The Night the Dead Come Knocking
Halloween didn’t start with candy. It started with fire, fairies with a grudge, and a night when the barrier between worlds went thin. In this episode, we trace how Samhain became trick-or-treating, then follow a grieving Victorian folklorist named Dorothea Vane around the world through her ledger, The Calendar of Open Doors. We visit Wales, where the last child home gets chased by a headless woman, and Rome, where the dead were paid off with black beans. We stop at the glowing cemeteries of Poland and the giant kites of Guatemala. We also cover Haiti’s Fèt Gede, where the dead are the…
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