Category: Halloween

Announcement Trick-or-Treat By Mail

Announcement Trick-or-Treat By Mail

A special short announcement regarding the October 20 deadline for Trick-or-Treat-by-Mail for listeners joining our Patreon.  Find out how you can  receive a hand-packed candy bag from the home of Bone and Sickle Podcast. Each bag this year contains a special MYSTERY ITEM from Egypt!

Visit: https://www.patreon.com/boneandsickle

“Young Goodman Brown”

“Young Goodman Brown”

We’re getting into the spirit of the season with a classic tale of witchcraft set in 17th-century Salem Village, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “Young Goodman Brown.” Written in 1835 for New England Magazine, it later appeared in the 1846 collection, Mosses from an Old Manse, which also includes the excellent supernatural story, “Rappaccini’s Daughter.”  Hawthorne regarded “Young Goodman Brown” as his most impactful short story, and it received high praise from his contemporary, Edgar Allan Poe.

Two more Halloween-themed episodes (historical  explorations) await  you next month.

An Old-Fashioned Halloween Party

An Old-Fashioned Halloween Party

Tonight we recreate for you elements of an old-fashioned Halloween party as experienced in the 1920s or ’30s. Foods, games, spooky stories and poems in an extra-long Halloween episode.

For more retro delights of the era, listen to Episode 35 “Vintage Halloween.”

Announcement: Listener Trick-or-Treat

Announcement: Listener Trick-or-Treat

A special short announcement regarding Trick-or-treat by mail option for listeners joining Patreon.  Find out how you can  receive a hand-packed candy bag from the home of Bone and Sickle Podcast. Each goody bag is guaranteed to include sinister extra as described in Halloween urban legends.

Visit: https://www.patreon.com/boneandsickle

Only while supplies last!

 

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!

While pretty much any of the 65+ hours of Bone and Sickle programming could be appropriate for listening on this day, I thought I’d re-share  past Halloween-specific episodes today should you’d like to stroll down Memory Lane.

2019 VINTAGE HALLOWEEN 

 2019 ALL OF THEM WITCHES

2020 SPOOK SHOWS

2021 HORROR HOSTS, PART ONE 

2021 HORROR HOSTS, PART TWO

2022 WHO PUT THE HELL IN HELLOWEEN?

And the “cursed” show…

2020 HALLOWEEN BONUS EPISODE

 

Two other early October shows done with Halloween themes in mind are 2018’s THE DEAD SPEAK, part one of a look at Spiritualism, followed that month by SEANCES AND SCANDALS.

(The pumpkin header image, as you probably know, is from my book THIRTY-ONE ROTTEN PUMPKINS.)

Who Put the Hell in Helloween?

Who Put the Hell in Helloween?

During the Satanic Panic, the notion of Halloween as a Satanic High Holy Day came to prominence, but the elements necessary to this mythology were set in place much earlier.

This episode focuses particularly on the early years of Wicca, some missteps in disassociating  the movement from Satanism, and early evangelical personalities spinning “ex-Satanist” yarns from this material, which is to say, we focus particularly on the 1960s Occult Revival  up to and including 1973. To set the mood for the era’s pop occultism, we hear some audio snippets by records released by witches, Louise Huebner, Gundella the Green Witch,  Barbara the Gray Witch, and Babetta, the Sexy Witch.

Barbara the Gray Witch
Back of Barbara the Gray Witch 1970 LP

We first have a quick look at Anton Lavey’s creation of The Church of Satan in 1966. While this sketched out cartoonish tropes of  the Panic narrative, Lavey’s carnival-barker style and insistence that there was no actual Satan in his school of Satanism, undermined the influence he might have among all but the most credulous and paranoid.

The real roots of the Panic lay not in Lavey’s publicity stunt, which in the wider historical context was a mere flash in the pan, but in a much older idea conceiving witchcraft and Devil worship or traffic with demons, a notion that held sway for more than seven centuries and therefore not to be quickly rooted out by modern Wiccans.

Some of the sticking points here are rooted in 19th and early 20th century writings on witchcraft by the American folklorist Charles Leland and British Egyptologist Margaret Murray, and their “witch-cult” concept regarding witchcraft as an underground survival of ancient pagan religion.  Problematic here too were their identification of the deities of this religion as “Lucifer” (Leland) and “The Horned God” (Murray).

We then turn to Gerald Gardner, the British civil servant, who in his retirement got the whole Wiccan ball rolling, declaring in the early 1950s, that he had been initiated into the ancient mysteries of this witch-cult by members of a surviving Coven in the New Forest region.  In particular, we examine the way in which Gardner’s emphasis on UK traditions within Wicca, strengthened an association between Halloween and witches (despite virtually no mention of witch gatherings actually occurring on Halloween in earlier historical writings).

Sibyl Leek
Sibyl Leek and her jackdaw “Mr. Hotfoot”

We then have a brief look at Sybil Leek, first acolyte of Gardnerian Wicca in the US, and darling of 1960s journalists. (Leek was profiled in our 2019 Halloween episode, “All of Them Witches.”) As the United States was the birthplace of the modern Halloween, Leek’s insatiable engagement with the press around that time, did much to strengthen the idea of Halloween as a singularly important time for witch gatherings and ritual.  She also provides Halloween recipes!

By the 1960s, Wicca had branched into two paths, Gardnerian and Alexandrian, the latter named for the British witch Alex Sanders, who with his wife Maxine, headed a coven in London. Sanders has much to do with continued confusion between Wicca and Devil-worship thanks to his indiscriminate pursuit of media interest inclined to titillate audiences with the old diabolic model. We discuss his involvement with the British band Black Widow and their Satanic sacrifice stage-show, publicity involvement in the film Eye of the Devil (1966) , and his feature role in the documentary Legend of the Witches (1970) and mondo “documentary” Secret Rites (1971).

Sanders Secret Rites
Sanders in “Secret Rites”

Just as Wicca originated in the UK, only later to be embraced in the US. fraudulent ex-Satanist testimonies were first told in Britain. In 1970 Bristol-born Doreen Irvine began relating stories of her involvement in the occult, tales that took their final form in her  1973 publication From Witchcraft to Christ.  We hear a bit of her tale of teenage street-life, drugs, and prostitution leading to Satanism, her claims to curious supernatural abilities, and her crowning as the “Queen of the Black Witches” on the Dartmoor moor.  As well as her warnings about celebrating Halloween.

While the ex-Satanist narrative, never really caught on in the UK, it hit the big time with American Mike Warnke’s 1972 book purporting to document his experiences in Satanism, The Satan Seller.

Mike Warnke
Mike Warnke in his early days.

While Warnke’s fraudulent stories garnered him celebrity in the early days of the modern evangelical movement, by the late 1970s, he had reinvented himself as a popular Christian comedian.  He did, however, revisit the theme once the Satanic Panic got rolling, with the 1979 release of the album “A Christian Perspective on Halloween.”

We hear his Satan Seller narrative of a good Midwestern boy corrupted by drugs in a California college, eventual elevation to High Priest within global Satanic underworld, eventual self-destruction through drugs leading to a stint with the Navy, during which he’s saved. Along the way, are some bizarre details about his fingernails, strange ordinations in real-world sects, and eventual exposure and fall within the evangelical community.

Another evangelical making the rounds with ex-Satanist stories in in Warnke’s day was John Todd, who began spinning his yars tales around 1968 in Phoenix. We only briefly discuss Todd as he really hits his stride outside our timeframe, namely, in  the late ‘70s when his story of involvement in a Satanic underworld reached its greatest audience via Jack Chick comics.

We wrap up the show with a look at some early collaborators with Warnke in the the occult fear-mongering business — David Balsiger, Morris Cerrullo, and Hershel Smith (AKA “the Skin Eater) as well as their collaboration on the legendary “Witchmobile,” an “anti-occult mobile unit” that roamed the US and Canada from 1972 to 1974.

Witchmobile
Herschel Smith and the Witchmobile
Halloween Pumpkin Book for Sale

Halloween Pumpkin Book for Sale

Al Ridenour, your host of Bone and Sickle, has created a countdown book for HALLOWEEN!
“THIRTY-ONE ROTTEN PUMPKINS”
THIRTY-ONE images of surreal and decaying pumpkins rendered in a painterly 17th-century style – one pumpkin for each night of October to guide your nightly meditations toward Halloween.
Halloween Bonus Episode

Halloween Bonus Episode

As a short holiday bonus, we’re offering this special episode examining some obscure aspects of Halloween as manifested in our lives today. Forgotten traditions associated with the holiday arise in surprising forms many of us may not initially recognize. Simple occurrences perceived as nothing more than an everyday nuisance come into focus during our holidays – if we are attentive – as something making sense only in the light of old folkways, superstitions, and beliefs. Many of us have had these experiences without considering such context and associated old calendrical celebrations. Halloween, in particular, has drifted far from its original cultural significance, but in recognizing patterns of repetition within history, we may recognize a surprising confluence with the old holidays known to our ancestors and thereby allow ourselves to experience the same, albeit in a modern idiom. Extreme care, however, must be exercised, in such pursuits, which can bring with them bitter lessons in the fragility of our existence.

Spook Shows

Spook Shows

Midnight Spook Shows featured stage illusions borrowing from techniques used in fraudulent seances alongside vaudeville-style comedy and burlesque. Performances were staged in movie theaters, paired with a film screening, usually but not exclusively from the horror genre.  The tradition began in the mid to late 1930s and ran into the early ’70s, reaching its heyday in the ’50s.  After World War II, shows began catering to younger audiences and emphasizing movie monsters, horror and gore.

In this episode we examine the history of the genre and a few of its colorful artists, sometimes called “ghostmasters.”  Two leading lights in the field were (Dr.) Bill Neff, and Dr. Silkini (actually a pair of brothers Jack and Wyman Baker).  Other practitioners we look at include Raymond Corbin (Ray-Mond), George Marquis, Phillip Morris (Dr. Evil), Kara-Kum, and the various shows presented by Joe Karston.  Bela Lugosi dabbled in the field and is discussed.

This episode picks up the thread from last October’s show about unruly American Halloween celebrations, those of the teens and twenties. While the 1930s offered relatively sedate Spook Shows, by their 1950s heyday, as box-office lines wrapped the block and theater balconies sagged under the weight of screaming teenagers, the Spook Shows shared something of that unruly, possibly even dangerous, spirit of old Halloween.