Ghostly Presence

Tombstones are planted in the flower beds. A witch appears to have flown into a tree and is suspended there, broom sticking out from the trunk. An undead crone, motion sensitive, accosts passers-by from the hedge. On my otherwise very quiet, very nothing-to-see-here Brooklyn block, there’s a lot to see this time of year. I arrive home to tourists taking pictures with the skeletons.

This spectacle is aggressively, delightfully low-tech. I asked a six-year-old who was talking to the talking crone if he was scared of her, and he looked at me with pity, as one does at a fraidy cat who’s got to toughen up or the world will swallow her whole.

But in spite of the ghouls and revenants and other morbid players from the sidewalk boneyard, Halloween is a holiday for the living. In a world that feels irretrievably online, where our every interaction is mediated by technology, Halloween, weirdly, is not.

Trick-or-treating is an embodied activity. You have to show up. A Halloween costume is a physical get-up: You wear it out into the real world, where you interface with real people and get real candy. How quaint it seems when you think about it! For all the ways in which we might find legitimate fault with Halloween — it’s too commercial, it’s culturally insensitive, it promotes greed and tooth decay — it’s a refreshingly mundane celebration.

Virtual worlds have their virtues. Video games like Minecraft and Roblox can be refuges, realms for creative expression and imaginative play. But the more beguiling our digital diversions, the more it seems essential to look for, and to insist on, activities that require our physical presence.

So much of the way we interact with one another is asynchronous: text messages, voice memos, social media comments; we’re in our own orbits, colliding occasionally. On Halloween we have a script for deliberate connection: I knock on the door, you answer the door, we connect in real time. We’re wearing disguises, but actually, for tonight at least, we show up as ourselves.