Vintage Halloween

For Samhain 2022 The National Leprechaun Museum launched our Vintage Halloween special tour. The impetus behind the project was to recreate the “classic” feel of an Irish Halloween and so with images of black rubbish sack costumes, ghosts, ghouls, and turnips running through our heads we began.

First, as we always do, we focused on the stories. We wanted to pick some characters and creatures that summed up the Halloween spirit, allowing them to tell their own tales. The audience would be led through the museum as if they were Trick or Treating, going from room to room to be met by grizzly characters with grizzlier tales. Stingy Jack, according to the story, was the reason for leaving turnips on your doorsteps on Samhain night, a practice continued to this day in the form of the pumpkins that line the streets on Halloween. He would make him the perfect guide to introduce the evening, giving people to opportunity to hear why it is not safe to eat blackberries after Halloween.

Vintage Halloween featured the sublime musical talents of (I forgot their full names) providing musical backing and a chilling rendition of the classic Irish lullaby Weelia Weelia Waile. After the group would have the chance to meet either the Banshee on her busiest night of the year or the Irish god of Death himself, before finishing, appropriately, in a graveyard with a restless soul returning from the grave.

Overall, we wanted to bring the nostalgic feeling we all got when thinking back about all the Halloweens we had experienced, trying to capture the giddy excitement of listening to tales of ghosts and spirits on the most supernature night of the year.