There were once a bunch of different Halloween divinations that people would try out for fun once a year. Not all of them are covered in books, such as this strange “ghost fire” recipe mentioned in the 1919 article below.
I do not recommend anyone build this type of salt fire. The article is reprinted here for research purposes only.
Would You Know Whom You Are Destined To Wed
Build A Ghost Fire Halloween
The is the night o’ Ha’owe’en
When all the witches may be seen;
Some o’ them black, some o’ them green,
Some o’ them like a turkey bean.
Whatever a “turkey bean” may be like —
Nevertheless the fact remains that for centuries young men and maids on the eve of All Saints’ Day have invoked ghostly information as to their futures.
There are many methods of doing this — such as holding a candle lighted mirror over your head and walking backward down a crooked stairway as the clock strikes midnight. If you are a girl the apparition of your future husband will cloud the mirror’s surface. If you are a man vice versa.
Your Future Husband
But the oldest as well as most mirth provoking mode of procedure is the ghost fire.
A ghost fire is made as follows:
A big dish pan is placed in the center of the floor of a dark room. The pan contains some four or five pounds of salt which has been fairly well saturated with wood alcohol. The party gathers around the pan, chanting the incantation quoted above. Each has been given a chestnut, and each chestnut has been marked in some distinguishing way. A lighted match is thrown on the salt, which breaks into a blaze that gives off an uncanny green light. The chestnuts are then thrown in and the girl whose chestnut pops first will be the first bride. Of course, she must immediately eat the chestnut. BUT — That is not all.
She is supposed to see the face of her future husband arising from the flames!
The Ghost Fire
This ghost fire is a direct survival of the earliest Druid rituals. In Scotland, Ireland and Wales Druidism left its impress upon the later Christian faith, and to this day traces of its fire altars are still found.
Now, the Druids believed in transmigration of souls, and on the eve of their festival to the hun they lighted their fire altars to propitiate the spirits of darkness. The custom was kept up in parts of Great Britain until a comparatively recent period. None of the levity caused by the modern “witch fire” however was attached to this observance. Instead of chestnut being roasted white stones, each previously marked with the name of a member of the family, were thrown into the Halloween fire. Prayers were then said and the family went to bed hoping to find all the stones again in the morning. If any stone were missing, it betokened that the owner of it would die within the year.
While some superstitions are pretty, this was one of many which were cruel. Happily only sportiveness remains today of this quaint old time ceremony, and whatever incantations are chanted have to do with healthy nonsense.
Source: Bisbee Daily Review. Newspaper. October 31, 1919.
