What a Fool Believes

Things You Should Know About Halloween

• The holiday of Halloween began as the ancient festival of Samhain.  Samhain was principally a harvest festival but was also a festival of the dead.  The festival was begun in the middle ages by the odd pairing of Glenn Danzig and the Boston Celtics.  Gaelic and Brythonic legend has it that the punk rocker and the basketball team were out at the pub, getting hammered and singing tawdry folk songs - like any other Tuesday - when Celtics team captains Larry Bird and Kevin McHale, sharing a Gaelic blunt, thought it would be pretty rad if they could do this dressed up in costumes.  Danzig, always the Gothic one, added, in a poor Vincent Price impression, ‘Spoooooky costumes!’  The group continued to brainstorm and ‘get stormbrained’ that night and came up with the idea for a festival that would allow them to do just that.  The festival went on every Tuesday for two months before the country got burnt out by it all and decided to hold it once a year.  Danzig and the Celtics continued their own version every Tuesday at the pub.
• In the film Halloween, by John Carpenter, the original ending had Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, killing Michael Myers and removing his mask.  In a nod to Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Michael was revealed to be a monkey.  PETA, of course, the big babies, threw a big fit during a screening because Strode cuts off the monkey’s head and punts it down the street and all the children trick-or-treating see it’s a monkey head when it stops rolling and hear Strode screaming, ‘Monkeys are evil!  Monkeys are evil!’ and soon the neighborhood starts chanting that and then the chant turns into ‘Animals are evil.  Animals are evil.  Kill them before they kill us.’ and everyone flips out and goes after their pets.  So Carpenter changed the villain into a psychotic, seemingly unstoppable man of pure evil.  Ooh, scary.
• Up until the 1930’s, when children went trick-or-treating, there being no such thing as candy yet, they would receive livestock.
• Pope Innocent XII thought it would be ‘cheeky’ to dress as a witch on Halloween in 1693, at the height of the witch trials, during a trip to Salem, MA.  The costume worked a little too well and he was burned at the stake.
• Candy apples used to be given to trick-or-treaters until razor blades were found imbedded in some in Illinois in 1973.  The blades were traced back to the home of Norman Walpern, who was promptly arrested by the police.  During the interrogation of Mr. Walpern, the police found that he was suffering from psychosis.  It was revealed that some of the neighborhood kids, always hungering for some sweets, were thought to be taking advantage of Walpern, dressing up everyday and going to his home as if it was Halloween.  Walpern began to believe that these children were demons and would bring his soul to Hell unless he had sweets to give them.  One day, he decided that he should try to kill the demons - since his social security was running out from the bags and bags and bags of mini-size candy bars he was buying - so he placed the blades in some candy apples.  Luckily, none of the children were hurt, Walpern was sent to a psych ward and the Halloween decorations, which he had left up, and were the real reason the kids kept coming to his home, were removed.