At summer’s end, I was out on the lake on my paddle board early one morning, when a thick fog rolled in. My vision was limited to just a few feet. I couldn’t see the sun or the shore, so I drifted, uncertain where I was in the lake and in which direction I should paddle. I didn’t panic. It wasn’t the first time I had been in the fog on the lake. The lake where I was paddling was small and I was always close to shore. Really, I was safe. Even so, fear showed up briefly. Noticing the rise and fall of fear started some contemplation about fear and fog and what we find spooky and wondering why scary stories persist even when science explains the phenomena these stories are based on. Not like I had anything to do besides think while I waited for the fog to lift, anyway.
Psychology and physiology explain fear as our survival response. Fear is a mind thing, but it triggers a physical reaction in your body. When your brain recognizes something to fear, it alerts your nervous system, which releases stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Your blood pressure and heart rate increase. You breathe faster. Your blood actually flows away from your heart and into your limbs, making it easier for you to run for your life – or, if you’re the hero of the horror movie, to stay and fight.
Fear also makes you foggy. As the fight or flight response is revving up, the parts of the brain that are in charge of reasoning and judgment become impaired, making it difficult to think clearly or make good decisions. Lost in the fog feeling foggy. Hmph.
Halloween is just days away and scary movies are in the theaters and streaming on every service. Spooky stories aren’t new, of course. Historians say we’ve been telling scary tales for eons. Why would we intentionally freak ourselves out, especially since it messes with our ability to think rationally? And why has what we find spooky persisted despite lots of scientific evidence that explains the things that scare us? Is fear fun? I thought, floating there in the fog, that it might be fun to unpack a few of the tales told at Halloween – where they came from and how culture shaped the stories. I’ll share about jack-o-lanterns, witches flying on brooms, and New York’s own headless horseman. Will they still be scary at the end? We’ll have to see.
Imagine for a moment, or maybe remember, a dark Halloween night. You’re making your way home after trick-or-treating and just said goodbye to your friend at the corner of your street. Now you have to make your way down the block alone. The wind blows, rattling the dry leaves still clinging to the trees. You feel a chill and the hair stands up on the back of your neck. You find yourself hyper aware of every sound around you. Suddenly you jump – there’s a pair of glowing eyes looking right at you. You freeze for a moment, then realize it’s a jack-o-lantern. Happy Halloween, right?
Jack-o-lanterns are everywhere at Halloween. How did they become so popular, and why do we carve them out of pumpkins? To find the origins of jack-o-lanterns, we have to go across the Atlantic to the fens, or marshes, of early seventeenth century Ireland. There arose the legend of a shadowy figure known as Stingy Jack.
As the story goes, Stingy Jack was a drunkard who lived in a small village and wasn’t liked by the townsfolk. It’s a tale told by Christians, so the Devil has a role. Jack’s behavior attracted Satan’s attention, and Satan decided he must have this fellow’s soul. But when Satan came to collect his soul, Jack convinced Satan to let him to have a final drink at his favorite pub. After which, Stingy Jack left Satan on the hook for the tab. Jack told Satan he should turn himself into a coin to pay the bill and then they could be off. Satan fell for it, and Jack grabbed the coin, put it in his pocket with a crucifix, and trapped Satan in there. The Devil begged and pleaded, and finally agreed to leave Jack alone for ten years in exchange for his release.
Exactly ten years later, Satan found Jack stumbling home from the pub. Jack asked Satan to climb a nearby apple tree to get him a final snack to eat before the journey to hell. Satan, who apparently was not very clever, climbed the apple tree. While Satan was climbing the tree, Jack carved a cross into the trunk, trapping Satan up in the tree. The Devil again begged and pleaded, and finally agreed never to take Jack’s soul in exchange for his release from the tree.
Many years later, when Stingy Jack took his last breath and died, St. Peter refused him entrance into heaven for all his evil deeds. Since they had an agreement, Satan wouldn’t let him into hell, either, but he gifted Jack an ember ablaze with hellfire. Alas, Jack was stuck roaming the earth with only a carved turnip glowing with hellfire to light his way, and Jack of the Lantern came to be. On Halloween night, ask yourself: is that just a jack-o-lantern, or the hellfire glow from phantom Jack’s lantern?
Now I mentioned the fens, or marshes, where the story of Stingy Jack originated, and that’s important because of ignis fatuus, or false fire. False fire is an actual occurrence— scientifically, ignis fatuus is marsh gas and occurs during the spontaneous ignition of methane created by decaying plant matter in marshes or swampy areas. So, was it naturally occurring marsh gas that inspired the story of Stingy Jack with his hellfire?
Many people in those areas also continued the Gaelic celebration of Samhain. One thing they did was to go from house to house in search of food and drink, the origin of Trick or Treating. Since it was naturally dark in pre-industrial revolution Ireland, many would carve turnips, potatoes or other root vegetables and add coals or candles to create makeshift lanterns to help guide those celebrating. Eventually the traditions mixed, and carvings became the face of Stingy Jack. When Irish immigrants arrived in America, they found pumpkins and the iconic jack-o-lanterns came to be, still a scary image today.
Fear played a part in another iconic Halloween image – the green-skinned witch flying on her magic broomstick. It’s an unfortunate but well-worn stereotype. But how did witches come to be associated with such an everyday household object like a broom?
It’s not clear exactly when the broom itself was first invented, but the act of sweeping goes back to ancient times when people likely used bunches of thin sticks or reeds to sweep the hearth. This household task shows up in the New Testament, which dates to the first and second centuries C.E.
The word broom comes from the actual plant from Western Europe, common broom or Scottish broom, that was often used to sweep. From the beginning, brooms were associated with women, as a symbol of female domesticity. [make a face] Despite this, the first witch to confess to riding a broom was a man, a priest, even, from an area near Paris. He was arrested in 1453 and tried for witchcraft after publicly criticizing the church’s warnings about witches. His confession came under torture, so he probably didn’t do any actual broom flying.
A couple of years before his “confession,” two illustrations appeared in a French manuscript called, in English, The Defender of Ladies. In the two drawings, one woman soars through the air on a broom, the other was aboard a plain white stick. Both wear headscarves that identify them as Waldensians, members of a Christian sect branded as heretics by the Catholic Church. Why were they depicted as broom-riding witches? I believe that by attaching the Waldensians to the witchcraft scare, the Church justified persecuting them.
Anthropologists have suggested that the association between witches and brooms have roots in a pagan fertility ritual, in which rural farmers would leap and dance astride poles, pitchforks or brooms in the light of the full moon to encourage the growth of their crops. This “broomstick dance” became a tale of scary witches flying through the night on their way to their illicit meetings.
It gets weirder, though. Broomsticks were also thought to be the perfect vehicles for the special ointments and salves that witches brewed up to give themselves the ability to fly, among other depraved activities they were accused of. In 1324, a wealthy Irish widow was tried for sorcery and heresy. Investigators reported that in searching her house, they found an ointment-greased staff. I won’t say more because this is a family service.
It’s believed those ointments were made from plants which produced hallucinogenic chemicals. Because they could cause intestinal distress when ingested, witches, if they were witches, chose to absorb them through the skin—often in the most intimate areas of their bodies. Or under their arms. And now I’m wondering what’s in all your deodorants.
These stories were reported at the height of fear over witchcraft in Europe in the Middle Ages and may or may not have reflected reality. And they didn’t go away. By the seventeenth century, when women became more closely associated with the household and domestic sphere than ever before, accounts of witches using broomsticks to fly up and out of chimneys became commonplace. A customary practice was for women to prop a broom outside a door or place it up a chimney to let others know they were away from the home. Perhaps because of this, people embraced the idea that witches left their houses through their chimneys.
Even after fear of witchcraft subsided and the growth of neo-pagan traditions gave us plenty of self-identified “witches” in the United States, who are quite clear about not doing it, the image of scary witches flying on broomsticks endures, especially on Halloween. Maybe, now that we know some of the backstory, we can start to let that one go.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving’s 1820 tale of a headless horseman who terrorizes a real-life New York village, is considered one of America’s first ghost stories—and one of its scariest.
The spooky story takes place in Sleepy Hollow, in Westchester County. In it, lanky newcomer and schoolmaster Ichabod Crane courts Katrina van Tassel, a young heiress who is also being pursued by the Dutchman Brom Bones. After being rebuffed by Katrina at a party at the van Tassel farm where ghost stories are shared, Ichabod is chased by a headless horseman who hurls a pumpkin – or his head – at Ichabod, who vanishes in the night, leaving only his horse and a smashed pumpkin behind.
Before I get more into the story, there’s some history to this creepy little tale that you might relate to. Irving moved to North Tarrytown, now renamed Sleepy Hollow because of the story, when he was fifteen. At that time, New York City was in the grip of its tenth epidemic of yellow fever. Yellow fever, which we now know is spread by mosquitoes, was then believed to be caused by slum conditions in city centers and the recent immigrants and refugees who lived there. Families with the means to do so, like Irving’s, fled the urban environment for “pure air.” Families that couldn’t suffered not only from the virus, symptoms of which included the kind of bleeding and vomiting best left to horror films, but from being terrorized by their neighbors. Sound familiar?
Anyway, while in Sleepy Hollow, Irving heard the rumor of a headless Hessian soldier buried near the Old Dutch Church, who was decapitated by a cannonball during the Battle of White Plains and “rode forth to the scenes of battle in nightly quest of his head,” as Irving would later write. Another likely inspiration for Irving’s horseman was his friend Sir Walter Scott’s The Chase, which is a 1796 translation of a German poem, The Wild Huntsman, which was likely based on Norse mythology.
Tales of headless horsemen can be traced back to the Middle Ages, including stories from the Brothers Grimm and the Dutch and Irish legend of the Dullahan, a Grim Reaper-like rider who carries his head. and is thought to represent a past that never dies, but always haunts the living seeking answers, retribution, and a good substitute for his lost head.
The scariest part of Sleepy Hollow, for me, is the unresolved ending. What happened to Icabod? Did he get away? Or did his head replace the lost one? History is filled with mysteries and half-truths that may never be fully known and can continue to be a source of fear.
Why do we keep telling the stories? Why do we keep going back for that fear? Why do people love haunted houses and horror movies? Remember when I spoke about the way your mind and body react to scary things? Well, your body and brain remain aroused even after your scary experience is over. Especially when the experience is staged, which you understand to be the case on some level when you hear a spooky tale or run through a haunted house, your brain will produce more dopamine, a pleasure chemical. So, when what you are scared of isn’t really real, fear is, in fact, fun.
When the fog lifted, I made the short paddle back to shore. If you ask me what the experience was like, I’m going to tell you it was fun. I got to have fake fear and a nice dopamine hit.
There is a danger to fear from not really real things, though, and I’m going to slip this in so you can contemplate it next time you’re waiting for the fog to lift. When you seek out experiences of fear, and not just at Halloween, be conscious of who or what is being delivered up as something to fear and why. The old stories often shine a light – perhaps even through the eyes of a jack-o-lantern – on the mysterious half-truths of history, on fears twisted into persecution, on phantoms we continue to see even after they are explained away. Let’s not forget the other stories, stories that give voice to all people, that lift us up, that celebrate what can be. Let’s not forget those just because it’s fun to have something to fear.