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 Hello everyone, and Happy Halloween/Samhain season to you all. I am honored to have Allison Jornlin on our podcast episode 48, kicking off season 5!

FEMALE PARANORMAL INVESTIGATORS

Allison Jornlin has been investigating strange phenomena for more than 20 years. Inspired by Chicago’s Richard Crowe, one of the pioneers of U.S. ghost tourism, she developed Milwaukee’s first haunted history tour in 2008. Allison currently works as a self-proclaimed "professional weirdo," speaking throughout the U.S., writing for a variety of publications, and developing haunted history tours for American Ghost Walks. Her lifetime passion project is paranormalwomen.com, where she sets the record straight about the unsung female trailblazers of paranormal investigation, parapsychology, and psychical research.

American Halloween and Pagan Samhain are very different holidays. Neither are Asatru, or heathen, but because they are celebrated by the wider local community, this year I celebrated both. My experiences at the Samhain Soiree appear second in this post, after the link to an American Halloween celebration for those who wish to have one.

American Halloween is a fine community tradition. My street does it all together as a street fair, which we started doing in 2020 so we could move Halloween outside for safety, but we kept doing it because it was more fun this way. American Celebration Kindred does both Asatru holidays and American holidays. 

Did Halloween originally mean “hallowed evening”?

Did All Hallow's originally mean “all-holy [evening]”?

Was Hallows—used by some as a spellable, pronounceable alternative to the problematic Irish “Samhain”—an old pagan name for the holiday?

No, no, and no.

Hálig (HAH-lee-yeh) was the Old English adjective that meant—and eventually became—“holy”. Substantivized—i.e. made into a noun—this became hálga, a masculine noun denoting a holy person or thing. After Christianization, it became the standard word for a saint: i.e. a holy person. Until 1066, this word—which would become our hallow—was the standard English word meaning “saint.”

(The fact that we now use the French word instead of the native English one tells its own story. The Church has always favored the conqueror over the conquered.)

So Halloween didn't originally mean “hallowed evening”, nor All Hallow's "all-holy", but rather the "Saints' Eve" and "All Saints' [Eve]" respectively.

In effect, they're worn-down forms of old names for a Christian holiday.

Does it matter?

I don't know about all of you, but I have had many black cats in my life. The last one who was a furry family member lasted to the ripe old age of 22! Bootsie was a sweetheart—so gentle, so loving—a true gift to be a part of of our lives for so long. Many times when we adopt a pet, it is believed that they choose us, as much as we choose them. I believe that to be true.

Feline Friendships

That certainly has been the case for my dear longtime friend, Mary Domhan. If anyone is a cat whisperer, she's the one. She has the power to tame ferals, and cats always seem to find her. In my Halloween podcast episode (number 36) for "Women Who Howl at the Moon," I talk to her at length about her artwork and new Edgy Cat Designs website. If you are a lover of all things feline, you will delight in the cards, art prints, and stickers she has a available. If you're shopping for a cat lover friend, I have no doubt you will find it at her website!

So I saw a meme recently with a close-up of the infamous Wicked Witch of the West from the original “Wizard of Oz” classic film. It read, “You call it September, I call it October Eve.” Of course I shared it immediately—what Halloween fiend wouldn’t? I have found that I spend the better part of September in anticipation and excitement of what’s to come right on the next page of the calendar corner. I mentally prepare, I scout out fun local events happening and mark the ones that I’d like to attend as “interested.” In many cases, I pencil in all the things I want to do, books I want to read, movies I want to watch (and in many cases rewatch as an annual ritual) all over my Llewellyn Witches’ Datebook. I’m truly a kid at heart when it comes to this time of year—as I’m sure many of you are—and I hope to be until my dying day. In fact, when I was earning my journalism degree and one of our early semester assignments was to write our own obituary, I imagined that I would be found watching scary movies on the 31^st.

October Eve Ritual

Next September 2023, why not start your own, “October Eve” ritual? Haul out all of your favorite decorations (I always like to add a few new ones each year, too) and take your time putting them up and hanging them just so. Play some spooky music as your soundtrack as you do so. Sip some nice fall wine and enjoy the experience as a sensual/sensuous one. You may want to do this the night before October 1^st, two nights before October 1^st, or heck, as early as you want in September, whatever floats your ghost ship! You might want to mix it up and put different decorations in different rooms or create different arrangements each year. I tend to be a traditionalist like my dear grandmother was and put the same pieces in the same spots annually. I even have themed rooms for the types of decorations: Kitchen witches, black cat back bedroom, vampire bat bathroom, you get the idea. If you’re lucky enough to have a home with a nice front yard and love to go all out with your transformation theme, by all means, go for it. Nothing makes the majority of your Halloween fan neighbors more delighted than driving or walking by a wickedly clever front yard and house display all season long.

Let's face it: modern Yule has undergone a thorough Christmasization.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, just a fact. Still, when we scrape away the encrusted barnacles from the ship of Yule—when we look, for instance, at the extended Winter Solstice celebrations of the Kalasha of what is now northwestern Pakistan, the last Indo-European-speaking people to have practiced their traditional religion continuously since ancient times—what emerges is revealed as something both strange and familiar beyond telling.

The same may be said for Samhain, now thoroughly reshaped by its proximity to Halloween, and by the Christian festivals of All Saints' and All Souls' Days.

When, however, we look at Samhain as it used to be—Samhain as recorded in the old lore—a new-old landscape emerges before us, a land both familiar and strange.

That is what makes the following little poem so remarkable. On the face of it—until you get to the last stanza, anyway—there's little that seems to be about Samhain at all. (Oh, but look deeper, my friend!)

Even more remarkable is the fact that this enumeration of the essentials of Samhain-ness is not, in fact, ancient, but a modern poem: an excerpt from a longer poem, “Fionn's Migrations,” in Martin Shaw and Tony Hoagland's 2020 Cinderbiter: Celtic Poems.

Listen, now.

Samhain Is the Name of the Season

 Nine Schools of Thought

When is Samhain?

As one would expect, authorities disagree.

Stuffy (also: Traditionalist) School

Samhain begins at sundown on October 31, the First of the Three Nights of Samhain.

Hey: if the Gregorian calendar was good enough for the ancestors, it's good enough for me.

Old School

Old Samhain comes on 11-12 November.

Hey, if the Julian calendar was good enough for the ancestors, it's good enough for me.

I suppose you're one of those neo-pagans?

Old Craft

Do you maybe mean All Hallows? Or, better, All Saints?

Protective coloration, dude. It's all about protective coloration.

Slapdash School

It's Samhain whenever the coven has time to get together.

Usually this means the Saturday closest to Halloween, but if it's December 3 instead, tough.

What the f*ck is the “Three Nights of Samhain”?

Purist (also: Astronomical) School

Samhain falls at the precise midpoint between astronomical Autumn Equinox and astronomical Winter Solstice.

Hey: if astronomical precision was good enough for the ancestors, it's good enough for me.

“Three Nights of Samhain”? Did you perhaps by any chance mean the Trinox Samoni?

American Trendy School

Samhain = Halloween (or, as true Trendies would insist, Hallowe'en). Samhain begins at midnight on October 30, and ends at midnight on October 31.

That means that the Eve of Samhain is actually October 30.

Well, that's what they say.

American Commercial School