Articles
The essays
Essays that cut across several entries: one motif at a time, followed from one region to another or from one language to another. The rules of the entries apply — sources are declared, and what remains a hypothesis is said to be a hypothesis.
Who invented Samhain
In 1786 a British military engineer invents an Irish god of the dead who exists in no manuscript. Two centuries later it is still the opening line of almost everything written about Halloween.
❉The creature that sits on your chest
Seventeen dialect names for a single experience, from the Romagnol mazapégul to the Sardinian ammuntadore, and the etymologies that confirm it.
❉The red cap
Twenty Italian names for a single house sprite. The recurring traits are documented — but they admit three different explanations, and the oldest of the seven is in fact the most recent.
❉The exhumation record
Six graves opened between 1700 and 2004, six documents written by people who were present. The bodies resemble one another down to the detail — and the word «vampire» is younger than almost everything it claims to explain.
❉The dead who bring the presents
In Sicily the dead hide presents for the children, in Sardinia the children beg on their behalf, in Friuli a place is left at the table. The Italian tradition of the dead is documented — and it looks nothing like the one claimed against Halloween.
❉The bridge the devil did not build
The pact with the devil for the bridge over the Serchio underpins the largest Halloween festival in Italy. In the international comparative index the Tuscan variant is sourced to a tourist magazine of 2020: of nineteenth-century attestations there is not one.
❉Who wrote the Tuscan tradition
Pan co’ santi, ossi di morto, the ben d’i morti. I tried to trace who first recorded them, and the chain ends on four food blogs published between 2014 and 2023. An account of a search that came back empty, and of why that matters.
❉Lucca Comics is not a Halloween festival
A hundred thousand people in costume twenty kilometres from the Devil’s Bridge, in the last week of October. It looks like a design: it is a calendar, and the date is twenty years older than Halloween’s arrival in Italy.