Witches, once feared and even publicly hanged or burned, now are figures of fun at Halloween.

War, disease, scarcity, and religious zeal formed the backdrop to Salem’s witch-hunt.

As science advances, superstition retreats.

This Halloween season found us in a small lakeside town in Northern Michigan for a warm October “Witches Night Out” festivity, where costumed revelers, four out of five of them women, commandeered its main street.

Shops decorated for the occasion rewarded visitors with Jell-O shots and squirting syringes filled generously with spiced rum. Gloom is glitz at Halloween. A bright red-headed witch in a sparkling green dress recalling the Bette Midler character in The Witches of Eastwick patrolled the sidewalk. Then there was a Maleficent; a Cat-Woman; a Wicked Witch of the West, a blue-eyed Celtic Princess or two, and an assortment of Goths done up in peaked hats, special-effects contact lenses, black eye-shadow, spider-web stockings, and sequined high-heeled boots.

Was the evening ghastly and macabre? A night for roaming, mournful, unrequited souls? No. On Halloween, fear is fun. The vibe that night was “witchy,” “funny,” “creepy-cute,” and “spooky,” so said the participants.

Or to put it another way, Halloween is playful. Safe, too, it should be noted, because of all the 365 nights of the year, Halloween is the safest. Parents are out on the sidewalk supervising.

Halloween is popular. In the United States and Canada, Halloween falls only behind Christmas in holiday sales revenue. Celebrants spend billions on decorative outdoor ghosts and skeletons, costume horror-pop culture parties, and candy and wine.

If there was a spirit on the loose this gleeful night in small-town Michigan, it was a community spirit: bipartisan, commercialized, frisky, secular, boozy, performative, and modern.

A Demon-Haunted Colony

We tend to........

© Psychology Today