Happy Halloween!
For a good bit of the population, Halloween is the best day of the year.
These are your Halloween geeks that do cosplay, heavy on the costume, heavier on the play. And these just aren’t the kids.
Macbeth’s witches always loom large at this time of year, with the spell making. Thrice the tabby cat has mewed, thrice and one the hedgehog has…
You get the picture.
There are many interpretations as to when the witching hour is: when the darkness starts to gather, 0300, for parents early to late evening. For your circadian rhythm it is at the lowest: blood pressure, pulse, temperature. This is usually regarded at 0300.
Depending on the shift you work, this may be smack dab in the middle of your sleeping cycle. Shift work ruins everything.
If we are talking heart attacks, most happen in the morning after 0300. There is some evidence that these early morning heart attacks are the most sever types.
When I was working nights in a nursing home, this was when we would find residents dead in bed. Or in distress.
For parents it is the time of day when the day is slowing down, everyone is tired and crabby and the crying starts. Colic is also most prevalent from 1800-midnight.
To put it plainly, this is the time of day that is most dangerous: for health, for sanity, and for evil if you believe in that. To put in metaphysical terms, this is the time of day that the barrier between the worlds is thinnest. Which worlds is up to your personal belief patterns.
And things can happen.
Spooky things can happen.
I’ve written before about the “ghosts” I witnessed in Sonoma. I put it in quotes because you can believe what you want to believe. But was the woman that I saw with my own eyes admitted to the hospital? Nope and I checked every room and every floor.
In the emergency room it is a time of stress because people get drunk and do stupid things, just like any other perceived party time in the world.
The practical among us, myself included, would be wary of what the other people are doing.
Perhaps that is what the witching hour is. And who we should be afraid of.
Other people. Or our own minds. It all depends.
Or know that there can be change afoot, because that is what we all fear the most.
Dispatches from the Evening Shift 