At age six, I ordered a life-sized image of Dracula from the back page of a Superman comic book, and taped him to the rear of my bedroom door. My weekly routine back then included watching The Munsters and Bewitched on Thursdays, The Addams Family on Fridays, and waking up before everyone else on Saturday, turning on the bedside lamp, and staying under covers to to study each page of Homebodies, a collection of cheerfully macabre cartoons by Charles Addams. Little kids must have a need to face scary monsters in safe, packaged forms, enough to earn profit for the makers of Casper the friendly ghost and Wendy the Good Witch.
Fifty-two years later, I'm still drawn to monsters of the more genteel sort, civil vampires in evening dress and ghosts who haunt Victorian mansions. I admit that I like gusts of wind that twist branches of bare trees under roiling black clouds -- so long as I'm heading from my car to the warmth of my home.
But why? Looking inward, I have a few theories. For one, it's nostalgia. For another, an English major appreciates monsters as personifications of amorphous fears, and ghosts as metaphors for memory. Then again, I'm Episcopalian, amused at the logic that I shouldn't believe in a Holy Ghost if I can't accept the other kind. 
The church celebrates "All Saints" (i.e., all the Hallowed, or Holy) on November 1, and we pray for "All Souls" on November 2. Our All Hallow's Evening, or "Hallowe'en," is a last gasp for the dark spirits to make mischief before the Saints take over the next morning; but that's a pretty lame idea, as we believe those saints and Jesus himself are always with us. But this time of year, when our first cold days hammer shut the coffin of summer, before we experience sunlight sparkling on the frost of winter, it's natural to sense what the ancient Celts called a "thinning" between our world and the world of our fears, embodied by those scary monsters.
Bring on the bats, the howling wind, the branches scraping the window, and the ghosts of decades past.
[Photos, from top: That 6-ft. Dracula; "Grandpa Munster," who slept upside down and turned into a bat in a puff of smoke, played by Al Lewis, whom I personally encountered in 1987 at "Grandpa's Pizza" in Greenwich village, sitting at the entrance, a living advertisement; and a mash-up of a favorite frame from Chas Addams, "the kind of day that makes you feel good to be alive!" coupled with a stock photo of the sky on that kind of day. Below: From the internet, the cover of the Dec. 1967 issue of Wendy the Good Witch that I owned and wore thin with reading and copying.]
See my reflections on tangents to the same subjects:
- Addams Family, the musical;
- Bewitched Craft;
- My personal "literacy map" as a path up a moonlit "mountain of mystery"
Collect for Halloween
Creator of all that is, seen and unseen, You sent Your Holy Spirit to enlighten and protect us: help us find community with our neighbors and the souls of ages past, that we may overcome fear and differences to extend ourselves to the strangers among us. Amen.
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