Marie Treanor’s Halloween Haunt

Happy Halloween! Or should I say Scary Halloween, because after all, that’s why we love it. Halloween’s fun where I live. It’s a village and so the kids are pretty safe to roam around knocking on doors – one of the crowd always knows someone in most of the houses!

 Although Scottish tradition has got a bit mixed up with American in recent years – our kids will now greet you with “Trick or treat!” when you open the door – they’ve kept the basic Scottish concept of “guising”, which is that you have to do something for your goodies. In the last few years we’ve had singers, some amazingly well choreographed dancers, the odd short and gruesome play, and joke-tellers galore. The deal is, they do their act and you reward them with sweets etc – I suppose it’s a hangover from medieval travelling “mummers” who would disguise themselves and entertain.

They wouldn’t be kids, of course, if they didn’t try and scare each other witless in the process, and I suppose that’s what we lose as adults. Even at Halloween, catching sight of all your neighbours’ kids, however ghoulishly they’re dressed up, just doesn’t frighten you. For that, I think you need atmosphere. A nice, gothic ruin of a church, maybe, surrounded by an old graveyard, where the creatures of the night can play undisturbed…

Like this one, maybe: St. Andrews Cathedral, which was the setting for my climactic Halloween battle scene in Blood on Silk. It’s a huge ruin of what must have once been a magnificent structure - as befitted the ecclesiastical centre of Scotland – dotted and surrounded with graves. Begun in the twelfth century, defiled and deserted in the Protestant Reformation, then neglected and cannibalized for a couple of hundred years more, this building has seen a lot of history!

You feel that today, wandering through the grounds. Especially at night, the Cathedral has an atmosphere all its own, at once peaceful and awe-inspiring, with just a hint of menace. It’s one of these places where the past can’t help but intrude on the present. The perfect place to encounter ghouls, ghosts and maybe even vampires, in the misty darkness of Halloween…

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