The Dance of the Dead (2021)

[0] One November night, a woman coming home late at the hour of the dead grew tired and sat down to rest when a young man came up and talked to her.

[1] Wait a bit and you will see the most beautiful dancing you ever looked on.

[2] There, by the side of the hill.

[3] She looked at him steadily.

[4] Why are you so sad and as pale as if you were dead?

[5] Look well at me. Do you not know me?

[6] Yes, I know you now.

[7] You were young Bremen that was drowned last year when out fishing.

[8] What are you here for?

[9] Look at the size of the hill and you will see why I'm here.

[10] And she looked and saw a great company dancing to sweet music and among them all the dead who had died as long as she could remember.

[11] men, women and children all in white and their faces were pale as the moonlight.

[12] Now, run for your life for at once the fairies bring you into the dance you will never be able to leave them anymore.

[13] But while they were talking the fairies came up and danced round her in a circle joining their hands and she fell to the ground in a faint and knew no more till she woke up in the morning in her own bed at home and they all saw her face was pale as the dead and they knew that she had got the fairy stroke so the herb doctor was sent for and every measure tried to save her but without avail for just as the moon rose that night soft low music was heard around the house and when they looked at the woman she was dead I grew up in what I think of now as the sort of golden age of trick -or -tree.

[14] Our whole neighborhood was really into Halloween.

[15] People decorated.

[16] The street was thronged with kids and costumes.

[17] And I really loved making my own.

[18] And there was one year, for example, I wanted to be a cavewoman.

[19] And my dad was a hunter.

[20] And we made an honest -to -God, like, realistic costume out of an old deer pelt.

[21] Oh, wow.

[22] I mean, if there was any kind of costume contest, I feel like you wouldn't want it because that's authentic, you know?

[23] It was, maybe a little too authentic.

[24] This is Lisa Morton.

[25] She's been really into Halloween, basically her whole life.

[26] And a couple of decades ago, she decided she wanted to learn more about its origins.

[27] So she started sifting through archival records, old newspaper clippings, oral histories, and books.

[28] And eventually, Lisa pieceding.

[29] Together, The Story of Halloween.

[30] I have written three books on the history of Halloween, including the Halloween Encyclopedia and Trick or Treat a History of Halloween.

[31] She's also written a bunch of horror fiction books, and a few screenplays, too.

[32] Those, like, really bad movies that show up at three in the morning on the sci -fi channel.

[33] You're a vampire.

[34] No, we call us thrott.

[35] We're lower than vampires for life.

[36] But I'm not wildly proud of most of those.

[37] At this point, Lisa calls herself something of a paranormal historian.

[38] A paranormal historian.

[39] Not exactly a traditional title, but seems pretty accurate.

[40] This history is full of creepiness.

[41] Ghouls, ghosts, demons, witches, and beyond all that, Lisa says it taps into some very basic fears we all have.

[42] The fear of the unknown, of change, of death.

[43] Often are searching for ways I think.

[44] to deal with our fears.

[45] And at Halloween, we are told that these fears are things that we can have fun with.

[46] And much of that, of course, is also behind the popularity of horror movies and books.

[47] It's a way to deal with our fears in a safe and playful environment.

[48] Playful being the key word here.

[49] You're probably getting ready to stock up on candy as we speak.

[50] Okay, a couple people at ThruLine might disagree.

[51] But in my house, it's anything but candy corn, a .k .a. the reject candy.

[52] Or maybe you're decorating your yard with plastic skeletons and fake spider webs.

[53] Or maybe you just plan to stay in and watch a favorite scary movie.

[54] I personally won't be doing that because I'm a huge chicken now when it comes to scary movies.

[55] I don't know what happened to me. It was an excellent day for an exorcism.

[56] I tried rewatching The Exorcist while working on this episode.

[57] That was a bad idea.

[58] Strike terror lord into the beast, now laying waste your record.

[59] I can't.

[60] That voice, the way her eyes roll back.

[61] Yeah, I mean, she's terrifying.

[62] And honestly, I can't get out of my head either.

[63] I don't even have the stomach to rewatch it at any point.

[64] Anyway, this story begins with small tribes of people in Europe.

[65] Long before Halloween was a sugary movie fest, long before it was even called Halloween.

[66] If you're tracing it all the way back, we have to go back to the ancient Irish Celts that celebrated Salis.

[67] which is the holiday that is the great granddaddy of Halloween.

[68] 2 ,000 years ago in the Irish countryside during Sowin, the thing you'd fear most wasn't demons or ghosts or dudes in white masks, but fairies.

[69] Creepy, deadly, vengeful fairies.

[70] These things were as far away from Tinkerbell as you could get.

[71] When we come back, enter the haunted history of Halloween if you dare.

[72] You're listening to Doomline from NPR.

[73] This is Benjamin Nelson calling from Burlington, Iowa, and you're listening to ThruLine.

[74] Part 1.

[75] Winter is coming.

[76] The Celts believed that Salon was a night that the barrier between worlds was at its thinnest, the night when things could cross over from the other world.

[77] The living, believing their ancestors would cross over into their world during this time, would leave offerings for the dead outside their village.

[78] and they would dress as animals or monsters to ward off fairies, who also crossed over to keep them from kidnapping their loved ones.

[79] They believed in these very malicious forms of fairies that they called the she.

[80] And people know the ban she, which actually means female fairy.

[81] According to Celtic legend, fairies were a mythical race of people who were driven into the shadows when a conquering force arrived in their home.

[82] Some believe the fairies had the magical ability to disguise themselves.

[83] Sometimes the banshee assumes the form of some sweet singing virgin of the family who died young.

[84] And roamed the earth because they were not quite fit either for heaven or hell.

[85] Or she may be seen at night as a shrouded woman crouched behind the trees, lamenting with veiled face, or flying past in the moonlight, crying bitterly, And the cry of this spirit is mournful beyond all other sounds on earth and betoken certain death to some member of the family whenever it is heard in the silence of the night.

[86] On October 31st during Salwin, the Celts would gather around the fire and tell scary stories about these fairies.

[87] But it wasn't all doom and gloom.

[88] They'd feast and have a good time, too.

[89] It was a huge party for them.

[90] trying to figure out what they did and trying to go through the research, the best things that we have are some of the fairy tale books at this point.

[91] Oscar Wilde's mother, for example, Lady Wilde put together some excellent collections of Celtic folk tales, and I relied a lot on those.

[92] Lady Wilde lived through the Irish famine of the mid -1800s and was a staunch Irish nationalist at a time when the British Empire had totally control over Ireland and much of the world.

[93] She set out to capture rich stories of Ireland's past in a book called Ancient Legends, mystic charms and superstitions of Ireland.

[94] To the Irish peasant earth and air were filled with those mysterious beings, half loved, half feared by them.

[95] Flipping through the book, you encounter tales like the Holy Well and the murderer, the butter mystery, the farmer punished, the trial by fire.

[96] all possible titles for a John Grisham novel.

[97] Of course, there are a lot of tales about fairies, too.

[98] The fairies revenge, the fairy spy, Whitson Tide Legend of the Fairy Horses.

[99] And there are hints throughout that these fairies are somewhat of a reflection of the Irish people themselves.

[100] The fairies loved music and dancing and frolic, and above all things, to be let alone, and not to be interfered with as regarded their peculiar fairy habits.

[101] customs and pastimes.

[102] They had, like the Irish, a fine sense of the right and just.

[103] But the fairies took dire revenge if anyone built over their fairy circles.

[104] So much of Lady Wilde's book is built on this kind of folklore because information about the early history of Ireland during the time of the Celts is limited.

[105] The problem with the Celts is that they didn't believe in writing their history down.

[106] Celtic priests, known as druids, would safeguard the information and pass it down from generation to generation by word of mouth.

[107] So what we have for them is oral traditions and folklore that was transcribed by the first Christian missionaries who came to Ireland to convert these Celts.

[108] And of course that is probably colored somewhat by their own belief system.

[109] But some of it is fairly good and fairly substantial.

[110] Based on archaeological records, here's what we know about the origin of the Celts.

[111] They're believed to have first appeared in Europe around 1 ,200 BC, though the exact year is hard to pinpoint.

[112] And although they migrated as far as France and Spain, they mostly thrived in the north, especially in what's now Ireland.

[113] Their traditions and beliefs were alien to people in the great Roman Empire many miles away, who thought of the Celts as barbarians and looked down on their tribal, pagan lifestyle.

[114] But most of all, resented their defiance of Roman power.

[115] For centuries, the Celts and Romans fought on battlefields.

[116] As the Roman Empire expanded, it absorbed Celtic culture, and Celts had to move to find ways to survive in other more remote parts of Europe.

[117] But they kept their pagan traditions.

[118] They had many gods and goddesses who they worshipped in lakes, rivers, under bushes, places they saw as sacred, believing that supernatural forces dwell within the natural world.

[119] And then there are accounts of something disturbing, something truly deadly.

[120] We have, of course, the image of the Celts burning victims alive and gigantic wicker men and so forth.

[121] Human sacrifice.

[122] It's something Julius Caesar described in the Gallic Wars, a book about the Roman conquest of what's now France.

[123] There is some evidence where they have found.

[124] for example, the remains of someone buried in a bog, and they think that some of the remains they found around those bog figures indicated that they were having a bad year in terms of drought.

[125] They might have sacrificed someone at Sowan to the gods to ensure that they didn't have a continuing drought for the next season.

[126] You know, it's interesting about this kind of early Celtic tradition.

[127] it's connecting with the dead, right, which is this sort of like transition point between the living and the dead.

[128] And then in terms of the time of year, right, it's this kind of transition of the harvest and the seasons.

[129] And I wonder if you see a connection between those two kinds of transitions.

[130] Yes, it was absolutely a transitional, a liminal time for them.

[131] They knew that winter was coming.

[132] They were slaughtering livestock, salting the meat, getting it stocked away and so forth.

[133] It was definitely a major transitional time for them.

[134] And in fact, in part of their legends, they had a queen goddess called the Morgan.

[135] And the Morgan moves from being a beautiful younger woman to a sort of hag at that time of year.

[136] Like many early civilizations, Celtic holidays and rituals coincided with the changing of the seasons, times when things are born and die.

[137] During these times of change, you could plead with the gods for a good harvest or protection for your loved ones who've departed this world.

[138] And maybe by scaring away the bad spirits, you'd open yourself up to good fortune.

[139] In the 5th century, some Roman Catholic missionaries began making their way to Ireland to try to figure out how to convert them.

[140] Paganism was part of the old world order, the now Christian Roman Empire wanted to root out.

[141] But the Catholic Church soon realized that the Celts wouldn't let go of traditions such as Sowan easily.

[142] People were really connected to those traditions.

[143] So if the church wanted people to embrace Christianity, maybe Christianity had to embrace some of what they believed.

[144] Yeah, so the early Catholic Church had a doctrine of trying to convert people by co -opting their existing holidays and traditions.

[145] and temples, rather than stamping them out, they had found that to be much more successful.

[146] It was a pretty genius marketing move.

[147] Like, we'll basically let you keep your holiday, just add a sprinkle of holy water and a dash of Jesus to it.

[148] So it speculated that they looked at the Catholic calendar and moved their Catholic holiday to overlap with the Celtic holiday of Sowan.

[149] They moved the date of their saint's celebration from May 13th, which is when it had originally been held, to November 1st.

[150] And from there, we get eventually the name All -Hollows Day.

[151] Hollow was another word for saint at the time.

[152] And the Celts celebrated their holidays beginning on the night before it's sunset, which is where that All -Hollos Eve part comes in, eventually becomes the name Halloween.

[153] A quick side note, the Catholic Church did this kind of co -opting all over the world, including with the ancient civilizations who lived in what's now Mexico, giving us the Dia de los Mertos, Day of the Dead.

[154] But back to Ireland.

[155] All Saints Day, all Hallows Day, still seem to be missing something.

[156] Sure, it celebrated the Saints.

[157] But what about your own loved ones who had passed on?

[158] When could you celebrate them and ask for their protection in the other world?

[159] So about the 11th century, the Catholic Church adds a second.

[160] celebration to this time.

[161] They designate November 2nd as All Souls Day.

[162] And this serves a dual purpose for them.

[163] It lets them continue that process of co -opting Salon and it gives them something that a lot of the parishioners at the time we're asking for, which was, hey, it's nice that we get to celebrate the saints, but we also want to celebrate our own dead.

[164] So All Souls Day becomes the day that you would for example, pray for your loved ones who might be stuck in purgatory.

[165] You can think of purgatory as a sort of waiting room between this world and the next, a placeless place to rid yourself of the remnants of the past before moving forward.

[166] It's kind of the perfect illustration of transition, of liminality.

[167] There is something that was very big in Great Britain for many centuries called Soling, possibly sort of precursor to trick or treat.

[168] People would go from house to house and offer to say prayers for your loved ones who were trapped in purgatory in exchange for food.

[169] And they were offered these little very specific cakes that were called soul cakes.

[170] This starts with beggars doing this.

[171] Eventually it becomes a sort of ritual that kids engage in.

[172] They would paint their faces with suit and would maybe put on some rags and would go from house to house and then be rewarded with these specific little soul cakes.

[173] As time carried on with new traditions replacing the old, Saoan became a distant memory.

[174] We start seeing far less references in Irish folklore and history to Saoan and many more to Halloween.

[175] Halloween wasn't just taking form in Ireland.

[176] The holiday was emerging in nearby England, Wales, Scotland, inspiring new kinds of poems.

[177] This one is from 1584 and is by a poet named Alexander Montgomery, a Scottish poet.

[178] In the hinder end of harvest on all hollow even, when our good neighbors do ride, if I read right, some buckled on a bunwad and some on a bean, some hobbled on a hemp steak, hovened to the height.

[179] This gets into the really deep Scottish dialect at the time, and it's a little bit hard to understand and read.

[180] This poem was written centuries after Sowan had begun its transformation into Halloween.

[181] An elf and an ape and an unselle begot into a pot by Pomerthorn.

[182] I can't verify any of the Scottish stuff because I don't know Scottish dialect.

[183] Right.

[184] But that was great.

[185] And while Halloween started to spread through Ireland, Scotland, and England, there was still a strong divide between these places.

[186] If you've watched any of the many BBC period dramas about this era, I've watched them all, you know that there was a ton of political maneuvering and feuding between the leaders of these nations at this time.

[187] And you know that witch hunts were carried out, an easy outlet for these political games.

[188] They mainly targeted women who didn't conform to social norms and accused them of being pagans loyal to the teachings.

[189] devil.

[190] These political games were all about power, power that was totally wrapped up in religion, specifically the Catholic Church.

[191] And in 1534, the King of England, Henry VIII, grew tired of a church a thousand miles away in Rome, telling him what to do, particularly when it came to a personal matter, his divorce.

[192] As a result, he broke off from the Catholic Church, laying the groundwork for the Church of England.

[193] A Protestant Reformation swept through the region.

[194] And before long, Catholicism was part of an old world order, right alongside pagans.

[195] But many in Ireland and Scotland remain loyal to the Catholic Church.

[196] And when a new king, James I, who was originally Scottish, took the throne a few decades later, one group in particular was targeted.

[197] He was obsessed with witches and with demonology.

[198] In fact, even wrote a famous treatise on demonology.

[199] the fearful abounding at this time in this country of these detestable slaves of the devil the witches or enchanters have moved me beloved reader to dispatch and post this following treatise of mine and so the first time that we see witches tied to Halloween is under his rule and he had a very big witch trial and that's the first time that we see mention of witches celebrate their Sabbath on Halloween.

[200] The Catholic Church had basically created Halloween.

[201] Halloween attracted witches and demons.

[202] So if you get rid of Halloween, you get rid of witches and demons, and you weaken the power of the Catholic Church.

[203] Such assaults of Satan are most certainly practiced, and the instruments thereof merits most severely to be punished.

[204] The British outlawed all Catholic celebrations, and so All Saints Day and Halloween kind of went underground at that point and were not hugely celebrated within England, although they remained popular in Scotland and Ireland.

[205] When we come back, Halloween hides in the shadows and gets tricked out.

[206] Hey, ThruLine.

[207] I am Lainey.

[208] I'm in Virginia.

[209] You're listening to ThruLine on NPR.

[210] Part 2.

[211] Trick or treat?

[212] One of the most famous fairy tales and folk legends told throughout Europe and later on the Americas is about a blacksmith named Jack.

[213] He loves to drink and so forth, and the devil comes for his soul, and he tricks the devil out of taking his soul.

[214] Finally, he runs out of luck.

[215] When he dies, heaven.

[216] and obviously doesn't want him, but now the devil is really angry at him and doesn't want him in hell either, and is afraid that if he lets him into hell, he'll start tricking him in hell.

[217] So the devil very reluctantly throws Jack a burning hell ember to light his way, and so Jack puts this burning hell ember in a carved gourd and uses that to light his way as he endlessly wanders the earth.

[218] And that's how he becomes known as Jack of the Lord.

[219] lantern or jacko lantern and that whole folk tale is where we get the connection with the carved pumpkin or earlier the carved turnip those carved turnips are actually extremely creepy you can look it up if you don't believe me anyway the legend of jack of the lantern who was also called stingy jack seems to reflect that while Halloween was relegated to the shadows people got more sneaky about how they celebrated they played fortune -telling games and kids were playing pranks One popular prank was inspired by Jack of the Lantern.

[220] They were carving this face into this turnup and lighting it from within and then putting it out in it like a hidden corner or around the edge of a house or something.

[221] Someone coming home late at night, suddenly stumbling on that, would be genuinely startled.

[222] Or they were doing these odd things like they would light a celery stock, which would smoke a lot and stick that up to a car.

[223] keyhole on someone's door and you would come home and find your house filled with smoke.

[224] But while one Jack was creating mischief in the shadows, another Jack seized the attention of the world, the Union Jack.

[225] In 1801, the United Kingdom, the UK, was formed.

[226] And the Union Jack was a name given to the flag that flew over it.

[227] This new country swallowed up England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, and forced all of them to report to a central government.

[228] in London.

[229] The UK reigned over a massive empire with colonies around the world.

[230] And over the next few decades, resistance to this new setup grew.

[231] People like Lady Wilde, who we met earlier, wanted Ireland to be independent, free from the clutches of the British.

[232] The Irish, they argued, were a people with a long, proud history, whose age -old customs had been preserved despite attempts to change them.

[233] In the islands off the west coast of Ireland, where the most ancient superstitions still exist.

[234] They have a strange custom.

[235] No funeral whale is allowed to be raised until three hours have elapsed from the moment of death because, they say, the sound of the cries would hinder the soul from speaking to God when it stands before him.

[236] The sound of the Irish Keen is wonderfully pathetic.

[237] No one could listen to the long -sustained, minor wail.

[238] of woman without strong emotion and even tears and once heard, it can never be forgotten.

[239] Around the middle of the 1800s, the Irish Kean, that haunting funeral whale, began to overpower the calls for Irish nationalism.

[240] People were dying left and right.

[241] The ultimate nightmare, a seed without harvest, a land without food, a vengeful environment, was becoming a reality.

[242] There was a massive famine happening.

[243] They even called it the Great Famine.

[244] Some called it the Great Hunger.

[245] And it was a terrible disaster happening, especially in Ireland.

[246] A disease tore through potato crops, a main staple in the Irish diet, and around a million people in Ireland died of starvation.

[247] It's unclear if things got so bad in Ireland because the central government in London intentionally ignored what was happening, or if the government was just ill -equipped to respond.

[248] Either way, it was devastating, and many Irish folk ultimately decided to leave home.

[249] As many as 2 million people fled in desperation.

[250] 500 ,000 of them...