September had hardly drawn breath when I noticed the ominous trappings of Halloween creeping into the shops. I don’t know about you, but the very sight of grinning skulls, witches’ hats and effigies of old hags pointing bony fingers is not a vision I welcome.
In recent times, it seems these displays have become ever more ghoulish and macabre. Is it just a bit of harmless fun — we’re all intrigued by the paranormal, especially children — or is there something more sinister afoot?
Halloween, or the Celtic festival of Samhain, began over 2,000 years ago, to mark the transition from summer to winter. Pagans believed that on the night of October 31 the veil between the worlds was at its thinnest, so the spirits of the dead could easily cross over. The purpose of dressing up in scary costumes was to frighten them off.
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Back in the day, during my 1960s childhood, our celebrations were very modest in comparison to now. We children heard ghost stories about ‘the little people’ from the mouths of old-timers who came on their céile. When television arrived we sneaked in the occasional Hammer Horror offering when our parents were out on their céile. The sight of Christopher Lee sinking his fangs into pale, pretty necks was enough to give us nightmares.
I never saw a hazelnut — indeed nuts of any kind — until Halloween night, when my father got the hammer out to smash them to smithereens on the kitchen floor. My mother’s contribution was a huge apple pie with the ‘gift’ of an old 20p piece embedded in the crust. The fact that we never actually swallowed the thing is a miracle in itself.
We were sent to bed with a clip around the earhole and sore jaws from having dunked too many apples. We never went trick-or-treating — we lived on a farm, so traipsing miles in the darkness was out of the question. Dressing up in cobweb costumes was therefore not an option. Nor was gobbling down chocolate eyeballs, fizzy monsters, much less feasting on zombie body parts. Did we miss out? I reckon we did... to an extent.
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But things have shifted up a gear since those innocent days. Now children carry the whole world in their hands in the shape of mobile phones, and can watch, read and listen to literally anything they choose. The Harry Potter series, with its young hero adept in sorcery, spell-casting and spiritism, opened up a whole new chamber of horrors, giving rise to a scream of paranormal flicks aimed at kids.
Children are impressionable and want to explore and test boundaries. Packaging occult practices as harmless fun is, I fear, inviting them into risky territory.
I have a keen interest in the paranormal, having had an encounter with the ‘other side’ in my own childhood. My need to make sense of that experience kickstarted my writing career with two publications: The Dark Sacrament: Exorcism in Modern Ireland and its follow-up, Ireland’s Haunted Women.
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In my case, our ghostly visitor, in the form of a poltergeist or ‘noisy spirit’, turned up in the wee small hours one Halloween night, having successfully breached that ‘veil’ between the worlds. It remained with us for nearly two months.
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The clergymen involved explained that it was the spirit of our great-aunt Rose, who’d passed on a few weeks before. She’d been nursed in the afflicted room where the phenomena first appeared. Our great-aunt was trapped on ‘the other side’, they concluded, and needed our prayers so she could move on. It took a whole lot of prayers and many sleepless nights to send old Rose finally on her way. But leave she did. Thankfully, by the grace of God, she never returned.
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During our research my co-author and I met with scores of clerics — and many frightened people who were at a loss when something ‘other’ entered their lives. For, let’s face it, when the pipes burst you call the plumber. When the lights fail you send for the electrician. But when an invisible presence takes up residence and refuses to leave, “Who you gonna call...?”
Well, the Church, mostly. Catholics have their exorcists, Protestants their deliverance ministers, and non-believers... a psychic or medium perhaps, but such people are few and far between.
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I remember entering the afflicted homes of the victims and being struck by the number of cases involving children. One case was particularly disturbing: that of 10-year-old Gary.
The journey to meet the boy was memorable and fraught with problems. Our car broke down. The heavens opened — the windscreen wipers could hardly fight the torrential rain that suddenly burst from a clear, blue sky.
Reaching destination’s end, we couldn’t find Gary’s house. I asked at a neighbour’s, only to have the door slammed rudely in my face at mention of his name. Something sure didn’t want me to hear his story.
Gary’s story
During the Halloween school break, Gary had found a Ouija board discarded in a dump. He said he knew it was a Ouija board and how to use it, because he’d seen them in the movies. There’s that malign influence at play...
When he got home he was terrified to see “a man” sitting at the top of the stairs. He screamed out but his mother could not see any “man”. This ghost later revealed himself as “Tyrannus”. There is mention of a Greek schoolmaster named Tyrannus in the Bible, in Acts 19:9: “But when divers were hardened, and believed not, but spake evil of that way before the multitude, he departed from them, and separated the disciples, disputing daily in the school of one Tyrannus.”
Over the course of several weeks this spectre kept appearing to Gary, especially at night. When he was moved to his grandmother’s house Tyrannus followed. He frequently gave the boy instruction and showed him his future.
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“He shows me stuff,” Gary said calmly, his angelic little face and intense blue eyes fixed on me. “He showed me what I’d be like when I got older. He said I’d be in a big office and be very rich, but I had to come over to his side. He said the Bible was rubbish.”
From then on, according to his mother, Gary’s whole demeanour changed. He became angry and withdrawn, liable to lash out, and spent more and more time locked in his room. He began having seizures, going into trace-like states, each lasting well over an hour. Medical scans showed his brain to be perfectly normal. He was not epileptic. Strange noises began emanating from the walls of the house with no logical explanation.
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Distraught, his mother sought the help of two exorcists — eminent men in their field — a Church of Ireland minister and a Catholic priest. Sadly, both were unsuccessful in freeing the boy.
According to Canon William Lendrum — one of the exorcists who worked with him — Gary was being demonically oppressed and was on his way to full possession if he did not willingly renounce the demonic entity known as Tyrannus.
“Children know the difference between good and evil at an early age. Gary is choosing evil. He’s entertaining a demon,” explained Canon Lendrum. “I’ve seen their like before and I know their intentions. We all have free will, even children. So long as he wants the demon in his life there is nothing I can do.”
After my hour-long conversation with little Gary, where he’d agreed to undergo yet another exorcism, his parting words haunt me still. “But I want Tyrannus in my life,” he said boldly. “I don’t want him to go away.”
Chilling words, indeed. His mother looked at me in despair and I knew exactly what Canon Lendrum meant. The boy was attached to the entity Tyrannus and did not wish to be set free.
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Gary would be in his late 20s now. I never followed up on his case and really didn’t want to. My feeling at the time was that he was a lost soul, whom only God could save. I remember our American publisher wanting to fly us to the US so he could meet little Gary. I flatly refused to sit on a plane with him. The child was just too scary to be around.
I fear that children are vulnerable to these dark entities. Their innocence acts as a magnet and they are very easily manipulated. Having recently transitioned from the spiritual realm, they are more psychically attuned and have a deeper connection to the unseen. For that reason they are easy prey.
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One clergyman likened playing Ouija to allowing children to build sandcastles on a beach primed with landmines, since the game has the potential to open portals to other dimensions and admit the unclean.
So, this Halloween dress up your children by all means. Let them enjoy the spooky costumes, the fireworks, and the tooth-pulling sweets. But remember the darker side of this festival. The words of Hamlet come to mind. On seeing what he believes to be the ghost of his dead father, he asserts: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
In the exorcist’s handbook, our dead relatives do not come back. Demonic entities, however, masquerading as the dead, most certainly do. They are most active during the fear-fest that is Halloween, just waiting to break through that flimsy veil and feed on the essence of the living.
You have been warned...
Bestselling author Christina McKenna lives in Newry. Among her books are Ireland’s Haunted Women (Poolbeg Press) and, with David M Kiely, The Dark Sacrament: True Stories of Modern Day Demon Possession and Exorcism (HarperOne). Both titles are available on Amazon in book and Kindle formats.
