Have a ‘Spooktacular’ Halloween

Listen up! Beware, and be very aware, the witching hour is again upon us. The eve of October 31 when parents and children go door to door amidst a cheerful cacophony of ‘trick or treat’, as tales of ghosts are told, games played, and spooky music is heard in homes across the land.

The Addams family was a regular on the telly when I was growing-up and no doubt that theme tune and other spooky songs and sounds will play in houses on radio and other modern technologies, phone apps or via Alexa, as the young and some older folk dress up for the biggest fright night of the year.

Halloween has its roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain, which separates and marks the ending of the brighter half of the year from the darker half, commonly called winter. At Samhain, ancestors were honoured, and people dressed up in costumes, wearing masks as a disguise from frightening spirits, which they hoped to drive away. Large outdoor bonfires were lit where food was cooked for the living and deceased. Every house put out their fire and on the next day they took hot clinkers from the bonfire to relight the fireplace.

Stranger Things

Glangevlin was the scene of an ominous black cloud not unlike the one seen on the hit Netflix show, Stranger Things. The Schools Folklore Collection from the late 1930s, which is now on Dúchas.ie online, tells this interesting ghostly tale. An account by Mr J. McCabe of Snugborough, appears in the Schools’ Collection, Volume 0968, Page 100.

He wrote: ‘Some years ago a man in the townland where I live was looking after a sick cow about two o’clock in the morning when he heard the bagpipes playing beautifully in Mr Lang’s fort. A few nights after, a man going home was surrounded by a black thing, which seemed like a big cloud. When it reached a field, it burst into flame and disappeared.’

To have been out of bed and alone in the wilds of that isolated field must have felt terrifying.

We all wish for a treat and few, if ever, have received a trick unless in the form of a prank, like the farmer from the Dairy Brae, Cootehill, who many moons ago was on his way home one unhallowed night and, having taken a drink or two, met a group of smart rapscallions intent on mischief. They bid him join them and he did, as they dismantled a cart and then rebuilt it inside a house. The following day, the farmer, feeling groggy, opened his eyes only to find that the cart was in his own bedroom. It must have taken awhile for him to have it ready to attach to the horse before heading off to town.

Ballyconnell

The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0968, Page 101, provides an eerie story from the pen of Mr J. O’Reilly, Church Street, Ballyconnell, about an unearthly occurrence on a night during the harvest when a man suddenly heard a ‘hunt crossing the mountain from the direction of the west’. It was a particularly clear evening, and the bark of dogs were heard tear through the air, their ominous echo travelling for miles.

On the following day, the man asked his mountain neighbour what he had heard of the hunt to which he replied that not only had he heard it but had seen all as well. Said he, while standing on his own drive, men and women on horseback came rushing down the roadway with hounds crying in full and yelping. They came so near him that he jumped to one side to avoid being knocked by them. Regaining his composure, he looked up once more and the whole ghostly hunt had vanished, all but for the sound of the fading clatter of the horses’ hooves as the ghoulish hunt evaporated into the dark of the night.

Bailieborough

The Castle demesne in Bailieborough has its ghosts and another we might add to the spooky list is an unearthly spirit called ‘the Rector,’ a strange prelate-like figure. Observed by ‘several nocturnal’ walkers he was seen, a tall upper class looking ghost in a suit and stovepipe hat. This tale was reported in the Schools Folklore Collection by the journalist, P.J. Gaynor, appearing in volume 1012, page 299. Other people have reportedly seen a tall well-dressed man in a silk hat walk the castle avenue, which in a column from May, whom I suggested could have been Sir John Young, aka Lord Lisgar. Were these just figments of a dreamlike imagination or are they real? Perhaps a stroll in the woods this Halloween as darkness falls, might set the record straight.

Memories

In the 1980s, every schoolkid anticipated what excitement that might befall them at Halloween, whether it was drawing a witch, painting face masks, or listening to scary stories as the witching hour approached.

Then, there was the face mask to be chosen, usually with a monster face, like a witch, a green Frankenstein, or a Dracula. These for Cootehill folk like myself, were usually to be got in Vicki’s shop, or Aidan Boyle’s and there was the sheer excitement of putting on the new mask and the delightful smell of the fresh plastic, as the thin elastic just about fitted around the back of your head. The mask would last only so long until it got too hot and sweaty to wear and, by the time Halloween came around, you were lucky not to have broken the elastic or cracked the mask in several places. I always wanted to keep a mask from Halloween, but they never seemed to last and therefore that is one thing, which must go unarchived from my childhood.

I am now about to switch off the computer, when from the open window at my desk, a distant radio plays Michael Jackson’s ghostly Thriller. Then, Vincent Price’s spooky monologue begins. For somebody, Halloween is already into full swing, for sure!

Vincent Price’s monologue from Thriller:

‘The foulest stench is in the air,

The funk of forty thousand years

And grizzly ghouls from every tomb

Are closing in to seal your doom

And though you fight to stay alive

Your body starts to shiver

For no mere mortal can resist

The evil of the thriller’