Halloween Snapshots To Haunt Your Dreams

By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
– Macbeth, William Shakespeare

 

 

Jack-o’-lanterns! Pumpkins! Halloween! A knock on the door and the refrain, “Trick or teat?” – the expectant call laced with joy and menace. Halloween is part of American life exported worldwide, a rasp of cultural colonialism you can see from Glasgow to Athens as children dressed as Disney princesses and Spiderman wonder the streets holding plastic pumpkins tight.

It’s a lot of fun. But something darker is afoot. The night is rooted in All Hallows’ Eve, the day before the Christian holiday of All Hallows’ Day, and before that the pagan festival of Samhain, celebrated by the Celts of ancient Europe. On Samhain, the veil between the dead and living is at its thinnest. Visitors come from the beyond. The Celts lit bonfires to ward them off and wore disguises to prevent the spirits from recognising them. Others see the night as a chance to reconnect with the Others.

These pictures of ghouls and worse are from Robert E. Jackson, whose stupendous collection of snapshots never fails to delight. As ever, let’s try to imagine the stories between the pictures…

 

 

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door —
Only this, and nothing more.”
— Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

 

 

Nobody moved.

Everybody sat in the dark cellar, suspended in the suddenly frozen task of this October game; the wind blew outside, banging the house, the smell of pumpkins and apples filled the room with smell of the objects in their fingers while one boy cried, “I’ll go upstairs and look!” and he ran upstairs hopefully and out around the house, four times around the house, calling, “Marion, Marion, Marion!” over and over and at last coming slowly down the stairs into the waiting breathing cellar and saying to the darkness, “I can’t find her.”

Then… some idiot turned on the lights.

— Ray Bradbury, Long After Midnight

 

 

 

“Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and owlet’s wing,—
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.”
— William Shakespeare

 

 

“They’re Coming to Get you, Barbara”
– Night of the Living Dead, 1968

 

 

He had never liked October. Ever since he had first lay in the autumn leaves before his grandmother’s house many years ago and heard the wind and saw the empty trees. It had made him cry, without a reason. And a little of that sadness returned each year to him. It always went away with spring.

But, it was a little different tonight. There was a feeling of autumn coming to last a million years.

There would be no spring.

— Ray Bradbury, Long After Midnight

 

  

 

 

Follow Robert E. Jackson for more great stuff.