Is Halloween Dying?

In the name of safety or religion, today’s kids are being deprived of a proper Halloween experience

I don't know when I first became aware of what I call the "anti-Halloween" movement in this country. Perhaps it was when I heard episode 213 of my favorite radio show, This American Life, titled "Devil on My Shoulder." It first aired on Public Radio International in the spring of 2002. The topic was Halloween—or rather people who for some reason oppose it.

I'm not a strongly religious person. I was raised as a once-weekly churchgoing Catholic. In the home in which I grew up, Halloween had nothing to do with religion. It was simply a time to dress in whatever costume you fancied that year. It was a chance to eat copious amounts of candy. Mostly it was a night of freedom—hours of running in the twilight from house to house in our suburban neighborhood, collecting candy with best friends.

The level of freedom once granted to children on that night would be unthinkable for most parents today. When did Halloween become so wrong—or so dangerous; when sex-offender databases became readily accessible on the Internet? The worst thing I remember happening at our house was the occasional smashed jack-o-lantern left lying in the road (something I still hate to see). The worst thing that happened while we were running around was when my best friend's wedding cake costume was ripped apart by a not-as-friendly-as-he-seemed dog. But no one was hurt. We never found needles in our chocolate bars; none of my friends were snatched up by kidnappers waiting for us in unmarked vans; not so much as a cavity could be blamed on that holiday (well, not directly). Even our black cat, "Frankenstein," made it through unscathed, year after year. Halloween was my favorite holiday.

But it's not the same for kids today.

It seems as if, over the last several years, there has been a quiet but persistent movement to do away with all the tacky, terrifying, and wonderful traditions that, to me, make Halloween so great. That brings us back to the radio show: this particular episode disturbed and offended me in a basic way. My reaction reminds me of the feeling I get when I see trucks driving around town with enlarged photographs of aborted fetuses emblazoned on the sides. It's not that I necessarily disagree that abortion has some awful consequences; I just can't bear having a message crammed down my throat. So when I heard this radio program, which focused on a "haunted" house called the Hell House, in Cedar Hill, Texas, it made me mad—partly for what it was trying to teach people and the way in which it was doing so, but mostly for its perversion of the traditional Halloween haunted house idea.

Hell House (which no longer operates, but is being copied as close to home as Grant, Alabama, in the form of Judgment House, www.grantjudgementhouse.com) claimed to be Bible-based and was sponsored by Cedar Hill's Trinity Church (an Assemblies of God church). It began in 1990 with the idea of scaring people into finding Jesus by depicting graphic scenes of various sins. Paying guests (as young as 12) were led through a series of rooms showing scenes from "unsaved" real life: a homosexual man dying of AIDS; drugs being ingested at a rave; a pregnant teenage girl getting an abortion. Then the guests enter "Hell," where they find the characters from the previous scenes languishing like the unrepentant sinners Trinity Church says they are. The final stop is a room where a leader tells visitors they can decide—then and there—whether they want to be saved from a similar fate by finding Christ.

Hell House operated for more than a decade and claims to have hosted 75,000 or so people, 15,000 of whom made commitments to Christ. The idea has been packaged and sold in a kit. Colorado-based pastor Keenan Roberts, who had a long-running hell house—also called judgment or reality houses—in Colorado, now sells "Haunted House Outreach Kits," guides to help others start similar houses of horror of their own towns. (The kit is billed on his church's web site as "the most 'in-your-face, high-flyin', no denyin', death-defyin', Satan-be-cryin', keep-ya-from-fryin', theatrical stylin', no holds barred, cutting-edge' evangelism tool of the new millennium!") The hell house idea even inspired an off-Broadway play of the same name in October 2006.

Hell House and its imitators are the extreme. But many churches have slowly but surely encouraged their congregations to do away with the traditional Halloween revelry in exchange for what they claim are safer, but arguably duller, affairs. Instead of letting kids who are old enough to know how to safely cross the street and stick with their buddies, and who undoubtedly carry cell phones, out for an hour to walk a pre-decided route of homes in their neighborhood, on Halloween night parents are driving their children to . . . church parking lots.

These are the sites of Harvest Festivals. These events confuse me. If kids are allowed to dress in costumes (some locations prohibit anything "scary") and collect candy, whether out of car trunks (for church-sponsored "Trunk or Treat" events) or at a booth in the church parking lot, then why not just call it a Halloween Festival? Better still, why not have a Harvest Festival, with all it implies—a season of abundance and overflowing cornucopias—during the day on Halloween, and still allow kids to enjoy the wild feeling of freedom they get for that one night of the year.

Many churches seem, ahem, hell bent on doing away with Halloween and images that they say are pagan celebrations of Satan. Enter the words "harvest festival" into any internet search engine and you'll find pages of church-sponsored web sites suggesting alternatives to such evil images as, say, jack-o-lanterns. They suggest carving angels or crosses into pumpkins instead of goofy, happy, or scary faces. (There's even a web site where kids and adults alike—if they simply must celebrate Halloween—can order Catholic-themed costumes, such as a Fransiscan friar, Jesuit priest, or the pope: www.catholichomeandgarden.com/Catholic_Costumes.htm

Some people might argue that it's not the supposed Satan-worshipping aspect of Halloween that makes it inherently bad, but rather the lack of meaning the holiday has, except to promote make-believe, mischief-making, and gluttony. (For an interesting article on the Halloween's origins, read: "What's Behind Halloween" at www.tinyurl.com/2whcf3.) But what's wrong with a holiday that has no other purpose except wild abandon, as long as no one gets hurt? If you're really feeling guilty the next day about just how many Reese's Peanut Butter Cups you ate, or the slightly-too-slutty costume you wore, you can somberly celebrate the Day of the Dead, or All Saints Day and All Souls Day, November 1 and 2.

Maybe what it all comes down to is that I'm just disappointed. I recently purchased my first home in a safe suburb full of kids, but none of them showed up at my door last year to ask for candy. While I no longer wish to get dressed up and trick or treat, I at least want to share the holiday spirit by decorating my house to entice kids up our steep driveway, so I can see their cute, creative costumes and the look on their faces when I drop treats into their bags. If my toddler can stay up past sundown maybe we'll take him on a whirl through the neighborhood to collect some candy (for, let's be honest, his parents). If not, I'll look forward to answering the doorbell to anyone who rings to indulge in a little Halloween heraldry—I promise I won't hand out anything healthy.

Spooky Sounds

If you're like me, your record player was one of your most beloved possessions as a child. I had records that told stories, some that I thought had the hippest music, and a few geared specifically toward the holidays. One record in particular—one of the earliest I remember owning—was a Halloween-themed album of spooky songs that, I now realize, could be used in a pre-school curriculum (that's about how old I was). I listened to that record year 'round, but lost it when I grew older and my record collection turned to tapes, then CDs, then . . . well you know the story. So it was with great relish that I discovered Forbidden Crypts of Haunted Music (www.tinyurl.com/gxpd7).

This site may host the largest collection of Halloween music on the web, consisting of uploads of 85 vinyl records and scanned-in album art. Site master Dave writes, "Welcome to the Forbidden Crypts Of Haunted Music! I am making each album into a listening sound page! I hope you enjoy listening to them as much as I did recording them! For those of you who think the sound files have too many pops and clicks, good—That's the way I meant them to sound. Just like you are listening to the albums yourself!"

If you had a favorite Halloween album when you were young, you are very likely to find it here, where you can download it in its entirety (in MP3 format), including album cover art. The site is very popular and takes a while to load, but so far the MP3s are free (though a donation is requested). Just click on the album cover of your choice and relive the memories. And here's the record that started it all for Dave (one I also had as a child and loved—my parents played it every Halloween night on a tape recorder hidden on our front porch): Disney's Chilling, Thrilling Sounds Of The Haunted House (www.tinyurl.com/yjwnqr).

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