“Boo! Trick or Treat!” Pumpkins and children in costumes, it's truly that time of the year, the time when the world celebrates a festival filled with spookiness and fun. Every year, as autumn leaves start to fall and the air turns crisp, the world gears up to celebrate a festival of shadows: Halloween. It's said that centuries ago, people believed the line between our world and the spirit world got really thin on Halloween night, letting ghosts pop by for a visit. But do ghosts even exist?
You've probably heard chilling tales: haunted hotels, eerie houses, and cursed toys, and while many claim that these are just stories, I've heard firsthand accounts from friends and family that make me believe otherwise. It’s hard to imagine that when we die, that’s just...it. But then, there's science. If ghosts are real, what are they? How do they work? It's not like we can just find "ghost" on the periodic table or in a physics book. As humans, all of us have a natural tendency to fear the unknown, and I think that our collective fear of ghosts comes under that. The ghosts and ghouls that we associate with the festival of Halloween cause us to feel uncertain. We don’t know if they exist. We don’t know what they look like.
Halloween has such an absurd concept. If we are so petrified of these things, why do we dedicate a full festival to celebrate them with such vigour? There are multiple lores and traditional reasons for this but I think that Halloween signifies something completely different. Now, Halloween might seem scary, but I think it’s more about conquering our fears. When a child dresses up as a monster, they're laughing in the face of what scares them, and the one in a superhero costume? They're saying, "Tonight, I'm powerful and can face anything." So maybe, Halloween is our way of saying that we're bigger than our fears. And if ghosts do exist, perhaps they're just trying to find their own way, like we are.
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