Editorial of 10/26/2023

Ghost Story

Next Tuesday is All Hallows’ Eve, more commonly known as Hallowe’en, a celebration observed by Christians across the globe on October 31 as the eve of the feast of All Saints Day, which is a day to honor the dead, including saints, martyrs and the faithful departed. It’s the night the kids dress up in their outlandish costumes of choice, parade up Otsego County’s Main Streets and fill their bottomless bags with all measure of calorie-enhanced candy. It is also the night that is filled with ghosts, both familiar and foreign, who are thought to roam the universe with spirit-filled, at times frightening, abandon.

Hallowe’en became a commonly celebrated event in the United Sates at the end of the 19th century, when the Irish and Scottish immigrants brought the tradition with them. At first acknowledged only by those communities, by the early 20th century it was welcomed by people of all social, racial and religious backgrounds. Artifacts and symbols were added to the merry festival through time: jack-o-lanterns—pumpkins by another name—were Irish folklore, said to represent a soul who has been denied entry into both heaven and hell; black cats are associated with witches; scarecrows are reminiscent of the harvest; pranks—tricks or treats—were first mentioned in 1780 by the Scottish poet John Mayne; and the supernatural—ghosts—appeared in the poem “Halloween,” by Robert Burns in 1780, where they were referred to as frights.

In folklore, a ghost is, among various accounts, the soul or spirit of a departed person or animal that is believed to be able to appear to the living, or to at least some of the living. Ghosts can be invisible presences, wispy shapes or realistic forms. Our ghost comes from the Old English gāst, meaning the living or deceased human spirit or soul. It also denotes any good or evil spirit, such as angels or demons. Ghosts appeared in ancient Egypt; Homer wrote of them in both “Odyssey” and “Iliad”; Macbeth saw the ghost of Banquo in Shakespeare’s play of 1606; Horace Walpole put them in his 1764 gothic novel “The Castle of Oranto”; Charles Dickens wrote in 1843 of the Christmas ghosts. The Flying Dutchman is a legendary ghost ship; ChatGPT will ghost write anything and everything.

In this country, Edith Wharton wrote ghost stories in the early 1920s; “Casper the Friendly Ghost” appeared in the 1930s; “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” in 1947. Topper was a hit show in the 1960s and Disneyland opened The Haunted Mansion in August 1969, a tad late as haunted houses first appeared in the 9th-century collection of Middle Eastern folktales, “Arabian Nights.” Ghosts filled the movies from the 1970s on, including “Field of Dreams” (1989), “Ghost” (1990), “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (from the 1980s), and they are still here, although much more dramatic, noisy and horrific.

According to the findings of the Pew Research Center, 18 percent of Americans say they have seen a ghost. In Cooperstown, there is a vast history of ghosts. From the Christ Church Graveyard to River Street, where there are almost more ghosts—a man, a woman and a Native American, all within an arm’s length of each other—than houses, and on to Lake Street, where an old woman screams, Cooperstown Candlelit Ghost Tours tells their story with knowledge and care. The Farmers’ Museum presents “Things that Go Bump in the Night” this week, and, at the other end of the lake, Hyde and Shriek terrifies at Hyde Hall, the home of two centuries of ghostly apparitions.

Happy Hallowe’en.