I love Halloween...

Oh Jesus (is that appropriate?), so that’s another Halloween come and gone and this year there were a record ninety-eight (yes 98! I put it in letters and numbers so that there is no mistake) Trick or Treaters a’visiting our house. I have to say I was impressed. The costumes were brilliant and the children so involved, little devils.

It was almost like I was taken back to my childhood – except I wasn’t. My Halloween childhood was the smell of burning turnips – no pumpkins for sale in supermarkets back then – and the threat of witches. These kids were dressed to the nines and their parents had spent big on their outfits. Witches, warlocks, ghouls, ghosts, Star Wars characters with light sabres, vampires, grim reapers, axemen, princesses of the night, cats, a robot, a moon and the cutest not quite three-year old girl pumpkin I have ever seen.

Of course I played my part, knife through my head and drooling blood. One group screamed and jumped back when I opened the door, the smaller kids just looked very nervous and quivery lipped. Apparently it’s healthy and part of the learning process for kids to be scared occasionally. So that’s alright then - conscience clean.

Most of the children were well behaved and very polite, but inevitably there were a couple of brats – well aren’t there always, cheeky little tykes. I only wish that my knife had been real so that I could have pulled it out and waved it at the little witch who repeated screamed that my knife was a fake, fake, fake, fake, fake, fake, FAKE!

Ninety-four children came to the door, running the gauntlet of pumpkins, their parents (many in fancy dress) standing at the gate watching on in various levels of wine induced oblivion. My wife had made up thirty bags of sweets and, with the frequency of our spooky callers, these were all gone by half-past six. She was pretty much on a sweet bagging production line, bagging sweets all night with no cupboard unrifled in the quest for confectionary.

The last trick or treater, a lone boy in a torn grey suit covered in dust, arrived at about nine. ‘Trick or treat,’ he mumbled. I’m not at all sure he was into the spirit of things. It was probably a last minute decision to come out and have a go; either that or he really was a risen spirit. I gave him his sweets anyway and he wandered off.

Then I blew out the pumpkins, closed the door, and drank myself to sleep. Well, you have to escape the evil spirits somehow.

 

No such thing as ghosts…

Was that the last leaf falling, the first­­ yet to be carved pumpkin grinning its empty way to the grave­? Halloween, Halloween, Halloween, Halloween… Shhhhhh you might wake the dead.

“I saw a ghost once,” they said.

Well, I’ve seen one or two along the way. Poor things; shivering in corners, attempting to make amends, not able to remember who they were, not knowing what they are. Lost things just trying to make themselves heard.

Not that we listen. No such thing as ghosts, they don’t exist, they’re a figment of an overactive imagination, a piece of undigested beef. Shadows, that’s all.

So why is it that on Halloween, the night of All Hallows, I listen for them?

Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

“Come in. I have a treat for you,” I say, and then, drawing close, I whisper in their overactively imagined ears, “You don’t exist by the way.”

And then they don’t. They leave with a smile, sometimes a wave, even a thumbs-up once. They vanish.

See, I told you. There’s no such thing as ghosts.