Is Nashotah House Seminary haunted by a monk in black?

Newspaper articles dating back to 1902 detail various ghost sightings and supernatural experiences at Nashotah House Seminary [Anglican], 2777 MIssion Road.

Most of them recount the history of the "Black Monk," a priest named Daniel Pope who was murdered by his wife in 1852 to accommodate an affair she was having with another man. But his death was ruled a suicide and considered a repugnant sin, so Pope's body was not allowed to buried in the consecrated grounds of the cemetery at Our Lady of Spring Bank Cistercian, where he served.

Nashotah House was nearby, but Pope was not allowed to be buried in hallowed ground there either. His tombstone stands to this day, but is isolated from the other graves.

On her deathbed, the legend goes, Pope's wife confessed to her crime. The priests, horrified at their mistake, exhumed Pope's grave — but found his casket empty.

Now, almost 170 years later, Pope's ghost is said to appear every Halloween and wander the cemetery in search of what should have been his final resting place.

continue at JS

The Holy Ghosts of Halloween: Resurrecting a Catholic Feast Dr. Marcel Antonio Brown

Dr. Marcel Antonio Brown advocates an uphill climb in the latest issue of Adoremus Bulletin.

"Indeed, it is difficult to think of a holy day more distorted by secularism than Halloween. The authentic spirit of the day has long-since been driven out of most places."

1P5: A Modern Catholic Gentleman’s Guide to Halloween

“Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.”
– G.K. Chesterton

At this time of the year, as they bustle about for their little mock-Patricks and Augustines, gluing miters and stitching chasubles (each of the same fine material and nearly so well-crafted as the dreck one finds on a living Bishop) the Buzzkill Catholics are once again foisting onto the faithful their annual All Saints parties.

These parties are typically scheduled not on the Feast of All Saints, but on the evening of the day before, aiming intentionally to harsh your mellow and preclude the culturally normal observance of Halloween. The Buzzkill Catholics, you see, detest cultural normalcy.

The origins of Trick or Treating are hotly debated. Are these old Catholic traditions, filtered through the experience of Irish immigrants to America? Is it door to door alms for the poor in exchange for prayers? Do more anti-religious origins lie shrouded in history, such as the annual mockery of English Catholics on the anniversary of the failed terrorist plot of poor, powder-damp Guy Fawkes? Or does something even more sinister lurk, a pagan festival perhaps, or devil worship itself?

continue at One Peter Five

Haha!  Yes!  Excellent!

Halloween prayer vigil at Wisconsin Rapids cemetery Oct 31st

MC Halloween Prayer Vigil

HT Cheryl

More on the Hubertus Haunted House

Jim Stingl of the JS took a tour of the Hubertus Haunted House.  Worth reading the full thing there.

Knowing there's a lot of competition for your spook house dollars, I guess I expected more Freddy Krueger or chain-saw-type mayhem and the resulting bloody body parts. I'm told it's been tamed down a bit this year.

"We do this without all the blood and guts people assume need to be in a haunted house," said Lynda DuPuy, a longtime core-group volunteer, member of the parish, and mother of two daughters who attended the school.

In that case, the attraction might want to change its website, which includes this blurb from a 2012 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel review: "The bathroom scene might be one of the goriest of all the haunts."

DuPuy said repeatedly she's not bashing the archdiocese or speaking for the school, but she wishes the archdiocese would reconsider the decision to close the House of Horror. She and other volunteers met with Hying in March to present their case along with testimonials from satisfied customers, but it didn't seem to help.

The letter from Hying said the last straw was a video produced to promote the haunted house last year, which included scenes filmed in the actual church cemetery as well as murder, decapitation and cannibalism.

That video was outsourced, and it was a mistake, DuPuy admits. It was long ago taken down from YouTube.

The letter also mentions demonic images and inappropriate sexuality there in past years. DuPuy said none of that was presented.

full article at JS

I think it's possible to have a scary "haunted house" without murder, decapitation, and cannibalism.   Some of those crimes go on in this world and should not be depicted lightly.  Gore is for folks who just aren't very good scarers.

Abp. Listecki shuts down Hubertus Catholic School haunted house

HUBERTUS - This is likely the last year for the haunted house in Hubertus. For 31 years, St. Gabriel's Catholic School has used an old farm house on church property to bring Halloween fun to families. It generally raises about $70-thousand a year.  [... the haunted house raises $70,000!?!]

"I'm sad. I've only been involved with it for five years, but there's people who've been involved for 10, 15 years and you do get attached," said Bernie Sidor, parent.

A parish statement says,"The Archdiocese raised concerns about the haunted house's depiction of circumstances or situations that did not seem to align with the joy of the gospel."

Parents fear tuition at St. Gabriel's will go up without this major fundraiser.

In addition to praying for a change of heart, volunteers are also inviting Archbishop Listecki to come out here and experience this for himself.

WTMJ ( with uh, video)

As you know, I'm not a puritan when it comes to ghouls and goblins.  That said, I know that Holy Hill has had significant problems with the actual occult in that area in recent memory.

WordonFire: Halloween and Catholicism

I always figured that Halloween had pagan roots, but you are telling me they are Catholic. Huh? How so?

 

The origin and traditional customs associated with Halloween require no other explanation than that they are examples of the kinds of festivity that served as a means of celebrating the various holy days of the Catholic Liturgical Year. This includes everything from masquerades, feasting, and the associations of a given day of the year with supernatural or spiritual truths.

I would draw a distinction between the violent, macabre imagery that characterizes the modern appropriation of Halloween as a kind of secular celebration and the more traditional customs that are characteristic of a Catholic cultural ethos. The descent of Halloween into the madness of an annual fright fest is a relatively recent development, but the true substance of Halloween belongs to the Church. Halloween (or “All Hallows Eve”) is the festive precursor to the celebration of the Church’s public commemoration of All Saints Day.

There has been an appropriation of the festivities of Halloween by modern pagans, but please understand that modern paganism is precisely modern and should be distinguished from the cults of ancient religions. The origins and practices of the modern paganism do not extend farther back than the late nineteenth century. Also, remember, the term “pagan” is a slippery one. What does it mean? The worship of the gods and goddesses from long ago? Those cults have long since passed away with the cultural matrix that once supported the world views that were the conditions for their possibility. You can’t just reinvent those cults without the culture that supported them.

The paganism that exists today is a romantic and very selective attempt at a re-appropriation of an ancient religious ethos, but it isn’t and cannot be the same thing that paganism was in its original cultural expressions. I think that the practitioners need to justify their beliefs by insisting on an association with what they are doing and ancient forms and styles of worship. This gives the impression that the modern pagan élan has more gravitas (especially in relation to Christianity) but it doesn’t make it the same thing as the ancient cults. The association that modern paganism makes between itself and the forms and styles of ancient culture is more about desire than it is about reality.

I think that the association of Halloween with paganism has much more to do with the Protestant Reformation than anything else. The Protestant reformers were concerned about the practices of medieval Christianity that to them seemed contrary to what they believed the Church should be. They knew that these practices had clear precedents in the history of the Church, but insisted that they represented a corruption of the original form of Christianity that had become degraded over time. The degradation was explained as a regression into cultural forms that the Protestants described as pagan.

continue at Fr. Robert Barron's Word on Fire

Surprise: Halloween's Not a Pagan Festival After All

We’ve all heard the allegations: Halloween is a pagan rite dating back to some pre-Christian festival among the Celtic Druids that escaped church suppression. Even today modern pagans and witches continue to celebrate this ancient festival. If you let your kids go trick-or-treating, they will be worshiping the devil and pagan gods.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The origins of Halloween are, in fact, very Christian and rather American. Halloween falls on October 31 because of a pope, and its observances are the result of medieval Catholic piety.

It’s true that the ancient Celts of Ireland and Britain celebrated a minor festival on October 31--as they did on the last day of most other months of the year. However, Halloween falls on the last day of October because the Feast of All Saints, or "All Hallows," falls on November 1. The feast in honor of all the saints in heaven used to be celebrated on May 13, but Pope Gregory III (d. 741) moved it to November 1, the dedication day of All Saints Chapel in St. Peter’s at Rome. Later, in the 840s, Pope Gregory IV commanded that All Saints be observed everywhere. And so the holy day spread to Ireland.

The day before was the feast’s evening vigil, "All Hallows Even," or "Hallowe’en." In those days Halloween didn’t have any special significance for Christians or for long-dead Celtic pagans.

In 998, St. Odilo, the abbot of the powerful monastery of Cluny in southern France, added a celebration on November 2. This was a day of prayer for the souls of all the faithful departed. This feast, called All Souls Day, spread from France to the rest of Europe.

continue at BeliefNet 

Image

Thee most adorable saints

via 1BillionStories

CERC: How to think about Halloween as a Catholic

While I was busy rubbing my hands together and thinking about how hilarious and yet subversively informative my post about Halloween costumes was going to be (once I got around to writing it), noted overachieving spoilsport Jimmy Akin went ahead and wrote it. Even worse, the big show-off produced a slick video about it, including some very relevant images of kittens and puppies. He also, without losing his rhythm, got sidetracked by thinking about delicious brains.

Akin makes the sensible point that people are attracted to spooky stuff for a reason — that God made us so that we enjoy small doses of peril and tension, because it prepares us to deal with the real thing, which will surely come along sooner or later. (This is where the adorable and extremely relevant, but adorable fighting kitties comes in.) So as long as we don't spend our lives wallowing in gore and ghoulishness, it's healthy and normal and perfectly fine to indulge in a little dramatic scaring and screaming from time to time. Therefore, spooky Halloween stuff? A-OK.

Akin's point reminds me of something my sister once pointed out: that when Daddy tosses the baby up in the air and baby laughs, it's because there really is a joke there, albeit a very simple one. The situation says, "You're in danger!" but the baby knows, "But it's Daddy! I'm fine!" See? Funny stuff right there, if you're a baby. And a pretty good analogy for the delightfully childlike question, "If God is for us, who can be against us?" Whee! There's yet a third answer to the question of whether creepy, gory costumes and other Halloweeny practices (or scary stuff in general) are appropriate for Catholics to indulge in: some Catholics argue, "This isn't just a little holiday from the somber demands of my Faith — it's actually my way of laughing at the devil! I'm spitting in ol' Nick's eye and reaffirming the truth of the triumph of the Resurrection when I . . . um. . . buy this rubber mask of a clown with an axe splitting his forehead open. See? Ad majorem dei gloriam! Wooooooooooooooo!" I used to roll my eyes over these rather contrived arguments, thinking, "Gee whiz, just admit that you want to have fun sometimes, and stop trying to make some big religious deal out of everything."

continue at Catholic Education Resource Center 

If only Sub Tuum was still online, he had a fantastic post on the matter.