[There’s the old tale about the man walking on the beach where countless starfish have been pitched up by a wave to dehydrate and die at low tide. He spends his day pitching them back one by one into the water. “You can never save them all,” someone said as he reared back for another […]
People can talk to you all they want about the old meanings – the spiritual significance – of Halloween/Samhain/the Celtic Day of the Dead. Intellectual understanding is a lot different from emotional significance. For those who understand and in some sense respond to it, the last night of October is a powerful point of the […]
Either I mistake your shape and making quite, Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite Call’d Robin Goodfellow… William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream Halloween for most of us is just a seasonal event. Many people enjoy the chance to don costumes and prance about. We probably all enjoy the intriguing imagery of […]
The Halloween season is here, and for most of a month the imagery of things and beings supernatural and paranormal will besiege us in every medium. It shows us that the dark side of the psyche needs a vent – and that the imagery related is simply tantalizing. The universal supernatural being of legend is […]
To some extent we English speakers are raised on Aristotelian – Greek – thinking. Our whole conceptual system is based on absolutes and zero-sum games. (“Indeed, you have persuaded me, Socrates, that if a thing is of this quality it cannot also be of that…”) For the Native Americans it was different, and the Western […]
Traditions about races of magical, more-or-less human beings – fairies, leprechauns, Little People – exist in the folklore of many parts of the world. If the average person has an impression of their cultural origins, he or she probably thinks most often of Ireland. The Irish certainly stand out for their reverence and even pride […]
Every single spot of air or earth at Lily Dale is potentially haunted, at least according to its residents and devotees. Almost no reports of psychic phenomena are considered either unlikely or even too far out of the ordinary at this Spiritualist community nestled into the three lakes of Cassadaga, NY, about eight miles south […]
[The grandmothers were the ultimate keepers of much of the supernatural tradition, it seems, among the Allegany Seneca. In his childhood the late author and storyteller DuWayne “Duce” Bowen (1946-2006) used to overhear his own grandmother talk with the grandmother of the girl who’d become his wife Janis, and he remembered many of the tales […]
[Author’s Note: The small country burying-ground in the Town of Wales, Erie County, NY, known as Goodleberg is one of New York State’s most mythologized “haunted” cemeteries. It is also one of the most devastated. Toppled stones, plundered graves, and late-night rootin’ tootin’ are only some of the outrages that offend both living and dead. […]
But if thou, jealous, dost return to pry… By heaven, I will tear thee joint by joint And strew this hungry churchyard with thy limbs. Romeo, Act V, Romeo and Juliet Yes, it’s that time of year again. The summer months are on us and it’s sure to get hot at the peak of that […]