One of the highlights of my early years was to go to the Halloween party at my Aunt and Uncle's house in the Scottish Highlands. Everyone was dressed up, guisers arrived by the dozen, games were played and a trail through the vast garden had to be trod by all. Uncle Bill would have spent weeks making cassette tapes of moaning witches which were played through old battery recorders hidden up trees and behind sheds. Skeletons hung from branches and dead hands groped from every door. The atmosphere was helped by a dead-leaf smoky bonfire and the fact that the nearest streetlamp was thirty miles away.The basic, widely accepted premise was that children wouldn't be able to sleep in their own beds for several days afterwards. We all ran screaming from that garden with unwanted wee running down our legs at one time or another.I've just realised that those parties were forty years ago, and Uncle Bill has long ago become one of his own ghosts.I love a proper Halloween. Human beings have been scared of the dark and the dead for thousands of years, I suspect.Long may that continue.
