All Hallows

A favourite question from curious visitors or even from some of the press is to ask if the castle is haunted. My reply is always that whilst I don’t feel  it is haunted, there are a few ghosts and spirits living here as well as us.

Halloween is the night that celebrates the things we fear in the dark: the “unknown” when we cannot see exactly what is going on or identify all the sounds. Night time is the time of day when predators, dangerous animals or beings can lurk in the darkness and Halloween exacerbates our normal fears to become the night when the veiled boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead become smudged.

However sophisticated we may or may not be, most of us occasionally like a bit of a “fright” on All Hallows’ Eve. In religious terms, it is the day we reflect on those who have died, to take the time to remember and honour them. It was also, in pagan times, the night the dead walked again and these days, certainly in the west, that idea now takes precedence and halloween is more about visions of poltergeists, shrouded figures and spectral skeletons rising up from long closed graves than anything else.

Celtic traditions called the day Samhain, a day to ward off ghosts, to light bonfires against the dark and to listen to the priests as they tried to predict the future. Samhain is an Anglo Saxon word which means to assemble or to congregate which in many ways segues into the present community celebrations of pumpkins and “trick or treating” and family dinners. Many children look forward to dressing up to go round asking for sweets which tend to be preferred to carrying out pranks!

In contrast to All Hallows Eve, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honour all saints. All Saints Day or All-hallowmas (from Middle English “all hallow messe” as it was) incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain and made it Christian. The processions often carried on to the next day with those taking part dressed in white as the symbolic colour for victory and life out of the darkness. Nothing is ever wholly new though. As you walk through the Egyptian exhibition at Highclere, you can see the replica tomb paintings of Tutankhamun showing him dressed in white as he moves through the hours of the night towards the next world and eternal life.

By reputation there are a number of ghosts or presences at Highclere.I gathered together some of our best ghost stories and curses writing my latest book. Not all of them are entirely peaceful but they seem to be sufficiently settled at the moment. Certainly, everyone who has worked at Highclere for a while has their own story and the places they don’t like to visit on a gloomy evening.

The word “ghost” has likely links to the Germanic “gast” and thence to the word guest. So they cannot all be bad! In fact,  I think Highclere has a lovely warm, homely atmosphere which welcomes guests and I hope will continue so to do for some time to come.