The Witches' Book of the Dead (26 page)

These devices go by various names, including “ghost box” and “Frank's box.” The name “ghost box” comes from the fact that such devices were popularized by paranormal investigators and especially by such shows as
Ghost Hunters
on SyFy and
Ghost Adventures
on the Travel Channel. The latter show used one to detect the spirit of Bridget Bishop when I filmed with them. “Frank's box” is named after Frank Sumption, one of the early makers of these devices. Since sweep devices to date are built individually and by hand, not many have been offered for sale commercially, but I have seen a number of them available online, especially on eBay. However, you can also alter an inexpensive radio to produce a rudimentary scan, and so for a very modest investment, you can capture real-time EVP without
paying top dollar. You can find instructions online for modifying certain radio models.

Once you experience live voices, it is hard to be content with only passive EVP. It is interesting to get a mix of both. Once, Rosemary brought a ghost box to our séance at an old house in Salem. When the planchette on the Ouija board pointed to “yes,” the box would sometimes say “yes” as well! I was really blown away.

Real-time EVP is like passive EVP: sometimes you get great results and sometimes little or nothing. Responses are short and clipped, and often are hard to understand. A real-time device is dependent on the radio stations in any given area; AM works better than FM. Too few stations cannot produce a good scan, and sometimes the proximity of a single, powerful station can overrun a scan. The EVP does
not
come from broadcast, but from voices that piggyback, or ride on top of the broadcast signal.

A real-time EVP session is productive for an average of thirty-five to fifty minutes. For unknown reasons, links do not hold well much beyond that time frame. It may take up to ten or fifteen minutes for a session to “click” and start to produce voices.

Real-time sessions can be organized much the same as you would for passive EVP. They can be open-ended, seeking communication with whoever might be present, or targeted to specific personalities on the Other Side.

When you use a ghost box, try to work in a visionary state, have some of the tools from your altar of the dead present, or even keep the device on the altar itself. When you turn it on, tap the box three times with your yew wand and state,
This is [your name here], and I call the spirits [or a specific spirit by name] to come forth through this device. This session is now open and I await the voices of the dead
. If you have a question, you may want to consider asking it two or three times, even when responses are heard, as a measure against misinterpreting broadcast snippets. The devices never produce duplicate scans—every time the device sweeps past radio stations, different sounds are being broadcast, so the background noise is in continual change. Answers that are repeated from communicators thus are more likely to be from unexplained sources.

When a session is ended, thank the spirits who have come through. This brings formal closure to the session.

If you have the opportunity to experiment with real-time EVP, record all sessions, for passive EVP often shows up in recordings when you play them back.

Real-time EVP is even more controversial than passive EVP, for skeptics contend that it is much easier to mistake broadcast snippets for EVP. Consequently, real-time EVP does require more stringent evaluation. We are far from having a reliable, on-demand link like a “cell phone to the spirits,” but I do believe that technology will someday be capable of uniting the worlds of the living and the dead beyond any doubt.

13
A Festival of the Dead

In early 2003, Shawn Poirier and I were sitting in his living room talking about the fabulous Witches' Ball we had hosted the previous October. The guests who attended loved it, and we wanted to do more for the coming October. Salem had been host to an annual “Haunted Happenings” since the early 1980s, but the festivities were really at a low point at that time. Shawn and I scoured the Haunted Happenings calendar and he remarked that this once-great event had been reduced to “corn husks and dog shows.” It was then that I said to him, “Hey, why not bring Halloween back to what it was? Why not host a whole month of events focused on the dead? Isn't that what this holiday is about anyway?”

So began what is now Festival of the Dead, a group of events held each October in Salem that includes a public séance, a ghost-hunting seminar, a course in necromancy, a silent dinner with the dead, a Victorian tea where participants share memories of their loved ones in spirit, a vampire masquerade, and, of course, The Official Salem Witches' Halloween Ball.

Our festival was not well received at first. The mayor at the time treated Halloween and Witchcraft tourism in general with disdain. The official office of tourism wouldn't allow us to join and argued that Salem's tourism should be focused entirely on arts and culture. We thought this insane. The city's attempts to ditch the Witch made international news … and people everywhere else thought it was insane too.

Shawn and I persevered. We kept sticking our feet in doors, attending meetings at City Hall and the Chamber of Commerce, and getting involved in any way we could. A few choice publicity stunts along the way—like 2004's bloody bikini vampire poster of the Countess Bathoria, and 2005's serial killer Wanted posters all over town—didn't hurt. We sent a clear message: embrace Witches or we'll find something worse for you to look at. While abrasive, this tactic worked. Shawn and I began to be accepted in more serious circles in town, and, with much effort, helped to bring Halloween—and all of October in Salem—back to its former glory. We have a fantastic new mayor now who cares about the whole of Salem tourism, a rejuvenated tourism office (I'm now on its board of directors!), and a new mission to promote all of the wonderful things that Salem has to offer—including the Witch and the magical holiday of Halloween!

With Festival of the Dead, my new career was born. I had been practicing Witchcraft since I was eighteen years old, but suddenly, at thirty-three, I was walking a magical path unlike any I had traveled before. I remember the appropriately titled post-mortem meeting held after the first Festival ended in 2003. Those of us who hosted events discussed how doing so was transforming our long-held perspectives on death. If death is transformation, then everyone involved in this new exploration of it was changing in ways we didn't yet understand. All we knew was that
this
was Halloween.
This
was the power of the mighty dead.
This
was pure magic.

Celebrating Death

One might ask why anyone would want to celebrate something so dreaded as death, the dead, or anything to do with mortality. On a psychological level, I think it helps us to confront our fears and process the reality that people have left us, others will follow, and, finally, so too shall we travel through that doorway to the Other Side. On a spiritual level, honoring our departed loved ones keeps their energy close to us and invites them to continue to participate in the blessings of our lives. In America, we have the now-secular holiday of Halloween, making a mockery of all that scares us. Yet the roots of Halloween can be found in the sacred death holidays of old, and virtually every society in history has recognized the value of setting aside special times to honor the beloved dead. Such a communion between the living and the dead shows how connected we all are by the true language of spirit.

From their earliest beginnings, humans have faced the great mystery of death, knowing that it came in its own time for everyone. The truly wise learned to understand and honor this most profound of the rites of passage, guiding their peoples to understand its mysteries. These sages knew that even in the brightest of life's moments, Death's face would be peering from just beyond the shadows, waiting to leave his calling card, and so the magical leaders of old helped to prepare their people for the transformation that comes to us all.

Death is humankind's great lover. He courts and pursues us more relentlessly than any mortal paramour. Throughout history, humans have been led in a dance with death that is both fearful and romantic. Digging through the tomes of religion, myth, anthropology, folklore, and literature, we find the grim examples of death's shadows cast over all cultures like funerary shrouds. We discover that countless societies celebrated death, revered the spirits of the dead, and learned to cope with their fears of that inevitable destination.

Megalithic people of Western Europe left dolmens, mysterious chambers of stone. They were often the burial places of great heroes. The dolmens
were also seen as doorways to hollow hills, the realm of the faerie—whose tales are often intermingled with those of the dead and the underworld.

In majestic Egypt, the wellspring of much of the magic and mystery that have survived through the ages, festivals were held for the dead throughout the year, one of the most important being the annual Festival of the Valley, held in the city of Thebes, one-time capital of Egypt and situated on the east bank of the Nile River. Across the Nile on the west bank of Egypt was the famed Valley of the Kings, where for centuries the tombs of the pharaohs were built. At the Festival of the Valley, the people of Thebes would cross the Nile in a regal procession of boats to the west bank to honor departed royalty and to visit the tombs of their loved ones in the Necropolis. There, they opened the tombs and celebrated with feasts where the living and the dead shared in the banquet. This helped the living to continue the blessings they received from the dead.
⁴²
Such ritual offerings of food, shared between the living and the dead, can be found in today's Dumb Supper, which you will learn more about later. The Egyptians treated their dead with the utmost respect, particularly those of royalty. They perfected the process of mummification, wrapping the dead in the finest of linens, ointments, and perfumes, and filling their tombs with all of the treasures they enjoyed in the body as well as carved canopic jars to hold the body's organs. As stated earlier, the only organ the Egyptians left in the body was the heart—which they considered the center of the soul.

The Romans honored their ancestors throughout the year, but their reverence for the dead peaked with the aptly named Parentalia. An annual nine-day festival beginning on February 13, the Parentalia was a time when businesses and temples closed and families would hold private feasts for the souls of their parents and other relatives in their homes. The observances culminated in the Festival of the Feralia on the 22nd, when the celebration extended to all the dead and crowds would gather at the tombs of the departed to make offerings of wine, milk, honey, oil, and water, while the tombs themselves were adorned with flowers. These practices endured long after the fall of the Roman Empire, as we will see later.
⁴³

The Romans also celebrated the other side of death's coin. The Lemuria, held on the ninth, eleventh, and fifteenth days of May, was a festival designed to keep harmful spirits in check. Lemuria derives its name from the
lemures
, the ghosts of those who died without a surviving family, or who were evil or harmful in nature. If evil, they were associated with the
larvae
, nasty spirits who frightened and injured the living. Like the Parentalia, during Lemuria, businesses and temples closed, and rituals were performed—only these rituals were designed to appease and exorcise the dark spirits that they might trouble the populace no more.

The Athenians of Greece had a similar three-day festival of Dionysus known as the Anthesteria, held in the early springtime, when it was believed that the days belonged not only to the gods, but to the souls of the dead as well. Like the Romans at the Parentalia, each family attended to its own departed loved ones with offerings of items such as honey cakes. They prevented the dead from getting too close by smearing their doorposts with pitch and by chewing whitethorn leaves, a type of hawthorn. On the last day, they made offerings of cooked vegetables and seeds to Hermes, the god who escorted the dead to the underworld, and invited the dead to leave with him.
⁴⁴

Few celebrate the dead quite like the Japanese Buddhists. At their annual festival of Obon in August, with roots dating back to 606 CE, participants feast and dance to honor their dead. The Japanese believe that the souls of their dead return home for the first two to three days of the festival. Fires are lit in yards to guide the souls of the dead to their homes, and those without yards light candles. In researching this holiday, I could not help but be reminded of the traditional jack-o-lantern—carved pumpkins lit on our doorsteps each Halloween night. Offerings of food and flowers are placed on home altars and the names of the dead are written, much like we do on the altar at HEX. Prayers are spoken and dances held and, on the third and final day of Obon, the spirits return home as lanterns float on tiny barges along the current of nearby rivers or on outgoing ocean tides.
⁴⁵
This must be a truly beautiful spectacle that I hope to see myself one day.

The Chinese Taoists and Buddhists have a similar holiday in the Hungry Ghost Festival, held during the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month of the Chinese calendar. Dating back to medieval times, the Hungry Ghost Festival involves rituals of salvation designed to ease the suffering of lost or unhappy souls. Offerings of food are made for the dead either in public ceremonies or within each home, depending on the region. In one area of Eastern China, rice cakes are left as offerings at crossroads, drawing an interesting parallel back to the Greco-Roman and African dealings with the dead.
⁴⁶
Some things truly are universal.