October: the Witching Month

Witches, ghosts and the Devil himself. Come see what scared medieval people the most--and why it still scares us.

This October, all month long, I'll be looking into the supernatural in the Middle Ages. Medieval people weren't quite as disturbed by the supernatural as their descendants in the Renaissance and Reformation era would later become, what with all of those witchcrazes. But doesn't mean that they liked to go out alone in the dark, either. Going out at night, of course, meant something very different then than it does now, with our 24-hour gas stations, our omnipresent street lights and electrified homes and our trivializing of horror in films about dumb teenagers being chased around the woods by indestructible maniacs with knives. It had more concrete fears in it.

Medieval people liked a good ghost or horror story as much as we do-perhaps more. They lived hard lives and were not quite as easily scared as we think. This next month, we'll look at the other side of medieval life-namely, death and the supernatural. We'll look at ghosts, ghouls, lepers, heretics, witches, Hell, monsters, nighttime, graveyards and medieval ideas about bad deaths. Starting with the background history to MacBeth this Sunday, we'll tell a medieval ghost story all month long.