Halloween is all fun and games, but only until it’s not. Especially when you actually see a ghost. I mean, I didn’t. But back when I worked at a furniture store on the outskirts of Blacktown in western Sydney, I heard about plenty. The warehouse guys working out back were freaked out one night by a supposed apparition, slipping between aisles, appearing, disappearing.
Who knows what spooked those tough, no-nonsense men in hi-vis vests, 20-something years ago? They weren’t the gullible or credulous type. Whatever rattled them that night is a question that’s haunted me since, even as these days it’s pretty normal for the supernatural to be made cosy, courtesy of kids getting sent out on a sugar-fuelled jaunt around the neighbourhood.
Halloween is a way of making the supernatural fun, a way to tame it. My family enjoys the dress ups too, and the inter-generational bonding over a lolly stash. But I’m thinking that the way we ‘do’ Halloween might also be a way for us to gloss over the tragedy and violence embedded in the background of our lives.
Down the road from that furniture store loomed Sydney’s spookiest and most dilapidated church, St Bartholomew’s. The eerie, rundown old building on Blacktown’s fringe was handy fuel for our tea-room ghost stories. Blacktown Council has since restored the church, and clever capitalists have monetised our fearful fascination by turning it into a haunted tourist attraction. People pay to take ghost tours, hoping to encounter the ‘troublesome ghost’ in the cemetery who paralyses people and makes them feel ill.
Seems like a fun night out, until you realise what happened there. St Bartholomew’s sits on the site of the first Aboriginal insurrection against colonial rule, and the adjoining suburb is Pemulwey, named for the Aboriginal warrior who was killed and beheaded on the governor’s orders. Violent colonial history seeps into the soil, working its way through to our safe suburban worlds. Maybe we should be a little spooked.
We keep that uneasy balance in lots of ways. That push and pull between a good ol’ haunting and a fear of darker things we don’t want to confront head-on. Take The Babadook, the 2014 Australian horror film that taps into a kind of creeping dread about dark forces bent on our destruction. The film, which initially didn’t attract much attention domestically, has since achieved cult status worldwide, owing to its particular blend of ‘art horror’. It’s the story of a recently-widowed mother who shares a picture book with her child and accidentally conjures a demonic figure from within its pages. This malevolent creature, the Babadook, makes her do horrible things and she is so overcome by its evil influence that she murders the family dog. The terror in this film lies in the ability of this force to make us our own worst enemies, our own agents of destruction.
Many reviewers of The Babadook speak of the mother’s ‘possession’ as a metaphor for trauma and the pervasiveness of grief. Even the possibility that the Babadook represents the Aboriginal other, ‘the shadowy figure that haunts the white Australian consciousness’. But the overriding feeling of this film is pure terror, the dread that something other-worldly and evil can overcome someone and possess them entirely.
Here, supernatural unease rubs up against our suburban complacency. Because for all our playful scepticism about ghosts and goblins, there’s a strange twist — people aren’t as sceptical as they used to be. Halloween might look like pure make-believe, but 49 per cent of Australians admit to a belief in some kind of supernatural force. For them, the rituals of Halloween may point to a more supernatural reality, a thinner line between this reality and another.
'This doesn’t mean that kid-friendly Halloween fun is a gateway to something sinister, but maybe it’s a reminder that we shouldn’t dismiss all notions of the supernatural outright. Not that I want us to jump at anything that goes bump in the night, but occasionally we could use a healthy scepticism of our scepticism.'
Even more surprising, a survey found that Australia’s Gen Z believes in supernatural spirits, including angels, demons, fairies and ghosts at a rate 21 per cent higher than Boomers. It seems the kids are all-in, while the grown-ups around them arch a sceptical eyebrow.
This doesn’t mean that kid-friendly Halloween fun is a gateway to something sinister, but maybe it’s a reminder that we shouldn’t dismiss all notions of the supernatural outright. Not that I want us to jump at anything that goes bump in the night, but occasionally we could use a healthy scepticism of our scepticism.
If you ever come across a minister of religion, it might be worth asking them about any experiences they’ve had with the supernatural. Chances are, they’re as inured to it as everyone else, but you might be surprised. Father John Corrigan, for instance, went all the way from regional Victoria to the Vatican in 2019 to be trained up as an exorcist in order to help the sheer number of locals fearful of the demonic. Maybe it’s the return of colonial ghosts of the oppressed. Or perhaps more malevolent forces seething just beneath our modern-day suburban contentment.
The slightest possibility that any of this could be true is enough to send shivers down anyone’s spine. Good thing none of us really believe it, right?
Danielle Terceiro is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity and it completing her PhD at Alpha Crucis University College in Literature and Theology.