27. Halloween Episode: Arche the Miller and his Drunken Buddies Pretend to be Ghosts, Cambridgeshire, England 1592
Medieval ghosts usually looked like the humans they had been, only much paler, but they more and more began to look like skeletons. Either way, the main thing they did was waylay living humans in order to give them orders — either concerning how the living could manage to stay out of Purgatory, or how the living could help the dead get out of Purgatory (by finding the stuff they stole in life and giving it back, for instance). Here, a living person is waylaid by a skeletonized dead person, clearly giving unwanted instructions. From a 14th C French Book of Hours, held at the Esztergom Metropolitan Library, Hungary.
When Arche the Miller and a bunch of his cohorts got very very drunk and pretended to be ghosts, they were living in Early Modern England, but they were pretending to be Medieval Ghosts, new ghosts having not been invented yet. In this episode, we explain medieval ghosts and how to pretend to be one, tell medieval ghosts stories, and try to wrap our minds around the well-known medieval forensic tool wherein murdered bodies bleed when the murderer comes by. Happy Halloween!
