While a majority of Southerners claim Christianity as their religion, it must be pointed out that many diverse incarnations are practiced in the region. Among the traditional denominations and within other more individualized modes, a wide-ranging array of beliefs, myths, and narratives pervade every aspect of the culture. Here, we read about one writer’s experiences with a sometimes-controversial popular holiday that has Christian roots: Halloween. Interpreted and re-interpreted over time, this annual tradition can incite strong opinions, especially among some of the faithful.

Southern Pagan Rights
by Terry Barr

I’ve been teaching Grady Hendrix’s novel The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires to my freshman literature class. This novel follows our viewing of both the original 1922 German expressionist film Nosferatu and the strange retelling of the possible making of that film – or rather the possibility that the vampire of that film was neither a real actor nor a real person – E. Elias Merhige’s 2000 Shadow of the Vampire. And for good measure, we also read Stephen King’s 1975 classic Salem’s Lot.

Yes, the theme of my course is “The Modern Vampire.” And oh, I could have done so much more, but I do teach at church-related, liberal arts-oriented Presbyterian College in Upstate South Carolina, so exposing my students to a gorgeous male vampire who likes to ingest the blood of his mainly female victims by biting a gaping hole in their inner thighs is going pretty far, I think. You and I might understand the carnal desires of the fanged undead, but I’m not sure what today’s nineteen-year-olds understand about wanton desire and supernatural horror, because, well, the real horrors of our age are upon us for sure. so Who needs a good vampire story when we have figures above us sucking the marrow out of our very democracy?

The beauty of these two novels is that King’s and Hendrix’s horror is actually warning us against the narrow provincial mindset of small town complacency that believes it already understands all there is to know about virtue and looking after each other. Hendrix’s subtext is that, rather than night-hunting vampires, we should fear the toxic masculinity that is clearly rising from its seemingly half-hour nap. For example, Hendrix provides this eerie definition on a stand-alone page just after the Prologue:

“Housewife (n)—a light, worthless woman or girl.”

He notes that this definition may be found in the 1971 edition of The Oxford English Dictionary. So much for second-wave feminism.

From there, as I’ve said to my students on more than one occasion, Hendrix’s novel portrays how men exploit their wives and abandon them for: late nights at the office; golf weekends with their pals; business trips to Atlanta conducted in strip clubs like the Gold Nugget; and land developing that takes homes from the already poor, disadvantaged, and Black citizens on the fringes of their Old Village/Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina world.

 “Don’t you think the greatest bond between two married people is trust,” I ask my students, “which is also the greatest form of intimacy? Would you rather trust and be intimate with your wife or with a male stranger who comes to town offering you a chance to get even wealthier than you already are?”

I don’t exactly get answers from my students at this point and settle for my questions being rhetorical. But I wonder what they’re thinking? I know some of them are religious because they’ve told me of mission trips to Africa and Appalachia. It’s funny, though, that the most religious young woman in my class is now referring to the husband of the protagonist of Hendrix’s novel as a “real shit.” And she’s right, of course, and maybe she’ll thank me for assigning this novel one day, or maybe she’ll curse me.

Or maybe next Halloween she’ll even dress up like a vampire. We have discussed the value of Buffy, too.

I mention Halloween because there’s a scene in the novel when one of the members of the Southern Women’s Book Club of Mt. Pleasant named “Slick” tells the others about her family’s plans for an upcoming Halloween party:

“I’m against Halloween in all its forms because of the Satanism,” Slick said… “So this year, on All-Hallows’ Eve, I will be holding a Reformation party. I know it’s last minute, but it’s never too late to praise the Lord.”

She goes on to pour coffee in her Bob Jones University mug and describe to the novel’s protagonist Patricia how, at her party, kids will dress as Martin Luther and John Calvin and how they’ll have medieval line dancing and German food. And a Diet of Worms cake (275-6). The idea is to take Halloween back from the satanists and the pagans, and though Slick doesn’t mention it, she’d likely have included the Yankees and the Jews if she had thought of it.

I don’t want to give Slick too hard of a time because a) she’s a fictional character, and b) she really faces an uncomfortable end, though, to her credit, she becomes almost noble before she leaves us. But she did cause me to remember something that I always remember at Halloween and in other months, too.

II

I grew up in Bessemer, Alabama then moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, for graduate school, and have been living in Greenville, South Carolina since 1987. In other words, I was born in the Cradle of the Confederacy, earned a doctorate near the birthplace of the KKK and the scene of the Scopes Monkey Trial, and then moved to the first state to secede from the Union in The War Between the States. I am a natural-born Southerner who was raised in the United Methodist Church by a Christian mother and a Jewish father. Of course, my father didn’t go to church with us, but he did celebrate all the holidays with us: Thanksgiving, Easter (or at least he hid the eggs), Christmas (he usually bought our tree and gave and received all sorts of presents), and of course Halloween. In fact, it was my dad who took my brother and me trick-or-treating every October while my mom stayed at home to hand out candy to all the little ghouls and goblins.

The first year I can remember dressing up, my costume was merely a plain white sheet with two eyeholes that covered my entire body. As I write this, I know it might sound as if I was planning on getting my treats by pretending to be a Klansman. But no, I was only a ghost.

One year I was a werewolf, but the year I turned five, I was — and I remembered this fact only two sentences ago — not just a devil, but The Devil. I had the mask, the horns, the red suit, and I’m not sure why no one gave me a pitchfork, but then, I was only five.

This was in 1961, and so maybe we had other red beings to be more worried about, but no one that year or any other year said anything to me about Satan or that we were going against God, or that we should have a Reformation party, or that we’d be better off having some kind of bobbing for apples event at the church. In our neighborhood there were other Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Catholics, and a few kids from the Church of the Nazarene. No one ever said they couldn’t go out on Halloween, and in fact, our across-the-street neighbor Mrs. Batton — grandmother to my first girlfriend Mary Jane — used to serve all the kids caramel apples, and she loved our costumes and us for dropping by and making her feel loved and appreciated.

Even when I was a teenager in the early 1970s, our neighborhood opened its arms to us rowdy high schoolers, and at the end of the evening one of my friend’s parents hosted us for a late-night chili supper. And no one ever asked us to pray. I took for granted that this was a holiday ritual norm, and when I think back, if this was the norm in the Alabama of the 1970s, shouldn’t any community in the USA be similar, if not almost exactly alike, in its way of celebrating this holiday?

So, in all those years in Alabama, and then in Tennessee, when I went to Halloween parties and watched as kids traversed both secular and sacred ground in dazzling costumes of all stripes and colors, I never once thought that Halloween was anything but fun (Yes, I did know and was warned about the few who put razors in apples, etc., but then, nothing like that ever happened to me, so I really didn’t worry about the possibility at all). I never once considered that Halloween or All Hallows’ Eve might be offensive to Christians, since everyone I ever knew who participated, including all parents, were either Christian or Jewish. And Lord help me, though I knew that Halloween arose out of some pagan ritual/belief, I didn’t for one second think, or ever hear, that Halloween was Satan’s birthday . . . until I moved to Greenville, South Carolina.

III

In 1992, my wife and daughters and I moved to our first house on a pleasant street mixed with young couples and elderly matriarchs who thought nothing of asking us on a first meeting which church we attended. Like every place I’ve lived or worked in the South, churches existed in abundance, and in our neighborhood, all of these churches conducted services in the presence of, with the awareness of, and with either the approval of or the consternation of Bob Jones University. From our house, I could walk to BJU and back without coming close to making my quota of required steps for the day. But I didn’t walk to BJU ever, nor did I ever want to. To me, it was a creepy cult, all very white—a place that didn’t allow Black people to attend for most of its life and that also forced couples to sit in parlors on campus for their dates. Holding hands, I heard, was strictly forbidden. It was enough to make even an agnostic shudder.

Not that I announced my agnosticism to anyone. For how do you look a sweet and very wrinkled woman in the eye and tell her that you, your wife, and your two little daughters won’t ever be attending church? The woman I am writing about actually became my daughters’ surrogate grandmother since their biological grandmothers lived in Alabama and Tennessee. At any school event, this woman accompanied us, and though we told everyone her name and that she was our neighbor, we also wanted our friends to know that we saw her as a true elder for our kids. And after that first time when she asked us about church and we told her we were still looking, she let the matter drop.

Then, when I told her that, though I taught at Presbyterian College I wasn’t Presbyterian, she said that she was and that she attended Second Presbyterian Church in downtown Greenville.

“Well, one of our close friends attends Westminster Presbyterian!”

“Oh, that church is too rich for me!”

I had never considered that one church in a specific denomination might be “too rich” for anyone. She couldn’t afford the tithing expectation from Westminster, she said, and whether this is reality or not, I thought then about the things that Jesus said about money and those who thought they came before others.

The other clear memory I have of our surrogate grandmother is when she invited us all to a spaghetti supper at her church. My wife had to work, so I took our girls, dressing them up in their finest outfits because I figured that was the thing to do when attending an evening supper at church. I wish, though, I had not allowed our older daughter to wear her best white dress because the inevitable did happen, and pasta sauce is impossible to remove from white linen. Anyway, listening to six-year-olds has its price. It was a sweet event nevertheless, and we were some of the only guests to show. Clearly, the church was dying, but we were welcomed graciously, and though I can’t remember now where he was from, the minister who ate with us was dark-skinned and spoke with an accent that I would place in the India-Pakistan region. I’m glad we went, because it meant so much to our neighbor. She never asked us to her church again, and not long after, the congregation shuttered its doors.

That benign church experience with our beloved neighbor, however, made me complacent about meeting our next-door neighbor and the family across the street—both young couples with many children, whom our children interacted with, until Halloween of that first year approached. The couple who lived across from us had three little blond girls and one boy. Our girls played with them, and their oldest daughter gave our oldest daughter a stuffed bunny whom my daughter called her “Lovie” and which she slept with until she was ten when she passed it on to her little sister. This past weekend, as we were visiting our younger daughter – who got married last year and is expecting her first child this coming September – I saw “Lovie” on her bed, and of course I smiled, and of course I thought of how things unraveled back in that old neighborhood in 1992.

We had the couple across the street over for coffee not long after we moved in, and it was on that day that they told us they homeschooled their kids.

 “Why homeschool?” I asked. “The pubic schools around here are highly rated.”

You know how, when people pause a bit before answering such a question, you’re almost positive what they’re about to say, but you still hope that something else will emerge from their mouths, something like . . . We had a bad experience with being bullied, so we’re trying homeschooling for this year just to get things back to normal or to put those bad experiences farther behind us. To that, I could have related, given that I had been a bullying victim during my early school years and often wished I could have stayed at home and continued learning with my own mother who taught me to read and write and do basic arithmetic.

Unfortunately, what did emerge was . . . “Well, we’re just not sure what they’re teaching these days, and we want our values to be communicated clearly and wholly.” Actually, I don’t remember what they said, but the implication was that schools these days were too mixed and too mixed up. Public schools weren’t teaching from any religious set of values, and there were too many kids from families that didn’t share the belief that some people are saved and those people who look and think pretty much like the couple who was sitting on our porch, all blond and blue-eyed, and sipping our organic coffee. As we parted, I wondered if they thought we were heathens, but I knew that our contact would now be more limited.

Some time later, when we were out for a walk, we ran into that couple who had their children’s grandparents with them. Though we were introduced, and though they smiled so wide, I don’t remember anything the grandparents said, because the grandmother was wearing a t-shirt with the large and colorful image of an aborted fetus on it. It’s hard recovering from that, especially since we were members of a pro-choice group. When Operation Rescue came to town later that year, we defended the Women’s clinic while our neighbors stood on the other side of the street ready to storm at will. When their five-year-old son got arrested for trespassing later that day, his mom referred to him on the local news as a “hero,” while my wife, also interviewed, referred to Operation Rescue as a terrorist group.

All this to say, the Halloween of 1992 was less than I hoped for but certainly what I should have expected had I been able to put all of these random parts together sooner.

IV

It was one of those sunny mid-fall days you long for. Cool but nothing to stop desperate trick-or-treaters from making the loops around friendly neighborhoods. Since my younger daughter was only two, we decided to head out around 5:00, hoping that the hosts throughout our block were ready. We thought we’d go first to the couple across the street who would surely want to see and embrace the Fairy Princess and the Green Elf who were walking up their front steps.

My older daughter rang the bell. We heard sounds, but no one came to the door.

“Maybe they’re getting dressed,” I said. “Let’s ring the bell again.”

Hindsight gives you all the opportunities to see yourself as the fool you are. We should have walked away, wondering why they didn’t come to the door, but at least not feeling what we felt when they finally did answer.

“Trick or Treat,” my daughters cried, and the look on the blond mother’s face seemed like one of us had just forced a congealed and moldy matzo ball down her throat. She must have said something, though I don’t remember what. She put some “treats” in my daughters’ basket, too, because we all have known for ages that Luden’s cherry cough drops are really just candy. Though I felt her discomfort, I didn’t know the source since all the religious people I knew from my Alabama past treated Halloween like . . . a treat., like a normal holiday. Why I didn’t suspect anything is just another mystery in this strange and corruptible universe.

I think every act is a story in the making, maybe even something mythic that forms us and that we will recount on Halloween nights to come when our grandchildren wonder why certain of their friends must stay at home. In any case, I swear that, in the time it took us to descend the five front porch steps, that woman had grabbed her four kids, rushed them into their car, and were halfway to the end of the block before we even reached the end of their lane.

I wondered about what had happened the rest of the night’s journey. My kids got enough candy and loving smiles that it was all worth it. They also received a couple of Bible tracts, and it was then that I finally glimpsed the shameful light. Sure, I got that little goblins and demons and witches all had evil components, but did anyone seriously think that our children aspired to being evil?

Still, it was the next day that the other black hoof dropped. The kids next door, children of missionary parents, came over to play. I used to take all the kids on wagon rides up and down our street. These neighbor kids were named Kylie, Trevor, Ian, and Colin. Assume what you will, but only Kylie, the oldest, ever said a word. Really, I don’t know why they were allowed to play with my children and come to our house and be in my care at all, except that when you have four children under the age of nine, you might not be able to worry every second of the day if the family next door is satanic.

“So Kylie,” I asked as we wagoned around the block, “what did you dress up as last night? Pari was a fairy princess, and Layla was an elf.”

“We didn’t dress up,” Kylie said just as easily as if she had said she liked her hot dogs with mustard only. “Halloween is Satan’s birthday.”

I had never heard this “belief” before just as, until my wife and I got married, I had never heard anyone called a “sand nigger” before. (This term was used by one of my former best friends). In such moments, there are no words if, like me, you are completely unprepared to hear statements that reach to the core of your identity and your past. It was useless to argue with a little girl who was only repeating what her parents believed. However, I did ask one more question.

“Kylie, which church do you all belong to?”

“Friendship Bible Church,” she said as sweetly as our surrogate grandmother had pronounced her own church benediction a few months earlier.

The following week, I spoke to our college’s senior religion professor—a man who was part of the committee who interviewed me for my position. We had spent the bulk of that interview discussing Flannery O’Connor, “Grace,” and the “Christ-haunted landscape” that backgrounds her work.

“George,” I asked now, “have you ever heard that Halloween is Satan’s birthday?”

He looked somewhere between puzzled and stunned. After a few seconds, he shook his head, “No, Terry, I’ve never heard that one.”

Nor had I until I came to South Carolina.

V

By the next Halloween, we had moved to a different neighborhood, and as we and a few other families were trick-or-treating through the same streets I walk today, I saw an older man coming our way.

“Can I give you something to read?” he asked.

I paused, always a fatal mistake.

“HALLOWEEN: SATAN’S BIRTHDAY,” this tract proclaimed, and pictured below was Satan himself boiling a couple of little ghosts in some big cooking vat.

I threw the tract in the street and grabbed my daughters’ hands. In that moment I wanted to hold them and keep them tightly by me until they grew up, even if that meant homeschooling them. But soon, I let go again and watched them run up to another house, where the couple inside treated them to caramel apples and some Hershey’s kisses. To my knowledge, they never caught on to the accusations and the potential Reformation party around them. Today, my older daughter takes her daughter trick or treating throughout their mountain community in Virginia. They even have one of those twenty-foot-tall skeletons in their front yard, and parents stop their cars and trucks stop all the time to take pictures of it with their children. My younger daughter, now living in Charlotte, is expecting her first child, a boy, and I’m sure she’ll take him out on Halloween night, too, maybe dressed as, who knows— a little devil?

I wonder though, if my children and grandchildren will one day be turned away from someone’s door, and politely cursed and condemned — as Southerners are wont to do — to some hell they don’t believe in? What will they think then, and what will it do to them and their love of Halloween and their Southern homes? What stories will they tell about these haunted traditions?

And as for The Southern Book Club’s Halloween night . . . well, it turns out that no one wanted to attend Slick’s Reformation party, and so that fearful bunch stayed home and did what God surely wanted and expected of them. They played Monopoly.

Terry Barr is the author of four essay collections published by Redhawk Publications of Hickory, North Carolina. His upcoming work will be a co-authored study of the  Religion of SEC Football, to be published by the University of Alabama Press. His work has previously been featured in storySouth, South Writ Large, and Under the Sun. He lives in Greenville, South Carolina with his family. You may also read his work on music and culture on Medium.

Lesson Plan: NH-MSF Lesson Plan Personal-Historical