Tag: Witches

Eat, Drink, and Be Scary

This Sunday, October 31, the annual holiday of Halloween will be celebrated in the US, Europe, and other places around the world. Across the country, you will see the symbols of Halloween, including witches, black cats, bats, Jack ‘O Lanterns, skeletons, and ghosts. Being a nerdy historian, I’ve always been interested in the origins of such things, and I used to incorporate some of this info into my classes.

The celebration of Halloween began many centuries ago. About the time of Jesus’ birth, the Celtic people of the British Isles celebrated a festival called Samhain (pronounced Sow-in) on October 31 on the Roman calendar. The next day, November 1, marked the New Year of the Celts (according to some sources). This holiday came after the summer, when the harvest was completed, and the dark, cold winter began. Because many people without adequate food or warm homes died during the winter, Samhain was also associated with death. It was believed that on the day before the new year began, the lines between the living and dead were blurred and ghosts of the deceased were able to return and roam the Earth. Thus the symbols of Samhain were ghosts, skeletons, and pumpkins, which representing the successful harvest. The pumpkins were often carved into grotesque faces, as might be seen on partially decomposed corpses of the recently dead.

Britain and Northern France, where Samhain took place, eventually came under the control of the Roman Empire. When the Empire fell, in the late 400s, the Catholic Church stood as the only unifying factor across Europe. Between the 600s and 1000, the Church devoted much effort to converting the Celts and other pagan people to Catholicism and getting them to leave their traditional beliefs behind. At some point, in an attempt to win over those people, Church officials hit upon the ingenious plan of combining Catholic holy days with the festivals celebrated by the non-Christian peasants. In late December, on a day near the Winter Solstice, when the tilt of the Earth made for short days and long, cold nights, superstitious, pagan people were worried that the sun would not return to help their crops grow. They made sacrifices to the gods to persuade them to bring back the sun and its life-giving warmth. No one knew exactly when Jesus of Nazareth was born, so the Catholic Church moved the celebration of his birth to the end of the year in order to coincide with this festival. They also moved Easter, the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus after his crucifixion, to the spring, at which time many pagans celebrated the planting of crops and the birth of livestock. Even today, many Christians will go to church services to celebrate the return of Jesus to life, then go home and hunt for colored eggs hidden by a Harvey-like bunny rabbit. Thus, we see a bizarre juxtaposition of symbols for Easter: sacred Christian ceremonies, followed by pagan rituals. Both the egg, representing new birth, and rabbits, animals known for their prolific reproductive abilities, were pagan fertility symbols.

So, how did Halloween fit into this pattern? I already mentioned Samhain and the various autumnal festivals celebrated by peasants. On that night, bonfires were lit and sacrifices were made to appease the gods and help the family and livestock survive the long winter. Moreover, it was believed that the souls or spirits of dead relatives walked the earth seeking hospitality that night, so a place was set at the dinner table for them. In imitation of this activity, people dressed in costumes (a practice called “guising, from which comes the modern word “disguise”) and went door-to-door reciting verses in exchange for food on behalf of the dead. That’s where we get the tradition of Trick-or-Treating. The Catholic Church, trying to convert pagans, moved two holy days to the beginning of November. In the 800s, November 1 became All Saints Day, the day to remember and celebrate those who had been canonized by the Church, and November 2 became All Souls Day, a day to pray for the souls of dead relatives. All Saint’s Day was also known as All Hallows Day in Britain, so the night before was called “All Hallows Evening.” This phrase was eventually contracted to “Hallows Ev’n,” and then “Halloween.” Once again, the sacred holy day fused with the pagan festival.

So we’ve covered ghosts, skeletons, and Jack ’O Lanterns, but what about some of those other venerable symbols of this fall holiday? Witches, with tall pointed hats, hunched over boiling caldrons of steaming liquid are forever associated with Halloween. This image of evil women with magical powers who consorted with the devil and put curses on people grew out of a practice that was much more innocuous. Along with other duties associated with the home, brewing beer in a large iron caldron was considered women’s work throughout the Middle Ages. In an age when most drinking water was tainted with various disease-inducing impurities, consuming beer was considered a healthy way to ingest needed nutrients. With a life-expectancy of less than 40 years, husbands often died young, leaving women to try to eke out a living by themselves. For many widows, the only marketable skill they had was making beer. So they made their way to the market place with caldron in tow, and sold beer in a booth, wedged between the wool producer and the cheese maker. In order to be seen among the crowds of men, they began wearing tall, pointed, black hats. Today, no self-respecting witch would be seen in public without such a chapeau. Often, brewers kept a black cat in their home to catch the mice and rats who ravaged their grain.

The Wizard-of-Oz image of witches as ugly hags who are up to no good started in the 1500s. In fact, if we’re being precise, it started on Halloween, October 31, 1517. On that day, Martin Luther nailed a sheet of paper listing his 95 complaints about corruption within the Catholic Church onto the church door in Wittenberg, Germany. That seemingly simple act ignited a firestorm known as the Protestant Reformation which started new branches of Christianity and pitted Protestants versus Catholics in violent conflict for over a century. Hundreds of thousands died in these religious wars, each side believing that their view of Christianity was the true faith—and they were willing to slaughter each other to prove their point. (So much for “Thou shalt not kill.”) Caught in the middle of this sanguinary struggle were those poor women trying to make a living as they always had, by making and selling beer. Each side tried to show their religious purity by enforcing gender norms, including the one that said only males should be active in the marketplace. The Inquisition and various propaganda campaigns painted widows and single women as dangerous threats to the community and labeled them witches. Tens of thousands of people—most of them single women—were executed by burning, hanging, or being pressed to death under tremendous weight in the witch trials of the next century-and-a-half. One of the last of these incidents occurred in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts.

The final symbol that is ubiquitous at Halloween parties is that disgusting mammal, the bat. Remember those bonfires that people lit for sacrifices to the gods on Samhain? Those fires attracted nocturnal insects, which, in turn, attracted bats. Few people like bats, but they are actually valuable creatures on a number of levels. They devour insects, especially mosquitos, consuming more than 600 in an hour. As Bill Bryson, one of my favorite writers, puts it, “Without bats, there would be a lot more midges in Scotland, chiggers in North America, and fevers in the tropics. Forest trees would be chewed to pieces. Crops would need more pesticides.” In addition, bats pollinate many plants and disseminate seeds through eating and excreting them. A small colony (about 400) of Seba bats in South America, can produce 9 million new fruit trees every year. Without bats, some of our most desired plants would disappear. This includes bananas, avocados, peaches, and my favorite nuts, cashews. Yet, because of unwarranted fears about rabies and a lethal new fungus, many species of bats sit on the brink of extinction.

So, the next time you attend church services on a Holy day, drink a beer, carve a Jack ‘O Lantern, or see a cardboard cut-out in the shape of a black bat, remember where these traditions came from. Now, pass that bowl of candy over to me—but first take out those damned candy corns.

Ghosts of Halloweens Past

It snowed a bit on Saturday (October 17th). I was out for a long walk in the morning and it started to spit some big, fluffy, white stuff for a few minutes. It was pretty, and no big deal, especially since it was five days later than last year’s first snow, which came on October 12th. Then we had some more flurries on Monday. On Tuesday, I woke up to a winter weather advisory and the expectation of several inches of snow. I guess the most alarming part about this prediction was the phrase which our local newspaper meteorologist used at the end of this forecast: “this snow will probably melt.” In other words, he was saying he can’t promise anything, but he’s hopeful that this particular snow won’t still be on the ground in late March, or whenever the thaw comes. When we went out to vote on Tuesday, the snow had started. I had left my driver’s license in my running clothes, so we had to go back home to get it. Then we were stopped for a TV interview on the way out of city hall. (I think they were intrigued by the fact that I wore a Chicago Cubs facemask, while Kathleen wore her St. Louis Cardinals mask.) The upshot of all of this is, that by the time we were winding our way back home, the snow was several inches thick and getting deeper; the streets were so slick that we couldn’t make it up the hill to our home. Luckily, Ben and his family lived right there, at the bottom of the hill. I borrowed a shovel and cleared two tire tracks up the steep, 150-yard hill, so we were able to get home. We received 8 or 9 inches of snow officially before it stopped, the biggest October snow since the “Halloween Surprise” of 1991.

Still, I’m not scared. Hell, I’m a Wisconsinite now, with one mild winter under my belt, so a little snow can’t frighten me. When I was a child, though, I feared many things. As Halloween approaches in this, the strangest of years, I thought back to those early days in Chicago and some of the things that scared me.

Growing up across the street from a cemetery, I suppose it was inevitable that ghosts would figure prominently in my childhood fears. In fact, my neighborhood of Mount Greenwood was surrounded by cemeteries. Even our local gang called themselves “The Graveyard Gents.” There is a reason for all of the cemeteries. Back in the 1800s, city officials determined that it was a health concern to have disease-ridden corpses buried within city limits. At the time, my neighborhood was outside the city, and at least ten cemeteries existed within about three miles of our house. Later, when those health concerns subsided, Mt. Greenwood was annexed by the large metropolis and became a Chicago neighborhood ringed by graveyards containing tall trees, green grass, and, to my young mind, ghost-infested graves.

Many of Chicago’s best stories about haunted places and ghostly spirits originated in this area and probably stem from the presence of so many cemeteries. People still talk about the ghostly parade of monks that supposedly visited St. Rita Catholic Church in 1961. The Batchelors Grove Cemetery in the nearby forest preserves has produced stories of mysterious lights, phantom cars, and ethereal apparitions. The most famous tale, though, is that of “Resurrection Mary,” a spectral woman dressed in white who was spurned by her boyfriend at a nearby dancehall in the 1920s and has been seen hitch-hiking along Archer Avenue late at night for nearly a century. We knew all of those stories while growing up, and even engaged in a graveyard challenge that was designed to test our fortitude. Al Capone was originally buried in Mt. Olivet Cemetery, directly across the street from our house. Later, his body was moved to the suburbs, but a family plot and a large marker remains in Mt. Olivet. The game consisted of climbing under the fence and entering the cemetery, alone and after dark, going in several hundred yards and touching Al’s grave, then running like hell back to our secret entrance without getting caught by ghosts or the Mt. Olivet night watchman. I believe that my later prowess as a runner developed in those stress-filled excursions into the graveyard. (The picture above is from my brother’s Christmas greeting from a few years ago. That is the Capone family gravestone in the center)

My house proved to be no haven from such terrors. When I was about 7 or 8, I had a nightmare involving some Halloween novelties that we owned. My siblings and I had these scary-looking, life-size, plastic heads on sticks that we would carry while trick-or-treating. One was a white skeleton skull, and the other was a red devil’s head, complete with sinister horns. In my dream, I was down in our basement—which was dark and scary under the best of circumstances—when these two heads suddenly became animated and began bouncing in the air and chasing me. I woke up screaming, with cold sweats, and I never again felt safe going down to the basement alone. Of course, soon after that terrifying nightmare, my parents built a bedroom for my brother and I down in the very place that produced such uneasiness. On many nights, I slept with my eyes open, ever alert for dancing skulls and devils.

Like many children of my generation, we also had a “witch” living on our block. It should be noted that, as in the Middle Ages, any older woman living alone was suspected of being a witch. Ours was a widow named Nellie Shevlin and she lived in a big, imposing home built on the corner in the early part of the 20th Century. The rest of our houses on Sacramento Avenue were new,1200-square-feet, tract homes, all indistinguishable from the others. We tormented poor Mrs. Shevlin by calling her nasty names or running through her yard to avoid capture. Chicago folksinger Michael Smith had his own neighborhood witch, as he explained in his song, Crazy Mary:

“Crazy Mary from Londonderry, lived next door to the cemetery;

How many lovers have you buried?” we would shout

As we ran along the green and golden path

That took us home away from Crazy Mary.

Out of curiosity, I looked up Mrs. Shevlin while writing this article. She died in 1984, at age 95, and was buried across the street from her huge house, in Mt. Olivet Cemetery.

The centerpiece of any Halloween for most kids was the wonderful ritual of trick-or-treating. You knock on a stranger’s door, yell some nonsensical phrase, and they give you candy. Great stuff. One year in particular stands out in my memory. In 1964, I was ten years old, and Halloween fell on a Saturday. As soon as my brother Dan and I realized that we would have a longer time than usual for trick-or treating, we planned our attack as if it were a military operation. We had maps, charts, timetables, and contingency plans. We carried pillow cases, assuming our puny paper Halloween sacks would prove unequal to the task of carrying multiple loads of heavy candy. We had to plan carefully so that each time we ventured out, we ended our route just as our bag was filled and ready to empty. We started before noon and continued, with only a short break for dinner, until nine o’clock at night. Each time we circled back to our house, the mountain of candy in our basement bedroom grew larger.

As time has passed, the legendary nature of that eventful Halloween has been aggrandized in the hyperbolic recesses of my memory. I seem to recall other kids in the neighborhood lining the streets and cheering our efforts as we trudged out, time after time, with a dogged determination to fill our bags yet again. I could even swear that at one point General George S. Patton himself stood on the side of the road, his be-medaled chest swelling with pride as he said, “Never before in the history of trick-or-treating have two kids engaged in a major conflict before dinner, emptied their bags at home, and marched right out to do battle again in the evening. By God, I’m proud of those boys!” Then, as the theme music swelled, he fell into step with us and marched along by our sides, just to share in our glory. At least I’m pretty sure it happened that way.

This year, like everything else, the annual cycle of holidays, events, and rituals will be disrupted by the Covid crisis. We have decided that it would not be safe to open the door repeatedly to dozens of kids while Wisconsin Covid cases are spiking dramatically. So no trick-or-treaters this year. Abigail and Lucas are busy building a haunted house, so we will probably just visit with them and give them way too much candy.

That is, unless their haunted house is in the basement. I’m not going down there alone.