The rain is torrential here in Northumberland this Halloween, and the sky is dark. It is all very fitting for the Day of the Dead, and I’m quite happy to remember my loved lost ones from the warmth of inside!
The beauty of researching a time-travel novel is that I get to discover all sorts of things about what people believed in long-ago times, and how much of it still applies to people today. Regardless of technology, and of developments in all sciences, people now are much as they were then – humans who loved and lost and grieved, who searched for answers and longed for meaning.
Also, they loved a good scary story – and in the wilds of North Carolina, in the mid-eighteenth century, the fears awoken by those stories would have been even closer to the surface, and seemed an awful lot more real. Who’s to tell where truth ended and folklore began?
The ghost-witch known as the Skadegamutc is a perfect example for this eeriest day of the year. Believed to emerge after the killing of an evil magician, the Skadegamutc becomes a ghost-witch who clings to the shadows of life, rising at night to curse any who see him, and to feast on human flesh. If you are unlucky enough to meet one of these at the dead of night the only way to kill it forever is by fire.
Fire is a constant through many of our mythologies worldwide. Unsurprisingly, since fire represents warmth and light and, therefore, safety. Fire can keep the worst of the demons away and kill those who come too close. Which leaves us to wonder… what do we do in these days of modern technology, when we don’t live closely with one another, telling stories and sharing the safety of a communal fire? When we are remote and separate under the cold electric light? Will the demons of the past sneak in on the skinny shadows…
Or will we welcome the thinning of the veil, and the opportunity to greet our long lost loved ones, with open arms, ready to share the joys of the past year and the hopes for the next, just as we might have when they were warm and alive?
Happy Halloween…. sweet dreams….
