Probably—no, almost certainly—because of the kind of day it is, and I’m not thinking about the fact that we’re eight days away from averting political apocalypse, with the social apocalypse to follow being ungainly but manageable, but because it’s Samhain/Halloween/All Hallow’s Eve, I’m going to leave aside writing about Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicles (although we’re coming back to them, in part because they’re excellent and in part because they provide a good deep dive into what makes fantasy such a vital art form) and open the floor for Halloween and Halloweeny musings.
Tonight is a magical night; the veil is thin, and we think about darkness and death tonight. The monsters lurk in the dark, and the wonders, too. It’s also a night most people don’t take seriously; the kids dress up and sock away the candy while the parents shake off hangovers from a weekend of pumpkin-spiced parties, and we’re almost into November. But if you’re not mundane, if you haven’t cashed in your imagination, if have a sense for the uncanny, tonight is your night. My night, too.
I’m structuring this diary into three parts: History, Monsters and Other Human Forms, and if you endure all the way to the end, I’ll finish with A Ghost Story. A while ago I wrote a diary about Ghostbusters, (not Ghostbusters but the subculture that seeks out ghosts and how they relate to old houses). What I did not disclose in that diary is that, while I may not believe in ghosts, not exactly, I do live in a real haunted house, and have a few tales to tell.
History of Halloween — An Over-Brief Sketch
We all know that Halloween (Wikipedia, that starting place for all research, actually offers a decent overview of Halloween history) was co-opted from the pagan calendar. Since the day has its roots in oral culture, there’s no lack of conjecture but precious little firm information about its origins. I once took a class in Paganism and the Occult, taught by a distinguished researcher and generally awesome human being so I don’t doubt my source, but I can’t provide references other than class notes. Tidbits he tossed off in lecture include:
- Traditionally, this was the day to bring the sheep in from the high grazing fields and close them into the farmsteads for the winter.
- Today, the dead can walk into the world of the living. You don’t want that to happen.
- Today you dressed in your dead relatives’ clothes and went around to the neighbors. They offered you food. Then you went home and waited for your neighbors to show up dressed in the clothes of their dead relatives. You gave them food. These were not gifts exchanged neighbor to neighbor, but offerings to placate the dead and keep them where they were.
- The more badass you were, the bigger your monument. Full-grave slab monuments did not (at least originally) denote social status or respectability. The living wanted to make sure you stayed planted.
- Vampires: a subject unto themselves, and an object of recent archaeological research, including from 2009, 2012, and 2013. Although vampirism is archetypal and worldwide, our view of vampires is heavily influenced by Eastern European folklore married to Victorian sexual anxiety, thanks to Joseph Sheridan le Fanu, Varney the Vampire, and Bram Stoker. Stoker was especially influential, having traveled throughout Romania and Hungary to soak up the folklore and ambiance. But he omitted a few details:
- Vampires rise soon after death and prey upon their closest relatives. Or they rise and go to the nearest church to ring the church bell. Whoever hears the bell is the next to die. Either way, they continue until they’re stopped or until everyone is dead.
- Vampires are natural mathematicians. So if you suspect you’re burying a vampire, you make the casket extra-tight and fill it with sand packed all around the body. The vampire will wake, but won’t rise until all the sand has been counted. It’ll keep the vampire busy for eternity.
- Bits of knotted string work, also. Between the counting and the unknotting, the risen dead are kept busy. Apparently vampires are OCD.
- Much of the Samhain holiday appeared to be devoted to balancing darkness and light. We’re moving into winter and the walls between the seasons, the walls between the worlds of life and death, light and darkness are thin. This is a tipping point, and one to be navigated carefully. Nothing about today is frivolous—if as a community we fail to honor and placate the dead, they might get up and do something about it. They may be displeased. We need to move carefully into the darkness.
These tidbits are details I haven’t seen widely disseminated, so I thought I’d share them. I’m sure I’m not alone in collecting Samhain trivia, so please consider this an appetizer, or a handful of oats in the cauldron. We’re making Stone Soup—you can improve the flavor if you ante up with a carrot or two.
Monsters and Other Human Forms
Horror is often considered separately from fantasy, but it shouldn’t be. It’s a piece of the continuum, the flip side of wonder. Since winter, the dark time of the year, is the appropriate time for dark subjects, look for us to be considering horror, the dark mirror of human experience (what more appropriate fodder is there for fantasy? she asks rhetorically). In brief, monsters: the real ones are the humans. Human nature is on trial when we look at monsters, because Monsters R Us.
In vampires we see seduction, death and more than a smattering of sexual violence. Born in the Victorian Age, Western vampires (Count Orloff, Dracula, et al) were rapists, and their visitations to their victims are marked with all the motifs of rape: penetration of flesh, spilling of blood, the woman left ravished and insensible (and, not surprisingly, marked for damnation unless she could be redeemed by the love of a virtuous man and even then, redemption was not likely). Female vampires are lamias, succubi, enacting male fears about loss of strength, virility and even life. Latter-day vampires are diminished things, their mystique dissipated. It’ll be a while, I think, before we see potent vampire fiction again.
Zombies are the archetype of the postmodern age. Once it was human; once, it had a personality and a soul. Now it’s a shambling mindless emblem of consumption and savagery. Come to think of it, it’s a good metaphor for the postmodern age. Neil Gaiman has a great zombie short story called “Bitter Grounds” in the collection Fragile Things. It’s a flip-side look at zombies that’s about as far removed from The Walking Dead as you can get. Zombies tell us nothing about ourselves, but humans interacting with zombies—that’s where the fun is.
Frankenstein is another archetype, and it’s easy to remember that the rebuilt man was not the monster in Mary Shelley’s novel. That honor went to the good doctor, and his case will eventually lead us to consider the nature of evil, whence it rises and what it is. The rebuilt man was the victim, sinned against and eventually rebellious. In that, if Dr. Frankenstein is cast as Prometheus, the “monster” is the Outlaw Josey Wales.
For the sake of space I’m leaving aside for now consideration of what the Church calls “active evil” and discourages. Active evil encompasses malevolent forces that act outside of human ken and includes demons,devils and the great Adversary himself. How we got from a pagan fertility god to Satan has everything to do with 9th century plagues, ancestor worship and village priests taking the bit in their teeth. But that’s a story for another night because, as promised,
A Ghost Story for Halloween
Everything I’m about to write is true. Unvarnished and as plain as the odor that emanates from my recently-skunked border collie mix, Barkley the Wonder Dog.
Tonight is the nineteenth anniversary of my first night in our house, Riverbank, fondly nicknamed Castle Dracula (follow the link to see why). Where I live, until about twenty years ago there was a tradition of torching abandoned buildings on Halloween. Before we bought the house it had been protected by its previous owners but, in the slip-time between when we closed and when we could move in (about a month) the place was unguarded. And we had inherited a tenant on the farm I would not have put much past. So we unloaded a mattress and hooked up a lamp via extension cord to the only live electrical outlet in the house, in the basement, and camped for the night.
A lot has happened since then. A lot of work, restoring both the house and the grounds. A lot of laughs, and a lot of good times. And along the way, a few inexplicable events.
My husband Andy does not believe in ghosts. Not at all. He’s vocal about it, too. I’m suggestible, but skeptical. And when we moved in, our son Jack was five. He was terrified. The child of the despicable inherited tenant had told him that our house was infested with monsters in the upstairs and zombies in the basement; all the spiders and snakes were poisonous and, if he went outside to play, he was going to die. For years, he stuck on us like a burr.
So anyway, Jack was scared, Andy was disbelieving, and I was in the kitchen one evening early on, doing dishes, while Andy was reading Jack a bedtime story. Andy heard noises upstairs. He thought it was me. He yelled up the stairs into the darkness (no electricity on the second floor yet), and I answered from the kitchen. He chalked it up to imagination and went back to the story. Jack, for the record, thought I was playing a trick. After he went to sleep, the upstairs noises continued intermittently. Andy took a flashlight and explored the upstairs at least three times and found nothing. After that, he couldn’t put something down, be it a tool or a pen or book, without it disappearing and turning up in some unlikely place. He heard bumps and odd noises that no one else heard. This went on for years. And it took years before he believed that it wasn’t me being playful or forgetful.
In 1998, I had a bone marrow transplant and spent time at home, recovering. Recovery included afternoon naps, and I would set an alarm to make sure I was up and waiting at the end of the lane when Jack got off the school bus. As insurance, Andy would always call me to make sure I was awake. One afternoon I slept through both the alarm and the phone, but woke to hearing two voices in the kitchen, speaking loudly but indistinctly. And I woke up instantly alert, the way you sometimes wake up startled, and thought, Who’s in my kitchen? The conversation continued, loud, distinct, one male and one female, although I couldn’t tell what was said. As soon as I reached the kitchen, silence. Silence so loud it was almost palpable. The room was empty. I looked at the clock. I had just enough time to put on my shoes and get out to the end of the lane to meet the school bus.
Not long after, maybe a year, after Jack had started to play chess, he and Andy played in the kitchen in the evening. We had a board on a stand with glass chessmen, and they’d leave the pieces everywhere. One morning, cleaning up, I reranked the pieces and couldn’t find a bishop. Looked everywhere. It was missing. I went on with chores and came back to find the bishop sitting in the middle of the board. Andy called and I told him that something odd had happened. He asked which square the bishop sat on and I told him. “That was my last move,” he said.
More recently, one afternoon Andy and Jack were out cutting firewood, and I was alone in the house. We had just shifted from a land line to cell phones—the old flip variety. I was housecleaning and had been downstairs and outside, painting, all day, and realized that, after I had talked to Andy while he was in the woods, I had put the phone down and couldn’t find it. Searched everywhere. Finally the guys got home. I got Andy to dial my phone and followed the ring….upstairs and into my bedroom, where I found my phone in a laundry basket of dirty clothes.
You can’t say they don’t have a sense of humor.
One thing I especially value about our ghosts in whom I don’t believe: all the while Jack was growing up, he never heard or saw anything of them. When he was about 12, he decided to become a Civil War bugler and reenactor (which is in itself worthy of a diary). One weekend at Gettysburg during a living history he saw something at Devil’s Den, something he couldn’t explain, and came home and talked about it. That night, he saw something on the stairs, something that wasn’t there. It wasn’t until he was open to the experience that they let him see them. He had other experiences on other battlefields and at Virginia Military Institute, and while I would love to tell those stories, they’re his, not mine. I hope one day he’ll write them.
This week it’s fantasy fun and games, games of the solemn sort on this night of the dead. Next week, back to Kingkiller and the nature of stories. Tonight, in the spirit of Samhain, let’s boil us up a cauldron of stories.
Previous Installments
Resources
Science Fiction and Fantasy Primary Online Resources