BACK THEN, EACH HALLOWEEN my mother would hurry her four daughters into the minivan and ferry us seven minutes away to an old office building turned church, where we would meet with the congregation, lights dimmed and chairs pulled into a tight circle, to pray against the spirits being unleashed upon the world.
During that seven-minute drive, we weren’t to look out the van windows. Who knew what prowled the streets on Halloween? We always left the house in daylight, when we were safest, but some trick-or-treaters started early, and once they were out, so was harm.
Ghosts and witches, shadows and spirits, demons waiting to possess, humans aligned with Lucifer. We were at war, Christian soldiers, and on October 31, the war spilled out onto every street in the city, Satan rising, only the truest of saints fighting back.
There were signs to prove this. One year my black cat went missing, and we found her the next day stuffed into a mailbox, unhurt but scared. Only a person possessed by darkness could hurt an animal, I knew. Some years teenagers strung toilet paper up on tree branches or streaked brick houses yellow with egg yolks or smashed pumpkins on doorsteps. Neighbors filled their yards with murder scenes and gravestones. Evil surrounded us. October, our call to action.
“Why?” we wanted to know. Why, with the battle lines so clearly drawn, did even our churchgoing friends collect candy on Halloween? Why did they watch Casper the Friendly Ghost and Fantasia and sing songs about ghost hunting and monster mashing? Why shove their children into costumes and push them out the door to mingle with witches and whatever agents Satan had thrown up into the world for his own ill amusement.
“They’ve been deceived,” our mother would say.
We understood that. We understood that we were different, this community we were part of, which prided itself on being in the world and not of the world. Let your babies grow up unvaccinated and drink unpasteurized milk and raise your own chickens and grind your own wheat and homeschool your children and rename the days of the week with words that aren’t idolatrous and celebrate Passover instead of Easter because Easter is pagan and Christmas is pagan and the months of the year are pagan and we are not pagan.
They meant to protect us from the world. I know this now. It had hurt them so badly. Isn’t that the way of every ghost story, though? The ghosts you least expect are the ones that really get you in the end.
There were sicknesses that grew silently in our secluded little world. Men licensed to cruelty, all-powerful heads of their households, the family’s direct line to an angry god. There were daughters who went uneducated, babies who nearly died, mental illness that was never prayed away. All the vigilance in the world on Halloween night couldn’t protect us from the demons we’d already surrendered to.
More Octobers would pass than I care to admit before I believed I had any say in what happened to my own body. More Octobers would pass than I care to admit before I understood that shelter doesn’t always equal safety.
As I sit here this Halloween, my neighborhood streets are alive with trick-or-treaters, and my porch light is on. Every few sentences, I pause to open the door to a bumblebee or jedi or dinosaur. A neighbor introduces herself, and her children pet my dog while we exchange numbers. I’m trying to be in the world and of the world and in love with the world and grieved for the world and broken by the world and also healed by the world. I’m trying to fling the door wide open, to dance in a circle with the witches and help them cast their powerful spells, to teach the ghosts to shout their histories at the top of their lungs, to sit my demons down and pass the time with them until they talk to me.
On those Halloween drives to church every year, I mostly kept my eyes hidden, but sometimes I peeked. I looked out the windows and toward the gutters, where I was sure I would see the shimmer of ghosts against the setting Texas sun, the spirit world alive and awake and haunting. I saw crowds of children running together in felted costumes. I saw parents carrying their babies. I saw plastic pumpkins filled with candy, and there, a flicker of sunlight through the oak tree, its leaves even in October still so green and so bright.
Courtney Craggett is the author of the story collection Tornado Season (Black Lawrence). Her short stories appear in The Pinch, Mid-American Review, Baltimore Review, Washington Square Review, CutBank, and Monkeybicycle, among others.
Photo by Neven Krcmarek on Unsplash
