HALLOWEEN ORIGINS
Whether one is a believer or a skeptic, Halloween in the U.S. might be the one time of the year that both stand united in simply having a good time in the shadow of such reported phenomena. The origins of Halloween itself lay in supernatural beliefs and an ancient Celtic festival that dates back some 2,000 years. Originally called Samhain (pronounced sow-in), the festival originated amidst the region now known as the United Kingdom and celebrated the one night each year that the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became indistinguishable. On this night, the Celts believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to Earth for good or for bad and allowed Druid priests to additionally interact with them for the wellbeing of them all.
Over the course of hundreds of years, early Christianity would attempt to suppress and replace the Celtic festival with All Saints' Day, which was celebrated on November 1, a holy day of obligation to honor saints and martyrs in the Christian faith. The celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints' Day) and the night before it, the night of Samhain, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween. But even the powerful influence of the church was unable to squelch the supernatural festival, and Halloween endured and flourished over the centuries to become the sensationalistic celebration it is today in the U.S.
COMMERCIALIZATION OF HALLOWEEN
In many ways, Halloween has become an outlet and a celebration of the paranormal and a creative way of putting a fun spin on mysterious phenomena that might usually invoke fear. During Halloween, which is now a multi-billion-dollar industry that comes second only to Christmas, the demand for entertainment, merchandise, and assorted supernatural, horror-themed supplies have skyrocketed. In addition to the traditional movie and TV entertainment that features spine-tingling chills, live-event haunted attractions have become the biggest rage, commonly selling-out. Several metropolitan areas in the U.S., including New York City, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay area, Miami, and Los Angeles all possess hundreds of horror-themed mazes and attractions, several of them major theme parks that have been transformed into fully integrated “scream attractions.”
While Halloween is still mostly an American commercial phenomenon, little by little every year, evidence that the spooky holiday is being embraced globally is being seen more and more. UNICEF itself has a special “Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF” program aimed to empower kids, not just in the U.S., but in other countries as well, by trick-or-treating for donations to help their counter-parts in need all over the world. The reluctance to embrace Halloween in other countries has been primarily due to the seriousness that the supernatural and paranormal is taken in other cultures. While the western world can make light of beliefs, both religious and metaphysical, other old-world cultures are very sensitive to and deeply immersed in their beliefs and find such playfulness like the Amercanized version of Halloween to be considered as taboo and, in some cultures, even sacrilegious.
Whether or not you are believer in other-worldly phenomena, one thing is for certain: with every passing year, the popularity of this spooky season grows to new heights along with the global, year-round fascination in the paranormal and supernatural. And while the majority of us will be reveling in a fun-filled Halloween season where scarier is often considered better, the knowledge that researchers like Christopher Chacon will be dealing with real-life paranormal phenomena somewhere in the world is an eerie reminder of what this scary season is based on.
