David J. Skal - Halloween: The History of Americas Darkest Holiday

David J. Skal

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

Mineola, New York

Copyright

Copyright 2002 by David J. Skal

New Material Copyright 2016 by David J. Skal

Foreword Copyright 2016 by Todd Robbins

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

Halloween: The History of Americas Darkest Holiday, first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 2016, is a slightly revised republication of Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween, originally published in 2002 by Bloomsbury, New York. For this edition, the author has provided a new Afterword and a new set of illustrations, and Todd Robbins has written a new Foreword.

International Standard Book Number

eISBN-13: 978-0-486-81282-3

Manufactured in the United States by RR Donnelley

805212012016

www.doverpublications.com

To the memory of my

mother and father,

from their little monster.

CONTENTS

When the owls begin to hoot,

Quickly don your mummers suit,

Steal softly out and dont be late,

For Halloween decides your fate!

an early-twentieth-century postcard

FOREWORD AND FOREWARNED

I ETS face it.

There is darkness within us all.

Carl Jung stated, Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people. This darkness within us seems to only become a problem when someone attempts to deny its existence or to suppress it. Darkness will not stay buried forever and when it comes out and it will if it has been bottled-up then it will come out in very ugly ways. Weapons will be drawn and bad things will happen.

As the host of True Nightmares on the Investigation Discovery Channel, I know a bit about the malevolent quantities of human nature. I firmly believe that our dark side needs to be exercised, not exorcised. We occasionally need to let it come out and play.

And that is what Halloween is all about.

As you are about to discover in the following pages, this holiday has a rich cultural history and is so much more than just free candy and slutty bumble bee costumes. Halloween has been traveling for centuries down a shadowy twisted road and has taken many turns before it arrived as the event we know it to be today.

And fortunately for you, this journey has been chronicled by David J. Skal. He is the rare writer whose nonfiction is both impressive ly thorough and joyously readable. His writing has qualities similar to the works of A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. He paints word pictures that give the reader a true and deep appreciation of the subject matter. And though he has a distinctive voice and point of view, he never lets these get in the way of allowing the true character of what he is writing about to come through.

Appropriately, I met David many years ago on a Halloween night. It was in Ogden, Utah at the university there. I was at the school performing my sideshow act of eating glass and hammering nails into my nose. David was there doing a talk as part of the promotional tour for his Tod Browning biography Dark Carnival. We went out to dinner and it was a meal filled with great conversation about all things sinister. I found David to be a true gentleman and appreciated that he didnt use the fact that he is far smarter than I am as a weapon.

Fortunately for all of us, David uses his mind for the powers of goodominous good, but good nevertheless. If this is your first encounter with David as a writer, then I know you will be eager to investigate his other literary offerings. You will be please to find that they cover similar eerie topics, with a number of them delving into the world of vampires in general and the Dracula saga specifically. So sink your fangs into them and enjoy!

And you can also spend time with the man himselfon video. When I was approached to help with the creation of the DVD of Tod Brownings gloriously infamous classic film Freaks, I enthusiastically recommended that David do the commentary tract for that film. He did a superb job with it and Im sure that Tod Browning is lying in his grave smiling.

As for this book, you will find that it is all treat with the only trick being the wonderfully charming turn of a phrase with which David will surprise you. He has a gift for deft juxtaposition, to wit: David cites an article from the Jazz Age about how to make Halloween costumes out of lightweight paper and comments, There are no depictions of flaming human torches though the close proximity of candles and all that crepe paper suggest that such occurrences would not have been all that rare in the Roaring Twenties, when laissez-faire ruled and the Consumer Product Safety Commission didnt. The inquisitors of the Salem witch trials believed that physical abnormalities on a persons body denoted that the person was a witch, therefore it gave prurient Puritans a handy justification for endless strip-searching, without the necessity for soul-searching. In describing the appeal of the campiness found in the San Francisco gay community, David writes, If many people came to the city with flowers in their hair, then a good number of them also ended up replacing the flowers with tiaras. These are but a few examples of the breezy wryness you will encounter lurking on every page.

In conclusion, a word of warning. No matter what time of day you read this book, and no matter what the weather is like, you will find that as you read along it will become a dark and stormy night. And if you choose to pore over the pages of this book in the evening, you might have nightmares, and you dont want nightmares, do you?

Of course you do.

I hope you and your dark side enjoy this book.

Todd Robbins

January, 2016

Todd Robbins is an American television host, magician, carnival performer, lecturer, author, actor, and with Teller, co-creator of the hit show Play Dead.

INTRODUCTION

THE CANDY MANS TALE

B ECAUSE IT WAS raining on Halloween 1974, Ronald Clark OBryan, a thirty-year-old optician in suburban Houston, accompanied his eight-year-old son Timothy and five-year-old daughter Elizabeth on their eagerly awaited neighborhood rounds of trick or treat.

Cautious parents knew that Halloween was already the most dangerous night of the year for children, even without rain. Halloween was traditionally believed to be the night when the veil between life and death was at its most transparent. On a purely statistical basis, this was indeed true. Youthful traffic fatalities rose precipitously and tragically every October 31, owing to masked kids drastically reduced fields of vision, not to mention the reduced visibility of the children themselves, often dressed in costumes that merged dangerously with the murk.

Ronald OBryan was just one foot soldier in a new, nationwide army of vigilant parents who took to the streets with their children each Halloween. It had once been considered safe for children to roam unchaperoned through their neighborhoods on Beggars Night, but now parents were wary. They werent concerned about the childrens mischief historically associated with the holiday the soaped windows, toilet-papered trees, and quaintly toppled outhouses were mostly things of the nostalgic past. Most modern children, in fact, would be totally baffled if a contrarian householder demanded a trick in lieu of dispensing the expected sweet. Now, many commentators bemoaned the transactions degeneration into an empty consumer ritual without rhyme, reason, or reciprocity. The anthropologist Margaret Mead, observing the decline of any implied threat in trick or treat by the mid-1970s, waxed nostalgic about earlier times when trick-or-treating had a distinct role in the socializing of children: It was the one night in the year when the childs world and the adults world confronted each other and children were granted license to take mild revenge on the adults.