Gettin' Spooked
How folk tales and Halloween decorations make our fears a little smaller
(I don’t have an audio version of today’s essay. My family and I have had the flu for two weeks, and I’m still coughing too much to record.)
My four-year-old daughter asked to look at the fancy Halloween lawn decorations in the store. Since this is the child who was overstimulated and frightened by the end of the movie Up, I was a little surprised that she wanted a closer look at the ghouls, skeletons, and witches.
She tiptoed up, shoulders hunched, and turned to give me a nervous smile.
“Isn’t it spooky?” I asked with an encouraging grin. “Spooky means you’re a little scared but still having fun.”
Her smile grew, and she laughed up at the skeleton clown leering down at her. “Yes, it’s so spooky!” We walked around the fake tombstones and white-sheet ghosts, and she confided, “None of it is real.” Her shoulders had relaxed, and she chatted with me for a few minutes about her favorite decorations.
Maybe I got lucky. I’m pretty sure that impulsive decision of mine could have backfired. I had hoped that if she got to test her courage a little and take a closer look, she would see through the smoke and mirrors to see that these “monsters” held no terror. If I had hurried her past them as “too scary,” they might have become so. I want her to look shrewdly at scary things and see that, nine times out of ten, they’re not real. Just spooky.
In miniature, this is why people like being a little scared, and why every year people like to flesh out their fears with some costumes, decorations, and spooky stories.
Flip through any collection of folk tales, and you’ll find quite a few ghost stories. They don’t need any grotesque details or gore. What really scares us is quite simple: dark, lonely places; the eerie feeling that someone or something is right behind you; the sense that not everything can be explained by natural laws; and the powerlessness we have over fate, particularly Death.
So these stories often unearth our fears, poking a little fun at them while offering stern reminders to show respect for the dead.
In one Icelandic folktale, a young girl goes into a graveyard after dark to gather the washing and sees a silent figure on a tombstone. Thinking it is her brother trying to scare her, she steals the cap from his head and runs inside.
But inside, her brother is already waiting for her, and the cap in her hand is moldy and earthy.
The next day, the solemn ghost remains on the tombstone. The frightened townsfolk decide that she must replace the cap at dark while everyone looks on.
She marches up to him, rams the cap on his head, and shouts, “There! Are you satisfied?”
In an instant, the ghost strikes her to the ground and bellows, “And you, are you satisfied?” before sinking into the earth.
An English folktale warns those who would try to scare other people.
A young man was in the habit of getting drunk at the pub, so his friend decides to try to scare him straight. He chalks himself up to look like a ghost and takes up a stance in the church graveyard, where the drunk man will be walking home.
When the drunkard passes by, he looks into the graveyard and remarks, “Huh. There’s two of you tonight!”
His friend turns around and looks right into two glowering eyes. He dies of fright.
Perhaps most famously, this Middle-Eastern story reminds us that we cannot escape our fate.
A man is walking through Baghdad when he bumps into Death, who raises a hand as if to strike. The terrified man flees, not just the marketplace, but the city, traveling many miles to Samarra. A bystander asks Death why he had frightened the man, and Death responds that he was merely surprised to see him in Baghdad. “I have an appointment with him in Samarra tonight.”
These folktales don’t inspire terror, although I could have picked a few others that freaked me out a lot more as a child. (If you’re interested, google “Tailypo.”) Instead, they offer the chance to walk a little closer to our fears and, like a very brave little girl I know, sort through what’s real, what’s not, and hopefully, walk away a little braver.