A few reminiscences of my brushes with this ancient festival of the dead, that still manages to grab our imaginations:
1957, maybe? I must have been in fifth grade, because I remember reading this in Junior Scholastic magazine, which I think we started using in elementary school that year: a poem about Halloween, celebrating all the shivery spookies to which the holiday is dedicated. Among others, witches riding around on broomsticks, “cackling, too / For all the things they plan to do.” (If I have the quote wrong, forgive me. It was 62 years ago.)
Did I believe there really were witches on broomsticks? Hardly; because if I thought such dangerous creatures were on the prowl, I wouldn’t have gone out trick-or-treating. I would have stayed home and hid beneath the bed. Yet I had the sense, perhaps inspired by the poem–after all, they wouldn’t have put it in Junior Scholastic if it weren’t true–that something eerie, pushing the boundaries of our normal reality, would happen the night of October 31. I remember saying to a friend, in ominous tones, “A lot of funny things have been happening lately,” and I remember having the sense that really was true, although I couldn’t have named a single one of those “funny things.”
But then Halloween came, and I realized it wasn’t true. There was nothing special about that night: nothing creepy to the smallest degree, supernatural or bordering the supernatural. Just a warm, humid evening, still cloudy and a bit foggy from the day’s rains, suburban street lights reflecting in the puddles, and a bunch of kids tramping around with bags wherein to collect tooth-rotting goodies from the neighbors.
(No grown-ups accompanying us, back in those days. The genuinely scary stuff connected with Halloween, real or apocryphal, hadn’t yet entered the societal consciousness.)
Also the 1950s, though I think a bit later. The great sorrow of my Halloweens: that I could never wear a costume and not be recognized. For whatever reason, that was the great achievement of a Halloween costume, that no one would know who you were. For me that was wholly impossible, because I wore glasses and couldn’t see without them, and they would be instantly visible beneath any mask and since nobody else in my school wore glasses, everyone would know it was me. Whatever disguise I might choose to adopt was ruined from the beginning.
I recall a great many pre-Halloween musings on this quandary, most of them drenched in self-pity.
My mother came to the rescue with a truly genius idea. Why not turn my glasses-wearing to advantage? Roll up a few slips of brown wrapping paper into a cylinder resembling a cigar, give me a white shirt with a frayed tie and a draggy old black coat to wear along with my glasses, use burnt cork for a mustache and thick black eyebrows, and voila–the best Halloween costume ever! Groucho Marx!
I was a hit! And it no longer seemed of any importance that everyone knew who I was.
I remember sitting in the living room with the man and lady of one of the houses where I’d gone trick-or-treating while they reminisced about the good times they’d had watching Groucho, whether in the Marx brothers movies or the “You Bet Your Life” TV show, which was still running on Thursday evenings. It was warm in that room, in all senses of the word, and I felt the warmth deep down. It’s one of the fondest memories of my childhood.
I trick-or-treated as Groucho the following year as well, as a sort of encore, even though I knew I was getting a little old for it. But the year after that I was in eighth grade, almost thirteen and Bar-Mitzvah age, and it was time to put away such childish things as Halloween. And move on to UFOs.
Mid-1990s. I’d known almost from the start of my teaching career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that Halloween was a major event at UNC. That first year (1976) I scheduled an exam for November 1, to which one of my colleagues remarked: “That’s mean!” A professor with a heart would let students spend the night celebrating the occasion on Franklin Street, Chapel Hill’s main street (which bordered the campus), not studying for a test the next day.
(I don’t remember whether I rescheduled the exam. I could be kind of a hard-nose, back in those days.)
It was almost 20 years before I actually witnessed the Halloween festivities, if they could be called that, on Franklin Street. I went there with my wife. We were struck by the somberness of the atmosphere–not festive in the least, but gloomy and grim, enacted in what I remember as near silence. Young men and women in costume processed up and down the street, which was closed to traffic. The predominant costume for the men seemed to be old-fashioned suits, giving the impression of 1920s gangsters with their molls. There was a solemnity in the scene, but something more that I can only call archaic malevolence.
Perhaps there was something eerie, sinister, not quite natural about Halloween after all. A festival, indeed, of the deadly dead.
Rose and I left the “celebration” feeling unsettled, a bit unclean. We understood why Christian fundamentalists have condemned the holiday as devil-worship. We never returned to Franklin Street for another one.
October 27, 2011. It wasn’t quite Halloween, but the Thursday before. Halloween treats were served for the occasion, to lure wavering students into the auditorium. We were in the student union of Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and I was speaking on “Halloween’s Strangest Visitor – The UFO Alien.”
I’d come at the invitation of my former student, Conrad (“Ozzie”) Ostwalt, who chaired the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Appalachian State. It had been over 30 years since Ozzie’s UNC days, and time had left its marks on us both–not least on our perceptions of those around us. Crossing campus that day, he’d introduced me to one of his colleagues and I mistook the man for a grad student. Ozzie laughed. “They get younger every year,” he said.
“The UFO alien, with his light-bulb head and enormous eyes, is the 20th century’s contribution to the Halloween gallery of witches, ghosts and assorted terrors. Who is this creature? How did he come to be part of our cultural landscape? What is he here to teach us about ourselves, our yearnings, our fears?” That was what the advertising poster had to say about my lecture, promising that I would provide “some unconventional answers,” and I kept the promise pretty well.
The lecture title was inspired by what I’d noticed back in the 1990s, that cheap little “UFO aliens”–green-skinned, as the UFO beings are supposed to be according to an indestructible trope that has little or nothing to do with actual UFO reports–had begun to appear in the dollar store racks around Halloween time, along with the miniature plastic witches and the life-sized plastic spiders. To my disappointment, the aliens’ entry to these venerable ranks proved transient; I haven’t seen them in the dollar stores since about 2000. (Though they may have returned in the past year or two, now that UFOs are “in” once more.) But it seems to me significant that they were there at all.
As if to say: whatever Halloween means to us, in a culture that’s (supposedly) discarded the beliefs underlying this anciently hallowed time, the UFOs are a part of it. They speak to and from the same religious impulses that birthed the festival–in which death, and how we the living respond to the knowledge that we must die, play a central role.
Thoughts worth pondering, as night begins to fall on Halloween 2019.
by David Halperin
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