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It’s that time of year again, No, not the most magical, but the time when we all seek cheap thrills and become obsessed with the afterlife. For a reason I intend to explore, people decide to pay to be scared and send their children to gather food from strangers*.
First of all, this is similar to the “What Is Epinephrine: Do Cats Seek Adrenaline?” but is more specific to the spookiness in traditions around the world, and is less about the actual scientific breakdown of adrenaline and more relates to the history of the scare. The science behind it is the same but the culture is even stranger.
Halloween is widely believed to have a evolved from the Celtic holiday of the new year. Because of crop seasons, they would celebrate the end of the year with a bonfire and superstitions on November first. On October 31st they celebrated “Samhain” and believed the spirits lost during the often dangerous crop seasons could return to them and basically tell their priests the future. To learn more specifics and the history of other traditions I suggest the article “Halloween 2018” by history.com editors on history.com.
Some countries teach the young that death is a part of life instead of terrifying them with ghouls and skeletons. (More on those later). A lot of countries around the world are like this, but most of them are in Latin America or the Carribean which I am going to use for examples throughout. Dia De Los Muertos or day of the dead is a day in which ofrendas bring ancestors to communicate and cemeteries become places of celebration and fiestas. This teaches kids that death isn’t so scary and you can always visit your family annually, it is the most expensive part of the year for most who participate. Yet our society encourages children to dress up as the undead and murderous clowns.
Costumes were often worn by the Celtics to ward of ghosts, so why do we dress up as ghosts? Samhain was taken over by religion and modified it to be religious. The holiday spread throughout Europe over time and eventually became popular America. In the 1800’s there was another push for the holiday to be clean as it involved witchcraft. This resulted in the holiday becoming completely different, erasing costumes, trick or treating and even private parties. But what really led us to the holiday we celebrate today is the baby boom. During the 1920’s to 1950’s private parties were brought back because of the surplus of kids and this over time made the traditions we celebrate today popular and eventually common practice. In due course, the holiday became scarier and again became avoided by some religions as costumes became scarier.
This leads us to the reason we now terrify ourselves with the undead and parts of human anatomy. To begin, skeletons. Why are skeletons so spooky? I assume at one point it was decided that death is spooky and thus remains are spooky. But isn’t every other part of that spookier? I mean NOT VOTING is much spookier ( www.vote.org .) My next question was who just decided that a person would wake up from the dead, now green and fans of cannibalism? Turns out there were spooky boys doing the monster mash in Mesopotamia, as shown in a segment of the epic Descant of Ischar, where the goddess Ischar exclaims:
I shall raise up the dead and they shall eat the living:
And the dead shall outnumber the living!
It’d be a different essay to go through the entire history of zombies but you can learn more in the book American Zombie Gothic, or a simple Wikipedia search.
Everyone knows of the white sheet ghost but how did that happen? In early Rome and Germany unhuman figures from the past were reported disrupting barns. Because what else would disrupt a farmhouse? Eventually many claimed that famous or important figures in their recent history had spooked them or communicated with them, some of these same sightings are still being reported today.
Anne Boleyn said to be executed for treason and witchcraft is widely believed to be ordered execution by her husband because she didn’t birth a son for her him who couldn’t divorce her is one of the most common ghosts to have ever been reported in England. The first American ghost was Benjamin Franklin. The scholar and inventor are often seen in the Library of the American Philosophical Society. Since then, the ghosts have become less about the people and are shifting the meaning of ghosts to the idea of ghosts instead of seeing famous figures visiting their favorite places. So although the characters themselves have evolved the ideas are eerily similar. (This was also from history.com)
I’m sure you couldn’t tell throughout this essay or by the fact this is being edited and uploaded on Halloween night, I’m not the biggest spook fan. So this essay may have a bias, but maybe it should as the paranormal and undead aren’t very respected by the scientific or mathematical community. Overall, the spooks of tonight night might have shed light on the similarities of those who’ll seek frights tonight and freaks for ghoulish fun yesterday.
*I want to emphasize that I understand there is no known incidence of the gathering food be dangerous or outlandish as I portrayed it for comedic effect.