Some Advice for the Haunted Season

44°f/6.7°C, clear. Lovely day, just a bit chilly. Frost is possible tonight.

I love this season--- the stories, the decorations, the traditions, and the folklore. And since we're out rousing the spirits (both good and bad!), you might be wondering how to keep them out of your house and away from you and yours! In the old folklore there are quite a few superstitions on the topic. For example:

• sprinkle a ring of salt around your home. It was believed that spirits would not cross salt.
• paint the window and door frames of your house blue. Might clash with your green siding, but spirits apparently will not cross a blue threshold. Down south, there's even a color called Haint Blue, often used to paint the ceilings of porches.
• Hang a hagstone (a stone with a hole through it) by your door. For some reason these deter evil. 
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• You can also hang bells to warn you of approaching spirits.
• hang a mirror outside your door. Spirits must be vain because apparently they must stop and look at themselves in a mirror, and they forget why they came to your house (must have short memories too). A slightly different belief is that mirrors must be covered after a death in the family to prevent the person's spirit from returning through the mirror, thought to be portal to the other side. 
• Put screen wire over all your doors and windows. Spirits seem to be obsessive-compulsive because they have to count every single tiny hole in the screen. By the time they've counted all the holes, day is breaking and they must return to whence they came. As an old night-visiting ballad says, "Oh the winds do blow and the moorcock crows,  and it's nearly breaking day, and it's time for the living to depart from the dead, so now my love I must away, away, so now I must away."
• hang blue bottles on a bush in your yard. As explained to me, the custom springs from a belief that spirits would be attracted to the bottles and get trapped inside. 
• Hang rosemary, tied with red ribbon, outside your door. A twist on this is to put the tied rosemary into a seashell--apparently that can capture a spirit inside the shell!
• Lastly, storyteller Kathryn Windham of Alabama advises her listeners to turn their shoes in opposite directions under the bed at night. This confuses the spirits, she says, because they can't tell if you're coming or going! (Kathryn is a great teller of ghost stories as well as hilarious personal stories, and at 89 is still going strong.)

If you all these instructions, you should feel fairly safe from any ill-intended spirit visits. Of course, by the time you've done all this, it will be daylight anyway and the need for protection will be gone!
For some interesting superstitions, read Haints, Witches and Boogers, Tales from Upper East Tennessee, or Witches, Ghosts and Signs by Patrick Gainer; or the new work by Jerry Milnes, Signs, cures, and witchery : German Appalachian Folklore.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.