about the room. They heard the chairs and stools tossed about and thrown, and after an hour of torment they heard the great, bear-like thing enter the withdrawing room, where lodged Mr Brown, the secretary, two of the captains and two of the servants. The creature paused for breath.

The creature screamed.

It stalked on into the bedchamber, and under the beds again it went, and again did heave them up, and again. And those in the beds clung tight to the bed posts to save themselves from falling into its arms. The beast lifted the bed in its entirety and rocked them like a cradle, shaking them hard for nigh on half an hour. It returned then to the withdrawing room and did likewise to the others, standing at the foot of the bed and heaving it up and letting it drop, and again, and again, hoisting it so high that those inside near fell out, head first.

After two hours of this, the thing exited as it had before; slamming shut the door with a mightier force than any living thing.

These visitations were repeated without relenting. The next night it stamped so hard about the bedchamber that the room itself shook, and it beat a brass warming pan from the withdrawing room ‘as loud and scurvy as five untuned bells rang backwards’. According to the account we have, the captains affected strained humour at ‘the Devil in the pan’.

The next night, the contents of the house flew about, smashing into walls and going through from one room to another then back again, as if thrown. Captain Hart was grabbed at the shoulder and shaken awake, then hit in the head with a trencher of bread until he and all the others hid beneath their sheets as more trenchers flew about the room – when Hart peeked out again, he was bombarded with them. (Trenchers, for those who don’t know, are edible plates made of hard-baked bread, and not something you want hurled at your face with force.)

The next morning, they found their trenchers, pots and spits strewn about the floor, and dents and gouges covering the walls as if beaten with hammers. Still the captains stayed. Every night grew worse, and the full diary (which I shall not repeat here) is worth reading. Suffice it to say that the feigned humour soon dissipated, and the fear and distress of the captains became overwhelming, though still they tried to complete their work.