'Do you really believe in ghosts?", asked the bemused anthropologist, glancing at the freezer, electric mixer and mod cons which surrounded the old woman in her Connemara kitchen. "Of course I don't," she snorted in outrage, before adding a cunning afterthought, "but they're there anyway," writes Declan Kiberd
Halloween is one of the few pagan feasts which has not been fully captured and domesticated by the Christian tradition. It marks the end of the harvest and the onset of winter, with its long nights and dark days. In a pre-electric world without artificial light or heat, that date signified a momentous change.
Nowadays, traditional seasons are not experienced in all their fullness, as we can protect ourselves from extremes of weather.
But in olden times, after Halloween, people stared out of their homes into the blackness of the night, haunted by melancholy thoughts, depression and even madness.
Capitalism, not Christianity, has now moved in. Shops across the land will today urge us to take a walk on the wild side and embrace those "shadow" elements which are opposite of all that we are in the rational, daylight world.
But this conjuring of spirits is done with deep mockery, in a way which allows us to give ourselves a little fright, while also expressing our growing scepticism about the supernatural.
Ancient harvest festivals offered a way to challenge winter and to belittle death itself. That was a tradition well suited to the Irish, with their love of noisy wakes. As the song about Finnegan said, there should be "lots of fun" and the chance that the corpse might revive.
Many things that were forbidden in the everyday world seemed suddenly possible at Halloween. Illegal fireworks could be bought by nine-year-old boys from throaty-voiced women on Moore Street, or else imported (along with Spangles and Opal Fruits) from the North, in order to light up the dark night. And, in other lands, weird people did some very strange things.
Twenty years ago, when my family lived in California, our children came home from school with a note from the local hospital: "We share your concern for the safety of your child during the Halloween festivities. Although our X-ray service, which is free of charge, will detect metal objects in candy, it is unable to detect any other adulteration such as glass, wood, thorns or chemicals." The old American trick-or-treat routine seemed to be going into reverse, as kids ran the risk of being hurt by deranged adults.
The advice was not to give out apples or oranges (which could be adulterated) but to offer factory-wrapped sweets. Which we duly did, while wondering whether the whole scare was a marketing ploy got up by chocolate companies and whether the Irish Halloween would ever be troubled by such levels of paranoia and fear. It hasn't happened. Kids, though carefully monitored in this risk-averse society on most other days of the year, clamour to be "let out" to roam the streets in strange disguises on this one very special night. In a world where identity is fixed, the ability to dress up as a witch or a Dumbledore offers a welcome chance to play at being someone else.
It's notable too, that many adults, whose jobs as cashiers or check-out persons are more and more repetitive and routine, like to put on a fancy dress for the festival.
Half of the fun had by children, when calling at the doors of near neighbours, was forcing the hosts to guess who really was there beneath the disguise.
If the guessers had to give up and admit failure, the triumph of the young actors was all the greater.
In my childhood, "any apples or nuts" were welcome, but now it has to be chocolate or sweets (perhaps the California hospital had simply worked out, earlier than most, what kids really want).
In past decades, as the night wore on in Dublin, children would congregate in ever larger groups, straying even further from the home street in search of goodies. These days, however, most of the younger ones are chaperoned by kindly parents (sometimes themselves in strange get-ups), who hover in the background to ensure that all is well.
Some older traditions, like biting-without-handling an apple suspended from a ceiling or submerged in a basin of water, seem to be dying out. But others - the kind that make money for shops - like candle-lit pumpkins or themed fancy-dress parties for grown-ups have assumed a huge significance.
It's an irony that, even as institutional religion wanes, a pre-historic and rather pagan festival takes a deeper hold on our imaginations.
Perhaps this play-acting is part of the modern denial of death. As Woody Allen remarked: "we're not afraid of dying - we just don't want to be around when it happens". And so the dead must return and spirits walk the streets.