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Andy Thomas5 min

Re-enchanting Halloween and the Strange

October 26, 2025

Grinning ghoulish pumpkins, grotesque ghosts with tortured faces, hook-nosed witches with decaying skin, monstrous spiders in thick cobwebs. It must be Halloween again, a celebration – or at least an acknowledgement – of all we perceive to be dark and evil, forever hovering on the edge of awareness.

What is truly dark and evil is probably in front of our faces at the viewing of a single news bulletin, but we prefer it this way. The ‘spooky’ has an entertainment value and keeps otherness at a remove from our daily lives, warded off with lucky charms, incantations and symbols. The Halloween the West indulges in today, with its plastic entertainments and candy pleasures, is very much a reinvention that has left behind the broader practices of its earlier origins in the Samhain festival. Boundaries between worlds were considered to be weak between the harvest and the winter, as nature moved from vibrancy to dormancy and death. Samhain reminded humanity that different lives and mysterious entities lay just the other side of this reality – but they have been given a bad press by some religious dogmas for the last few centuries. The inference that anything appearing to emanate from across the divide can only be Demonic – an aberration to be exorcised through ‘deliverance’ – is unfortunate, given the significant evidence (as scientists insist, albeit without exploring the implications) that other dimensions do exist. If so, then why, in what is clearly a leaky and unstable universe, would interventions from them, both good and bad, not sometimes make their way through into our world, and occasionally the other way around? In my more than 30 years of researching the paranormal and speaking to thousands of witnesses to the strange, I have found that they almost certainly do, no matter what sceptics might say.

Death and fear of the unknown

Fear of the unknown vilifies otherness. Innately evil spirits may well exist, and astral travellers caution against visiting certain layers of reality, but there seems no reason to assume that all beings in other worlds are evil just because some are. Judging the human race on the wayward few that wreak so much havoc here would hardly be a fair assessment. A chronic Western inability to talk about and confront death properly is another element in the maligning of other realms – we don’t want to face either oblivion or the complexity of multi-dimensional existence and so push it down into cartoonish Halloween minimalism instead. The Mexican Day of the Dead approaches it better – a celebration of the ancestors and the lives they led, performing joyous rituals that accept both life and death as two unnegotiable sides of the same coin. But what is ‘death’? If, as most Kindred Spirit readers will likely suspect, it is a transition of energy from one dimension to another and that some semblance of consciousness lives on, what matter if our bones are paraded in the world they are left in, when the real us has already moved on? Super-rich pioneers hubristically seeking new scientific ways to live forever may be denying themselves a crucial prize, as they cling to their fragile ego-selves. In Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, the unageing Elves look with wonder at the new race of Men who have been granted the ‘gift’ of mortality. They never find out where the human essence goes after leaving Middle Earth, and envy it in part; to reach their own heaven, the Elves have to literally board ships.

Strange encounters

If it wasn’t already, it became overwhelmingly clear to me that there was definitely something ‘over the other side’ when I came to compile the selection of the thousands of incredible stories personally shared with me over many years for my book STRANGE: Paranormal Realities in the Everyday World, issued by Watkins Publishing this summer. This is the culmination of decades of investigation into many kinds of paranormal experiences that I have been drawing on for years in my other books and lectures. Recording what I have heard from very ordinary and entirely unbiased witnesses (I regularly lecture to community groups of all kinds) and allowing their voices to be heard directly in one accessible source makes a powerful case for the survival of consciousness and repeated interaction with wider dominions. STRANGE explores and open-mindedly analyses tales of everything from out-of-body and near-death experiences, to psychic phenomena, UFO encounters, timeslips and some very bizarre happenings – but the number one most-reported aspect of the paranormal, which I cover at length, is without doubt ghosts. There are different ways in which these are experienced but ghosts and/or spirits, often of recently passed loved ones, are being regularly encountered almost every day by somebody somewhere and the consistency of these reports is impressive. Most are not Halloween-style frightening apparitions but range instead from the comforting to the mundane, almost as if the passing through of a spirit from the past or an entity crossing dimensions is the most normal thing in the world. We are instructed by mainstream science not to believe in ghosts or anything beyond the flesh because it has been decided on our behalf that such things simply do not exist. If witnessed, we are told, spectres can be nothing more than a hallucinatory trick of the mind. Those people that meet and sometimes have entire conversations with recently departed relatives are patronisingly assured this only occurred because they missed them so much that they somehow willed the experience into being, but the circumstances under which encounters sometimes occur are clearly more than just brain glitches, especially if the ghost or spirit is observed by more than one person either at the same or at different times. Hallucinations don’t explain photographic or CCTV images, and neither do they address another recurring pattern of people having inexplicable meetings with people they didn’t know were dead, often occurring at the very moment of that person’s death, a shocking fact discovered only later. It seems that in that brief liminal state between dimensions, departing souls sometimes have a chance to tie up loose ends. This is not to say that darker and more unsettling ghost encounters never occur. I; in our fragile space-time framework, entities of all kinds will inevitably show up here and there. Some appear to be conscious spirits, fully aware of us, while others seem to be hiccups in time playing over and over, probably unconsciously to the beings visually trapped in their loops. STRANGE recounts fascinating examples of ghost encounters across the spectrum but the beautiful, gentler moments predominate in my experience. Spooky sensationalism sells, though, as recent television shows that appear to have suddenly discovered the paranormal after years of mainstream neglect clearly demonstrate.

The thinning of the veil

What I discovered through writing STRANGE and looking carefully at the many expressions of paranormal phenomena is that areas that appear at first to be disparate and in their own pigeonholes may well not be. The crossover between them can be strong and profound. Even UFO researchers speak now of beings and ‘craft’ coming from psychic realms as much as physical ones, and those that openly practice out-of-body techniques have discovered what shamanic folk have known forever, which is that there are many levels of reality, with doorways between them. Given this, what people brand ghosts, angels, demons or aliens may sometimes be all or none of these options, passing through or manifesting in different ways. It is often said by spiritual practitioners that the veil between worlds is ‘growing thin’, and perhaps the increased awareness of apparent supernatural interaction in numerous guises stands as a confirmation. This is why some believe there is an active attempt to suppress anything considered supernatural, probably from powers invested in holding us firmly in the more easily controllable material world. Hard-pushed technocracies and information overload can fill our heads and stifle our higher natures, as a century ago the mystic and philosopher Rudolf Steiner anticipated would happen a century ago. All the more reason, perhaps, to keep open the paths to other dimensions as much as we can, giving wider context to the one festival we do have that still acknowledges them, however crudely. Let us play with Halloween, then, and allow children the fun of facing darkness in a non-confrontational way, but remember as we do so, that the light of the other realms is also shining through. It is notable that an angel celebration has never seeped its way into mainstream awareness, but Halloween has. It is time to re-enchant the festival. If it is not death that calls to us all in the end but a higher immortality instead, we have every reason to rejoice.

Andy Thomas

Andy Thomas is one of the world’s leading mysteries researchers and author of the new book STRANGE: Paranormal Realities in the Everyday World (£16.99, Watkins Publishing) as well as the acclaimed The New Heretics, Conspiracies and The Truth Agenda among other titles, including definitive books on the crop circle phenomenon. He also writes on folklore and history and widely lectures around Britain and the world. Andy has made numerous TV and radio appearances.

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