Halloween and Ghost Stories
Leading up to All Saints and Souls Days
Halloween is one of my favorite celebrations. It is such a uniquely American tradition and a Catholic one. If you are interested in a discussion about why Halloween has this character and is actually not a pagan holiday, I suggest an article by Fr. Augustine Thompson, O.P., a professor of Church history at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at Berkeley, CA. For Catholics, Halloween or “All Hallows Eve” is the beginning of a most holy time of the year that continues for two days after. All Hallows Eve is the evening of the Feast of All Saint’s Day. This is where we celebrate all the souls that are in Heaven. The next day is All Souls Day, and that is in remembrance of all who have died in God’s friendship and need our prayers to get from Purgatory into Heaven.
I remember so many Halloweens growing up. I even remember my first time trick-or-treating. I remember two older girls, probably my babysitters, fawning over me as they helped me into my costume and hat. I was a cowboy. Years later, I remember talking my mom into buying us those Ben Cooper costumes from Peoples Drug Store, when we lived in Silver Spring. I was either Superman, Batman, or Spiderman each year. I always wanted to keep the costumes to play in, but I always managed to rip them apart before the next day was over. My mom made us custom Superman costumes one year—all three of my brothers were Superman that year. I was Dracula another year, and a ghost once. That one wasn’t the best costume—I couldn’t see a thing through my eye holes. We always used pillow cases to collect our candy; a tiny plastic jack-o-lantern simply would never be big enough. My kids mostly followed suit by dressing up as superheroes, and one year as Transformers. That was my creation with spray paint and cardboard boxes.
In the neighborhood of my current home, Halloween, closely followed by July 4th, are the most community-oriented celebrations of the year. I see more of my neighbors on those two days than any other time of the year. Lots of families put up decorations in late September. We wait at least until the first week of October, but every year, we pull out all our old decorations and place them around the house and yard. We spend a great deal of money purchasing candy for trick-or-treating, and we usually give most of it away. We get kids from all over the area, including those who don’t have much trick-or-treating in their own neighborhoods. Their parents drive to our neighborhood and park (or sometimes follow them around in their cars), and I love in particular being a part of giving these kids some joy. My wife, MG, is not as great a Halloween devotee as my daughter and I are, but nevertheless insists on doing the trick-or-treating right. As such, she always makes sure we give out the good stuff—Snickers, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, etc. But, because I’m always worried that we might run out, I do get plenty of the “filler” candy just to be sure.
Depending on the weather, we will sit out on the driveway or our open garage, often with a firepit blazing, to pass out our treats. I usually pull on my Captain Kirk uniform shirt for the occasion. In past years, I always accompanied my kids around the neighborhood while MG passed out the candy. Some families sometimes had treats for the adults—beer-filled coolers and spiked apple cider—great treats indeed! Now that the kids are all grown up, I stay at the house with MG.
I try to get into the mood for monsters, ghosts and goblins every year. All month long, we re-watch the Simpson’s “Treehouse of Terror” episodes. I also like to put on the old horror classics, such as “Dracula” and “The Wolfman,” and we often have fun with “Young Frankenstein” and my personal favorite, “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.” As a Star Trek nerd, I’ve been known to re-watch for the 100th time the Halloween-oriented episodes, “Catspaw” or “Spectre of the Gun.” I am also a long-time devotee of “Kolchak: The Night Stalker.” I remember being scared silly by it when I was a child. However, my favorite horror movie has to be “The Shining.” Last October, while visiting Colorado, we visited the Stanley Hotel, the inspiration for Stephen King’s book. It was great fun.
One of my favorite subject matters this time of year is ghosts. I have never personally encountered anything remotely spooky, but I am a sucker for a ghost story. Locally, we have a road, Erlanger Road, that has a history of ghostly encounters. An old 50’s style police car might pull you over and then vanish once you’ve stopped. This is just one of the possible encounters. Back in Maryland, one of my wife’s friends rented rooms in an old farm house for a time. Every now and then she could hear the creaking of a rocking chair coming from other parts of the house. When she asked about it, she was told it was the ghost of a former owner of the house, an old woman who had been killed by a slave when she tried to lock him in a holding cell in the 1850s. Once we stayed with family friends in Bay Head, New Jersey, who lived in an old converted church. The mother of the family, once while getting up in the middle of the night, saw a former pastor of the church standing in the hallway. She claimed she was not even scared by him. He, appearing as a ghostly old black man, seemed kindly benevolent in his church vestments. In my greater family, my cousins’ home had a number of ghostly events over the years, from kitchen doors opening by themselves during family dinners, to picture frames being bounced against the wall with no one about, and once an enormous crashing sound that was so loud they thought the roof had collapsed—but after running outside to inspect they found nothing amiss.
And I’ve just recently learned that there’s a difference between a haunting and a ghost, or apparition. I learned about this from Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World, my favorite podcast show, in Episode #210: The Haunted House of Marin County.
In short, a haunting is more like a replaying of some past event that is repeated over and over. The ghostly phenomenon is not a spirit but more like a video recording of someone in the past whom you cannot interact with. I have read about people who have purchased former school buildings and turned them into homes or apartments, and often at night the current tenants can hear the sounds of desks and chairs moving and scraping against the floor above them. It’s quite likely that many or most of the kids that attended those former schools are still quite alive.
A “real” ghost is an apparition, or spirit. You can get Jimmy’s opinion on whether ghosts are real in the first episode of his podcast, Episode #1: Are Ghosts Real? In sum, Jimmy’s analysis is, yes, ghosts are real. What they are and whether a particular encounter was an honest-to-goodness ghost is really the issue up for debate. I do believe in ghosts, simply another name for spirits, basically because I believe in a life after this one. And I believe that God can permit or even require that certain spirits come back to Earth for various reasons. It could be a form of Purgatory that allows a soul to remain until they have worked out something they did not accomplish in life. These might be the grayish, sad looking apparitions that people report. There are more frightening ones that may be demons or damned souls.
This is the time of the year where we celebrate and pray for souls who need our prayers to get to Heaven. The Saints in Heaven don’t need our prayers—they pray and intercede for us. While damned souls are beyond our help, it’s the souls in Purgatory who need our prayers. Perhaps they are permitted to appear to us so that we might do that for them. While we can pray for them at any time, All Souls Day is a great reminder for us to do so.