Book Review: Halloween Folklore and Ghost Stories
“This book is written with love, and an intention to dispel a number of lazy presumptions about Halloween that are parroted endlessly in almost everything written on the subject, but which simply aren’t true. They’re so
familiar that they’re taken for granted: Halloween’s an American invention, Halloween’s a modern import, Halloween’s actually Samhain, etcetera,
etcetera.
Hogswash.
This book is designed to tear off the plastic Americana of the commercial holiday and expose the pulsing, rotting flesh of the ancient British tradition that lurks within. It is unique, in that it does not focus on America’s modern Halloween, but on England’s – it does not dismiss the traditional forms as dead, but views them in the context of a living and intangible cultural heritage, with direct continuity from the past to the present and beyond. It alternates between history, storytelling and gonzo folkloristics – a fitting hotch-potch for such a strange season.”
A disclaimer: Brice Stratford is a personal friend, and provided me a copy of the book free of charge. My opinions are genuine and I have provided critiques in the few places I felt compelled to, but let the reader take note.
Memento mori - remember your death. It is an ancient saying denoting a yet older wisdom, that it is both necessary and edifying to meditate on our transience. Between it and taxes, death is certainly the more poetical of life’s certainties—and the more severe. It is therefore not surprising that the calendars of old Christendom should accord the contemplation of the Last Things a special season, as do practically all religions in history. All Hallows, and particularly its Eve, is a fixture of our culture today, and a holiday of great antiquity. It is also, however, something of a puzzle.
Today, Halloween occupies an even more prominent place in the Anglophone year than do Easter, Ascensiontide or Pentecost, something that would certainly be curious to most Americans and Englishmen just a scant few decades ago. Furthermore, while intractable quarrels over origins and alleged paganity have in recent years become a fixture around seemingly every major holiday, nowhere is this more prominent than in the lead-up to Allhallowtide.
With the rise of the witch and the pumpkin in the public sphere has come also the spread of much received wisdom about witchcraft and old Jack o’ the Lantern. Much ink is spilled, many videos recorded, many angry sermons preached, and every year, it all seems to repeat: Halloween is pagan, no, Halloween is Catholic; Halloween is Yankee cultural imperialism, no, Halloween is Irish Sámhain. Almost as conspicuous as the churning debate, however, is the absence of almost any actual scholarship grounding it. Hearsay and tall-tales are as much an All Hallows staple as are bats and candy corn. Enter Brice Stratford’s contribution: Halloween Folklore and Ghost Stories is a much needed infusion of real research into a conversation almost drowned in holiday gossip. It is also, rarely among recent works of history and folklorics, a fine pleasure to read.
The basic thesis of Stratford’s book is gently revisionist: That much of what is frequently attributed as “Irish” or “American” heritage in our All Hallows customs actually traces back to traditions that were widespread across the British Isles—still are, in many cases—and that England specifically was the origin of a great deal of practices now labelled “Celtic” or even as New World innovations. For this, he furnishes ample evidence, gathered both from academic resources, old newspaper records he has meticulously scoured, and contemporary folklore and regional folk culture across modern England. It cannot be denied that this is a book with an axe to grind, albeit that it brandishes it well. Throughout the pages of the book, he provides detailed accounts of the histories of various Halloween practices, from haunted houses to trick-or-treating, costuming, witches, pumpkins, bonfires, divination and more. Interspersed among all this are accounts of actual folk tales, some of which he has gleaned from the pages of centuries-old newspaper reports, others collected himself.
“There is a peculiar form of arrogant exceptionalism that the English seem particularly prone to, along the same lines as believing that everybody has an accent except for oneself. It instils a presumption that we are (or should be) somehow above folk culture, archaic ceremony, and weird tradition - that these belong to more sweetly primitive, foreign climes - they don’t know any better, after all, and so they can’t be expected to keep up with our superior levels of logic and reform. It is due to this post-colonial snobbery that anything which hints of rustic mystery or superstitious prehistory is dismissed as belonging to the Irish, Scottish or Welsh (at a push the Cornish or Manx) - as if such backwardness is only understandable in the so-called ‘Celtic’ fringe, and couldn’t possibly belong to our precious, streamlined, corporate-nowhere England.”
Stratford also provides a historical narrative for the development of Halloween as we know it—a narrative that unfolds, once more it must be stressed, almost entirely in England and the wider Britain. Though the Irish contribution is not denied, it is relativized and placed in context. All Hallows, Stratford affirms, originates with the Catholic triduum of Allhallowtide. It does not, as any modern folklorist of reasonable repute will affirm, has no meaningful connection to any pre-Christian heritage, though for individual customs this may very. Interestingly, he presents a convincing case that the word “Halloween,” so often said to be a contraction of All Hallows Even by the medial form “Hallowe’en,” actually has a different etymology. It derives from the Old English plural of hālga, ‘saint,’ hālgan, which in Middle English became Hallan/Hallowen and eventually Halloween. It referred, in origin, to the whole of Hallowtide, and the form “Hallowe’en” actually inserts a folk etymology in connecting it specifically to the Eve - the word is attested without the apostrophe before it is attested with it. One might envision an Anglish version of Fr. Butler’s famous hagiographies entitled “Butler's Lives of the Halloween.”
More interesting yet is the account given of the origins of the folkish All Hallows Eve. Though Stratford affirms its origin in the liturgical triduum, that is not the end of the story. The crucial event, in his telling, was the English Reformation, when the Church in England was torn from the wider body of Christendom, and the majority of liturgical celebrations suppressed by the minimalistic reformers. Allhallowtide fell out of official practice in the nascent Anglican church, and all regulation of the festive season therefore effectively ceased. Its observance, however, did not. Loosed from the oversight of a clerical establishment, largely divorced from its religious, liturgical character, the popular celebration of All Hallows began to twist and mutate, taking on increasingly strange expressions as it passed, in innumerable local forms, from generation to generation. It could thus properly be described perhaps as something like a “sub-Catholic” holiday, deriving from, but not identical to, the practices of the Church prior to the ruptures of the 1500s. This process Stratford describes as the “rewilding” of Halloween.
One could, perhaps, quibble over whether a holiday that was never, in origin, ‘wild’ can truly said to have been ‘rewilded.’ If the liturgical triduum was the root and stem of the holiday, the folkish expressions which subsequently blossomed were, in truth, the innovations. Certainly, there is something counterintuitive about this to our modern minds, which seem to sense in the strange and earthy customs of All Hallows Eve a ‘pagan’ note, surely more ancient than the orderly rhythms of the Church season. Yet, it is not so.
Carved mangelwurzel Jack o’ Lanterns for Punkie Night, a Hallowtide custom celebrated in Somerset on the last Thursday of October.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of the book is the detailed descriptions it provides of various customs, tracing back their histories both to their origins, where these can be discerned (which is very rarely), and through their permutations in later centuries. One such custom, which lies at the root of our later trick-or-treating, is that of souling.
Souling practices were originally connected to the doctrine of Purgatory, and the notion of soothing the souls therein, though the exact mechanism was never clear. People called ‘soulers’, typically children or young men, and often disguised, would travel from house to house, requesting treats of the different families by singing short souling carols. Initially, these treats came in the form of ‘soul cakes’, seemingly seed or oat cakes, which are still baked in places. As the years went on, however, the “soul cakes” often became increasingly metaphorical, the request widening to treats more broadly.
“Soul soul, for a apple or two
If ye’ve got no apples, pears’ll do,
Up wi’ the kettle and down wi’ the pan.
Give us a big ’un, and we’ll be gone.”
The discussion of souling and soul-cakes provides an example for one of Stratford’s primary themes: The endurance and vivacity of old customs, which often have more life in them than detached modern observers presume. The practice of souling may provide the antecedent of modern trick-or-treating, and may, indeed, be of substantial antiquity, but that does not mean it is merely a page of history: Souling, like nearly all seasonal customs prior to the standardization of the last century, was overwhelmingly a local practice with regional permutations, and in those local settings it endures in many places. Yet, as Stratford relates:
“In October of 2023, English Heritage had a well-meaning but characteristically misguided campaign to ‘revive’ the soul cake, with lots of press releases about how it was a forgotten medieval treat. They invented and publicised a new recipe ‘inspired by history’, which was essentially just a biscuit with raisins – seemingly ignorant of the historical recipes above, their new version has misinterpreted the ‘oat cake’ reference into something like a cross between a modern oatcake and a raisin shortbread. They also, rather naively, seemed to be ignorant of the fact that this tradition had not actually died out, and parts of Yorkshire, Staffordshire and Somerset (and probably other areas I’m unaware of) still bake and disseminate soul cakes of the nineteenth-century style, and never stopped.”
Trick-or-treaters from early-20th century America
Another Halloween staple which the book explores in substantial detail is the Jack-'o’-Lantern, a practice often, but wrongly, tied back entirely to certain Irish customs, and a literary fairy tale from Victorian-era Dublin about the character Stingy Jack. The term “Jack-o’-Lantern” itself was originally another word for a willow-the-wisp, Friar Rush, corpse candle, punkie—all local terms for the phenomenon called Ignis fatuus, ‘foolish fire,’ eerie flames that are sometimes seen dancing over bogs at night. Mistaking them for lanterns held by people, weary travelers would at times follow them out into the marshes, giving rise to a great number of legends about malicious trickster fairies or spirits.
“An ignis fatuus, commonly called Jack of the Lantern, has for several nights past been seen in St James’s Park [London], and a number of nobility and gentry being deluded by the appearance, and following it, have fallen into the dirt.”
Folklore often connected these ghostly lights with souls trapped in purgatory or limbo, and as their sightings grew more common as the days shortened and the dark spread, they naturally came to be associated with the Hallowtide season. People eventually began to carve special lanterns out of hollowed vegetables to represent these creatures, which naturally took name after them. Thus, disturbing, grinning faces made of turnips, mangelwurzels and eventually pumpkins came to be known as punkies or Jack-o’-Lanterns.
“Perhaps the most ingenious was the illuminated ‘death’s head.’ This was made by extracting all the pulp from a big Swede turnip. The ‘face’ was carved and the ghastly features illuminated by a candle. Hidden behind a fence, in illlighted thoroughfares or dark lanes, the ‘face,’ attached to a fishing or other light rod, would be suddenly dangled by some young imps in front of unwary pedestrians, who, as my correspondent says, would be ‘scared stiff.’”
If the souling practices explain the origin of the treat, and the spooky jack-o’-lanterns are at least part of the trick, Mischief Night furnishes the bulk of the latter.
The connection between mischief and Halloween is very old. In the Middle Ages, up until the Early Modern Period and the ravages of the English Civil War, the Lord of Misrule, a ceremonial “Maister of merry disports,” was elected on All Hallows Eve, to reign over revelries and festivities from then until Twelfth Night (5th of January) or Candlemas (2nd of February). This explicit linkage of Allhallowtide and Yuletide was but one example of a general connection that existed in the past between these, such that together they formed in effect one great festive season, lasting from late October and into the new year. After the abolition of the public Lord of Misrule, the practice survived for a time in private Twelfth Night parties, with which the figure is now chiefly associated, but vanished from All Hallows. In his place, however, the soon-to-be-established Guy Fawkes Night soon took over, falling only a few days later on the 5th of November. When, eventually, Guy Fawkes in turn was tamed, having grown unduly wild, its customs bifurcated into Bonfire Night and Mischief Night, of which the latter, migrating for a time across nearly all the year, finally settled on All Hallows Eve, where it fastened and grew established.
“Hallow E’en was also called ‘Mischief Night’ and perhaps the fact that people played all sorts of tricks on one another, such as taking gates and doors off hinges, leaving gates open, whitewashing doors and tying latches, may have given rise to the belief, on the part of those who didn’t do such mischief, that witches were the cause of the trouble.”
And as Stratford further writes himself:
“By the 1940s, the English Mischief Night had spread to America and joined with Souling, to become a part of their Halloween celebrations also. It is the melding of these two traditions, Souling and Mischief Night, that essentially create the modern Halloween – though the American version has certainly popularised it here, the evidence is clear that this regional combining of the traditions had already occurred in England by the time it was exported to America, and the modern Halloween is a homegrown holiday, not an import.”
Recent Guy Fawkes Night celebrations in Sussex
I will begin bringing this review to its close now, seeing as it has already grown overlong. There are many aspects of the book I have barely touched on, most notably the numerous recounted ghost stories of the title, many of which are legitimately unnerving, not least for being items of genuine folklore and experience, not merely literary inventions. A great advantage of the book, and one that adds tremendously to its readability, is the manner in which Stratford refuses to distance himself from the holiday by a dry, academic scrutiny. Many of the anecdotes and coincidences he has come across in his research are legitimately unsettling, and he allows himself to be unsettled, rather than dismissing all with a patronizing scoff.
Of notable faults, the book has only a few. The most glaring is in the presentation: Though the typesetting and general reading experience is pleasant, the book is filled with art that was clearly AI-generated, including on the cover, which unfortunately has dated very poorly even in the short time since its release, and will grow only more conspicuous as the years go on. With the limitations of budget, it is understandable why this might have been settled on as a way to furnish the book throughout with a degree of illustrations, but they simply do not come off well, and less would have been more. One may hope for an eventual second edition. There are also some minor errors where matters outside the book’s primary scope are concerned—the brief account of the origin of Purgatory as a doctrine is, for instance, incorrect.
These are, however, minor quibbles, and Halloween Folklore and Ghost Stories is an excellent and much-needed contribution to a greatly underserved field. For any who are interested in folk customs, ghosts and goblins and things that go bump in the night, it is highly recommended.
“Cold winter it is coming on, dark, dirty, wet, and cold;
To try your good nature, this night we do make bold;
This night we do make bold with your apples and strong beer,
And we’ll come no more a-souling until another year.”