Autumn Musings

‘Season of mist and mellow fruitfulness’? I don’t think so, especially when you consider the worn out secondhand hurricanes we seem to be importing from America at the moment. In all reality, Autumn is a time of unpredictability. In fact some of the few certainties we have at this time of year are the facts that the nights are getting longer and daylight hours shorter. Calendar Customs too will follow their regular pattern and Bonfire Night and Halloween or Samhain approach with all their promise of excitement, fire and spookiness. The veil between the physical and spirit realms grow thin and who knows what may cross over into our world?

The tradition of telling tales around the fire may have received a setback with the advent of central heating (and for some reason there are those who prefer CGI to the use of their own imaginations), but the spooky tale lives on in the guise of the Urban Legend with their stories of strange happenings and mystery. I can’t remember who it was who claimed that Ghost Stories would fade away beneath the glare of electric lighting, but they couldn’t have been more wrong. Brighter lights just cast darker shadows and the creatures that live in this new dark are undead and well and waiting to haunt our lives in exactly the same way that they haunted the lives of those who dwelt in caves.

I feel I’m qualified in some ways to talk about all things haunted because, looking back, I now realise that I was brought up in a haunted home. From sinister laughter in the dead of night to spectral cats whisking by on the periphery of sight, there were so many strange incidents in the home of my childhood and youth I could fill a book with them, and perhaps, one day, I will.