Spooky Season Returns!
Last year Vermont Folklife Archivist, Andy descended into our deepest archival crypts and brought forth a casket load of fascinating Halloween pranks undertaken by naughty Vermont youngsters in days of yore.
Among the pranks he dislodged from the brooding depths beneath VT Folklife HQ were accounts of an unnamed mechanism—an implement of raw chaos—employed by miscreant youth to strike the starkest of terrors into the hearts of unwitting elders on All Hallows Eve. What was this nameless mechanical nightmare, you ask?
Halloweening
When the air grows colder and the darkness begins to settle down upon us, our intrepid archivist dons his favorite shroud and squirms his way into the crypt (aka “the archives”) in search of Halloween treasures to share.
Visions of the Future - Halloween in the VT Folklife Archive, 2024
Spooky Season is upon us! As a part of our partnership with Local Learning and the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Program we recently discovered a wonderful description of a turn-of-the-century Halloween fortune telling game in the VT Folklife Archive. In 1984, Daisy Turner of Grafton, VT shared an account of her sister, Wilhelmina, using the Magic of Halloween to discover the identity of her true love!
It's Halloween! It's Halloween!
It’s our favorite time of the year! Halloween 2021 is nearly upon us. Check out the many ways the VFC observes the spooky season.
A Haunted Gingerbread House?
The theme for this year's annual Gingerbread House Exhibit and Competition is A Christmas Carol: Revisiting the English Tradition of Ghost Stories During the Holidays. Some of you have no doubt been wondering: what the heck do ghost stories have to do with the winter holidays?