Almost two centuries ago, Irish immigrants brought a festival called Samhain to North America. Samhain had ancient pagan roots. It was celebrated as a harvest festival at the end of October, but also marked a day when the veil between this world and the next was at its thinnest. The Irish brought Samhain to the New World in the late 1840s when a devastating potato famine forced millions of them to leave Ireland. They came to the New World aboard “coffin ships,” thus named for their high death rates. These folks carried with them a kinship and familiarity with death.

It is fitting that Samhain, now transformed into Halloween, should still be celebrated with pumpkins and ghosts in modern America, bearing echoes of harvests past and a historic reminder that the boundaries between life and death were indeed thin.

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In premodern times, both in Europe and the non-European world, ghosts were a fact of life. Understood to be part of everyday life, one protected oneself from ghosts in practical ways, with amulets and spells, just as one protected oneself against wild animals, with cudgels and staffs. Ghosts were feared, but unlike our modern times, they were also worshiped (the term for ghosts and gods were sometimes interchangeable), captured by humans to perform unpaid labor, and welcomed as ancestors. In other words, ghosts were part of the warp and woof of peasant society and ghost stories often expressed its lived experiences.

Premodern society’s intimacy with ghosts arose from its profound familiarity with death. Low productivity in agriculture and absence of reliable means of transportation led to chronic malnutrition, famines, and associated diseases. Societies of such high mortality were fertile ground for a variety of ghosts and ghost stories.

In the European Middle Ages, historians estimate, one-third of infants died before reaching the age of 5. The numbers were roughly the same for India, and might explain why Pencho, a ghost that took the lives of infants, was considered so powerful. The Pencho possessed newborns, causing them to turn strange colors. A........

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