Since she started teaching a Camosun College course on death, anthropology instructor Nicole Kilburn has become particularly interested in the “spooky ghosts of the Halloween season.”
Her course, the Anthropology of Death, looks at how death is viewed in different cultures.
“I find it really interesting when I drive around and I see all these ghosts on people’s front lawns, so there is more of an accommodation of talking about death and ghosts at this time of the year than at other times,” said Kilburn, who also appreciates the community events held to mark the occasion.
“But we seem to have forgotten some of those really deep, historical roots.”
Kilburn said one tradition linked to Halloween that resonates in the present is the Celtic festival of the new year and the harvest known as Samhain, pronounced sow-ween.
During Samhain, she said “the veil between the world of the living and the world of the spirit was lifted,” making people feel they were more able to connect with their dead loved ones.
But to avoid the mean spirits that were also thought to be around, people would make their homes look inhospitable and extinguish any light, Kilburn said, before gathering at the bonfire in the town square.
They would also dress in costumes, often scary ones, hoping the mean spirits would think they were one of them and leave them alone, she said.
Some people saw being in disguise as a chance “to do something you would not do otherwise,” Kilburn said. “That’s where the ‘trick’ part of trick-or-treat comes in.”
She said the tradition of pumpkin carving was preceded in Ireland and England by carving root vegetables, like potatoes and turnips.
“I’ve tried carving those but they’re hard to work with,” she said with a laugh. “I can just imagine how exciting it would have been for Irish immigrants to encounter pumpkins when they arrived here in North America. It would have been a very easy switch.”
Halloween started to become popular in North America in the 19th century, as immigrants brought their seasonal traditions here, she said.
At first, it wasn’t really for kids, but in the early 1900s, some cities in the eastern United States grew concerned with what has been called “the Halloween problem,” Kilburn said.
“It was just a licence for people to be anarchists, basically, with people egging houses and throwing toilet paper and making a big mess,” she said. “You could kind of get away with it under the guise of your Halloween costume.”
There were even calls to ban Halloween outright, but the problem eased as Halloween became more and more a time for children, Kilburn said.
Today, there are still people who take advantage of the anonymity a disguise provides to try to get away with things, said Kilburn, who compared it to the way some people act in an online environment. “People behave in a way that they would never behave in person.”
Because Halloween is seen as a time for children, some people don’t like it when youths decide go trick-or-treating well into their teens — but Kilburn isn’t one of them.
“I would say that anybody who comes to my door and wants to have some fun in a world where there’s so much angst is welcome to a Halloween treat,” she said. “Let’s encourage people to be kids for as long as possible.”
Kilburn will be part of a Halloween day event at the Victoria Conservatory of Music that will look at the combination of death and music, with both speakers and musical performances. She said it starts at 12:30 p.m. and the public is welcome.
And for those looking forward to trick-or-treating later in the day, the forecast is for showers.
