The Bard and the Blood Moon

How Shakespeare invented Halloween

The modern imagination owes its Hallowe’en to Shakespeare. Though he never wrote a ghost story in the strict sense, his theatre is filled with spirits, witches, omens, apparitions, and blood-soaked dreamscapes—all of which coalesced into the iconography we now reserve for the last night of October. The haunted castle, the boiling cauldron, the pale revenant—each entered our shared consciousness not through folklore alone but also by way of the Globe playhouse.

James understood this. If Montague Rhodes James was the twentieth century’s master of the antiquarian ghost story, then Shakespeare was his theatrical progenitor. James quoted Shakespeare more than any other author, including Le Fanu. The influence is persistent, structural, and thematic. Banquo’s ghost, for instance—bleeding, mute, unrelenting—stalks Macbeth’s banquet with precisely the atmospheric grammar that James later used in “Martin’s Close” and “The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance.” These are not sentimental phantoms. They are agents of judgment, figures who upend the natural order, then vanish.

The Weird Sisters of Macbeth, meanwhile, with their bubbling cauldron and incantatory speech, give us the image of the witch we still retain. When children dress in black robes and pointy hats on Hallowe’en night, they do so under the long shadow of Shakespeare’s moor. The witches do not merely plot—they prophesy, manipulate, and tease fate into action. That dramaturgical energy, that ritualistic invocation, undergirds the entire supernatural tradition James inherited that finds resonance in stories such as his “The Ash-Tree",” the unpublished “Fenstanton Witch,” and even “Lost Hearts.”

In Hamlet, we find the ghost as tempter and test. Hamlet’s father appears with mission and mystery, urging revenge but offering no proof. Is he a tormented soul or a devil in disguise? James returns to this ambiguity in “Casting the Runes” and “Number 13,” where the ghost may be spectral or infernal—but never, quite, resolved. The power of the ghost, for both Shakespeare and James, lies in its capacity to destabilize. It forces the protagonist not just into action, but into doubt.

Even Richard III, with its chain of vengeful spirits who visit the usurper before Bosworth Field, casts its long spell. Those ghosts are not horror figures, but moral visitants—spectral reckonings in the night. James captures the same mood in “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral,” where the haunting is not just spectral, but judicial.

In the very title of one of his own ghost stories, James lifted a fragment from The Winter’s Tale—Mamilius’s “There was a man dwelt by a churchyard”—and turned it into a tale of quiet, ritualistic dread. It was not plagiarism. It was homage. James knew, as we should know, that Shakespeare’s ghosts are not merely dramatic—they are cultural. They give form to our fears.

So now that the Hallowe’en season has returned, with its fog machines and paper cauldrons and rattling chains, let us recall that it is not the Celts or the Druids or even the Victorians who gave us our received stage dressing. It is Shakespeare. His ghosts are not simply for fright—they are for memory. And at Hallowe’en, above all, we remember.

Ever, your fellow spirit

Brian Jay Corrigan

Next month: James McBryde and M.R. James

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