What’s allowed the witch at Halloween, and what’s sold to the rest of us.
I’ve been passing by the same house on my drive home this week, the one a few streets over that goes all-in on Halloween: fog machine running, a scarecrow slumped against the mailbox, tombstones in the grass, skeletons in various poses, witches on broomsticks suspended mid-flight above the lawn, cobwebs stretched thin and deliberate across the porch railing. Each time, I’ve noticed something small and involuntary in my own reaction, a flicker of delight at how convincingly different it looks. Someone had decided to make an ordinary home look haunted, and the whole street was invited to enjoy it. The house was allowed to become strange, and it’s celebrated.
I’m enjoying the scene, especially the witches, and the longer I look at them with the other decorations, the more the rest of the lawn seems to organize itself around those free-wheeling broomstick riders: the tombstones mark the dead, the skeletons are what’s left of the dead, and the scarecrow, passed out either because he had too much to drink or because he is tired from his scaring crows duties, is a joke in a flannel shirt. The witches are the only figures on that lawn who are meant to be old and still very much alive, and the only ones meant to be admired for it, at least in a lopsided, tongue-in-cheek way permissible for this haunting time of year. Gray hair streaming behind them, hats tilted against the wind, they look powerful up there, and a little delighted with themselves. But their thrill of emancipation and freedom to pursue their sorcery endeavors is temporary. In a couple of weeks they’ll be unhooked, folded into a box, and stored somewhere until next October.
One of the nights I was idling at the stop sign out front when I caught my own reflection in the rearview mirror. I did a small double take at my gray hair, curly and a little unwieldy. I looked at the witches. We had the same unmanaged gray hair but I didn’t interpret our locks in the same way. On the lawn, the witches’ gray hair seem to signal power, mischief, an acceptance of being old. On me, it tends to signal the opposite: a woman who is easier to overlook, disappearing, whose knowledge and authority are assumed to be draining away. But if I’m haunted by anything, it isn’t the gray itself, it’s the story that arrives with it. And what I felt, looking at my reflection, was closer to envy than the sting of a lawn decoration. I wanted some of what those witches have up there, the hair out behind them like a banner with no apology anywhere in sight.
That was the thought that followed me the rest of the drive home. A house gets to change its appearance and be applauded, and the witches, for once, get to enjoy themselves. My aging appearance is a significant and natural change but applause is not what it brings. It’s something I need to defend, apologize for, or adjust because there is no shortage of products that tell me I must defy the inevitable. An entire industry organizes itself around that premise, selling the idea that an aging body is a problem to be managed, concealed, or corrected. Under that logic, my reflection in the rearview mirror isn’t just a face, it’s a body that has stopped performing youth on schedule. My interpretation of the witches is that their age gives them the power to just be, and for a few weeks every fall, we allow it. A witch’s power, though, is frightening, intimidating, and threatening (think the three sisters in Macbeth along with popular culture’s representations), and I suspect that’s why we only permit it in costume, on a lawn, with an expiration date. A witch is safe as long as she’s pretend. The real women, whose growing wisdom with aging carries authority and power, are offered the products instead.
Naomi Wolf names this in The Beauty Myth (1991). She argued that the pressure on women to look a certain way doesn’t ease as women gain power. It intensifies, because an ideal of beauty keeps women anxious, preoccupied, and spending, rather than sure of their own authority. Read that way, the products offered to aging women aren’t a side effect of the witch’s disappearance. They’re the mechanism. A woman who is busy defending, apologizing for, or adjusting her face has less attention left for what she knows. The lawn witch is allowed her gray streaming hair because she poses no threat. The woman in the rearview mirror is another matter, which is why she’s sold a remedy.
But there’s an older story running alongside that one, and it shows up every October whether we notice it or not. The witches in Macbeth aren’t young. They see what’s coming before anyone else does, and they speak in riddles the ambitious men in the play can’t decode until it’s too late. They’re frightening not because they’re old, but because their age comes paired with knowledge nobody else in the play possesses. Historians of the European witch hunts (such as Lyndal Roper Witch Craze and Anne Llewellyn Barstow Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts) have found that the accused were often older women, and that whatever power they seemed to hold was read as a danger rather than honored. The power attributed to these women was never respected. It was imagined as menace, and menace is something a community feels entitled to contain. We stage this image every autumn, the pointed hat, the withered face, the bony hands, the piercing eyes, the sense that this woman has seen something, knows something. Then we spend the other eleven months telling actual aging women the opposite: that what their faces and bodies reveal is decline, not knowledge.
That, I think, is the part we haven’t let go of. If an older woman’s knowledge and authority are framed as a threat, then controlling her image and her influence starts to look like common sense rather than cruelty. We insidiously send a quieter and more profitable message: we make the aging body a problem to be corrected, we make gray hair a failure of maintenance, and we make a woman who stops trying to look younger seem like she’s stopped trying at all. The goal isn’t always to silence her outright. It’s to make her easier to overlook, less taken seriously, and a little more likely to disappear on her own.
So when the witch comes back every October, gray hair streaming and pointed hat and all, I wonder if she’s less a tribute than a containment. She’s the one older woman we allow to be seen at full power, because she’s safely fictional, safely seasonal, and safely scary. The rest of the year, the real ones are told to take up less space.
I don’t think the answer is to become the witch. That’s its own costume, its own performance. What I’m left with is smaller and more stubborn. The two stories on offer, the haunted house and the crone’s cottage, the body in decline and the body with knowledge, were never really about the body. They’re about who gets to tell the story, and what they gain from it. The decline story sells products. The witch story offers a night of delicious fear that lets us feel we’ve honored something while changing nothing. Neither asks what an older woman actually knows, or what she might say if we stopped managing her image long enough to listen.
So I’m left with a few questions I can’t quite put down:
Who decides which version of an older woman we’re allowed to see?
What changes if we stop asking whether she’s frightening or fading, and start asking what she knows?
And what would it mean to look in the mirror and see a house that’s lived in, rather than a house that’s haunted?
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