With modern plastic Halloween here once more, there are more positive ways we can approach the festival and Andy has written a new article on this very subject for the Kindred Spirit website and given a new interview specifically on the subject of ghosts …
Andy says:
The paranormal is being given a bad name. In the run-up to Halloween, the mainstream media is, as usual, promoting its coverage with words like “terror”, “scary” and, of course, “spooky”, with presenters pulling silly fearful faces.
As my recent book STRANGE: Paranormal Realities in the Everyday World demonstrates, the paranormal can sometimes be dark but it can also be radiant, transformative and beautiful. The extraordinary intersects with very ordinary people in many ways on a daily basis, but a blend of both fear and ridicule has been used for many years to put a cultural lid on something we need to talk about more openly.
Encounters with unexplained phenomena of many kinds, as STRANGE explores, reveal a far more tantalising universe than the narrow vision we are sold by reductionists. Reality is, in truth, intriguingly leaky.
As Halloween approaches, then, let us celebrate the unknown, not demonise it, and remember the positive side of recognising multiple dimensions, inexplicable entities and the survival of consciousness beyond this world. The implications for us all are profound. Samhain, the festival at the root of Halloween, celebrated the cycles of both death AND life, after all.
With the above thoughts in mind, Kindred Spirit magazine’s website now features my full article on Re-enchanting Halloween and the Strange, which can be read for free.
Here is a short taster:
Grinning ghoulish pumpkins, grotesque ghosts with tortured faces, hook-nosed witches with decaying skin, monstrous spiders in thick cobwebs … Halloween is a celebration – or at least an acknowledgement – of all we perceive to be dark and evil, forever hovering on the edge of awareness.
But it is also a sign of a chronic Western inability to confront the cycles of life and death properly – we don’t want to face either oblivion or the complexity of multi-dimensional existence and so push it down into cartoonish Halloween minimalism instead. But there other ways of seeing this time of year. Boundaries between worlds were considered to be weak between the harvest and the winter, as nature moved from vibrancy to dormancy – but what lies beyond those boundaries may in truth be far more fascinating and a lot more nuanced than is mostly allowed for.
For a brighter, more positive side to Halloween and the paranormal, read on!:
Meanwhile, I recently gave an interview with The Grave Talks, an American audio podcast (yes, I know, the image is here is a ‘spooky’ one … but this is the logo!), focusing in on the themes of ghosts, spirits, interaction with the afterlife and mysterious apparitions. This show, presented by Carol Hughes, is a useful and subtle look at these aspects of the strange:
