A medieval Irish story says that on Samhain night, the fairy mounds open, and one warrior walks into a hill and comes back carrying summer. This year Americans will spend $13.5 billion on Halloween. So what happened in between? We follow Samhain from feasting kings and a maybe-sacred hill in County Meath, through a made-up "lord of the dead," the Church's messy calendar, kale-stalk fortune-telling, turnip lanterns, and a Welsh demon pig. Then we look at how the witch got into Halloween (it starts with confessions taken under torture), the first "tricks or treats" in print (Canada, 1917), the poisoned-candy panic, and whether anyone still celebrates the old way. Spoiler: there's a kid on the Isle of Man with a turnip.

Chapters

0:00 The night the hills open

1:26 What Samhain actually was

6:22 The god who wasn't

7:55 Did the Church steal Samhain?

9:49 Guising, kale stalks and turnip lanterns

13:02 How the witch got into Halloween

15:31 Coming to America

17:40 The first "trick or treat"

18:48 The poisoned-candy panic

20:03 Does anyone still do it the old way?

24:55 From the hills to a hot dog costume

Content note: witch trials and torture (briefly), and the 1974 poisoning of a child.

Music: "The Box's Secret" via AISong.org, used under license.

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In 1645, a young man in a small Essex town said he'd overheard witches meeting near his house. Within about two years, more than a hundred people across eastern England had been hanged. Matthew Hopkins had no official job and no real title, so how did the "Witchfinder General" end up running England's deadliest witch hunt, and why didn't anyone stop him?

Heather follows the imps of Manningtree, the towns that paid for the witchfinder's services, a court sent to make the trials fair that hanged eighteen people in one day, an eighty-year-old vicar who confessed to sinking a ship, and the legend of how Hopkins died. Was he a con man, a true believer, or a service his neighbors kept hiring?

Chapters:

00:00 The imp called Vinegar Tom

01:48 Who was Matthew Hopkins?

04:53 Manningtree, spring 1645

08:50 The Chelmsford trial

09:47 The witchfinders on tour

12:26 A bear in the garden

13:02 Twenty shillings a town

16:08 Parliament steps in

17:53 John Lowes

19:23 The vicar who pushed back

21:29 Hopkins answers back

23:30 How he really died

24:45 So what was he?

27:08 His ghost

Content note: discusses torture, sleep deprivation and executions.

Sources

• Malcolm Gaskill, Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (2005): https://research-portal.uea.ac.uk/en/publications/witchfinders-a-seventeenth-century-english-tragedy/
• Matthew Hopkins, The Discovery of Witches (1647), Project Gutenberg: https://gutenberg.org/files/14015/14015-h/14015-h.htm
• "The devil in East Anglia: the Matthew Hopkins trials reconsidered," Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press): https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/witchcraft-in-early-modern-europe/devil-in-east-anglia-the-matthew-hopkins-trials-reconsidered/457471091C78984FFDB263B9CF2290BD
• A True Relation of the Araignment of Eighteene Witches… at St. Edmunds-bury (1645), Bodleian: https://ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repository/xmlui/handle/20.500.12024/A95190?show=full
• John Gaule, Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches and Witchcrafts (1646), Bodleian: https://ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repository/xmlui/handle/20.500.12024/A85867?show=full
• Britannica, "Matthew Hopkins": https://www.britannica.com/print/article/1279664
• University of Manchester, Nehemiah Wallington's notebook: https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/diary-of-witchfinder-general-trials-published-online/
• Discovering Britain (Royal Geographical Society), Manningtree trail: https://www.discoveringbritain.org/activities/east-of-england/trails/manningtree-trail.html

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In 12th-century England, a dead man kept climbing into bed with his wife, and the whole street stayed up every night to watch for him. To understand why, we follow the strange medieval debt between the living and the dead: from Cluny’s prayers for souls, to walking corpses at Wharram Percy, to the 1517 indulgence campaign that literally put a price on salvation.

Content note: descriptions of corpses being exhumed and burned, plague, and death.

Chapters

00:00 The man who came home

01:46 Cluny and a day for the dead

04:35 When hell filed a complaint

06:21 Before purgatory had a name

07:55 William of Newburgh's walking dead

13:35 The bones at Wharram Percy

15:28 The bishop's letter

17:22 The 1517 price list

22:01 The rhyme and Luther's letter

25:09 They kept paying anyway

29:28 Why pay the dead?

Selected sources: William of Newburgh, History of English Affairs, Book 5 (trans. Stevenson); Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory; Mays et al., Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports (2017); the Instructio summaria and Tetzel's sermon (trans. Hillerbrand, The Reformation, 1964); Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun; John Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme.

Music: "The Box's Secret" via AISong.org, used under license.

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