According to the ancient Celts, Hallowe’en (the Celtic new year) is a time when the veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead is parted…it is uspposed to be a time when the spirits of the dead roam at will, and sometimes make themselves known to us the living.
Anyway, I’m tired of the usual Hallowe’en parties, and would like to make this Halloween a more serious occasion-I would like to attempt to contact some of those wandering spirits…so how is this best done? Do we have a handholding sceance? Black candles at midnight?
Finally, how do I capture the spirits on audiotape-will a cassette recorder do?
Anybody have experience with this?
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You can’t capture spirits on mechanical recording media. It’s just a “given”, that it won’t work.
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The “black candles at midnight” thing is more of a Satanic Black Mass thing, which is probably not what you had in mind.
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You can hire a psychic to come to your house and hold a seance. Check the Yellow Pages or the Internet, under things like “Psychic” and “Palm reading”. Even if the psychic or palmist herself doesn’t do seances, she’ll know someone who does.
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The easiest and cheapest thing to do is to buy a Ouija board at Toys R Us.
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You do know it’s all just pretend, don’t you, Ralph?
…Ralph?
I prefer to contact spirits in bars…
Look in the Yellow Pages under “Liquor Stores”.
And then there’s the whole “Bloody Mary” legend.
This is one of those stories which is a local legend, but apparently local to the entire country. It claims that there is an old witch/evil woman/unfortunate, innocent soul who died in a terrible accident/woman whose sad life drove her nuts/who died decades ago/decades and decades ago/sometime/who will appear to people if they call to her in the prescribed fashion while looking into a mirror.
When I was growing up in St. Louis in the 1960s she was known as Mary Worth, and this seems to be one of the names most commonly given to her. Folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand has suggested that the name of the venerable comic strip character became tangled up with the legend over time because it familiar, and vaguely sounded right to people who couldn’t remember some other name given the character. Another common name for the figure is Mary Whales; this appears to be a name favored in Indianapolis.
The wonderful NPR show “This American Life” did a program once about summer camps. In one segment a reporter joined a group of boys as they crowded into a restroom at their camp one night and chanted “Bloody Mary” fifty times in succession. As they did so, they stared into a mirror, and each posed as though he was cradling a baby in his arms.
If they did it “right”, the ghost of Baby Blue, Bloody Mary’s infant who died along with her, was supposed to materialize in their arms. Some of the boys weren’t sure but that they might have felt something for an instant. I believe their was some reference to a tradition that Mary and her child had died horribly in a car crash.
The ritual I learned as a boy was considerably easier. Mary Worth was said to have been an old Ozark witch, and to summon her one needed only to stand in front of a mirror in a totally dark room while calling out “Mary Worth” three times in a loud, clear voice. Mary was then supposed to appear as a glowing apparition in the mirror, looking over your shoulder and cackling manically.
I never tried it myself. A woman I knew in college, however, who had grown up in a suburb of St. Louis told me once about a party she attended in high school. This would have been circa 1972. A friend had gone into the bathroom alone and tried the chant. She then started sobbing hysterically, convinced that the old witch had actually appeared behind her.
It should probably be noted that my informant had something of a penchant for substance abuse. I am not sure but this might have been a prominent feature of this particular get-together.
Not that it is really relevant, but I seem to dimly recall a Green Acres episode which may have drawn on the legend for inspiration. In it the Douglas’ farmhouse was supposed to be haunted and Mrs. Douglas, who always seemed to be on her own, private, wavelength eventually finds that she can communicate with the ghost of an old hag who can be seen only in a mirror. Does anyone remember this?
There have also been various attempts through the years to devise a radio or radio-like device for tuning in spirits. The best-known instance of this concerns a psychic researcher somewhere in eastern Europe named Raudive who made thousands of recordings of white noise in the 1960s. He, and a number of normally sober-minded scientists, thought they could faintly hear the voices of ghosts mixed in among the static. Maybe: though in one notorious incident it was found that a “nonsense” word he picked up was, in fact, the last name of a disc jockey. He had actually picked up, ever so faintly, a rock show broadcast in, I believe, Luxembourg.
Recently I stumbled on a schematic for a ghost radio while surfing the 'net. The circuitry looked pretty simple (or simple-minded, depending on one’s point of view). The most interesting part was how you needed to attach a toy balloon filled with exhaled breath of a medium.
s
It was the spirits.
Google is your friend.Instructions
I can tell you, but I’d have to kill you.
(one…two…three… . If you don’t get it by now, you never will.)