And, Now, Just In Time For Halloween . . . .

Is the USS Salem haunted? She is, after all, on her third life. You can take a haunted tour and see for yourself.

"We were really excited to have the Ghost Hunters team onboard this summer," said Michael Condon, executive director of the museum, in a press release.

Condon wouldn't say if the team found any spooky evidence aboard the ship.

I suppose that, in some ways, we Pagans have a relationship to secular Halloween that parallels xianity's relationship to secular xmas, although we, at least, call our religious holiday by a separate name (Samhein in my tradition) to make the distinction. Still, secular Halloween is "based on" Samhein even a bit more than secular xmas is based on the xian holy day of Christmas, although I'm not about to launch some "poor persecuted me" campaign and bitch about the "war on Samhein" with "The Beloved Dead Are The Reason For the Season" bumperstickers, although, now that I think about it . . . .

I find that many of us, yours truly included, both enjoy some of the witchy and spooky aspects of secular Halloween, while, at the same time, objecting to the sexist and xianist characterizations of witches as evil, ugly, old women and to the commercialization of what is one of our high, high holy days. I have a collection of Halloween witches, added to just this year, that I collect the same way that some African American friends of mine collect Aunt Jemima figurines: I want to reclaim the word witch and to honor even those "ugly" old women who were being marginalized and persecuted as witches, even as the good xians skulked out to the edge of the village on moonless nights to ask for an herbal cure, a charm, a potion. I decorate for the secular holiday, I hand out candy to all the neighborhood kiddies ( dressed in my witchy finery, including the pointed hat), I enjoy the secular emphasis on the places where the veils thin, and I hold within myself as odd and, yet, because it's real, also sacred, the conflict over the strange overlap between my sacred day and the secular and commercial attempts to render that which chills us as somehow safe and silly. At the same time, I've started long -running blog wars with jerks who announce "The Witch Is Dead" when a conservative bites the dust or who call any evil woman a "witch".

How do you manage the overlap?

Picture found here.