Once upon a time, Halloween was a naughty pagan holiday, a raucous harvest festival...that was, until the Church co-opted the day and it was rechristened as All Hallow's Eve, complete with masques of the devil and his minions, meant to put a good scare into sinnwers. Today, while most folks are out celebrating the tattered remnants of the Church's reworked pagan festival, Churches are opting for the good old "harvest festival" again...an alternative to the alternative, it seems. Then there are those who want to give you a scare you won't enjoy- this would be the propriters of the nation's "hell houses," which look like your average haunted house until you're trapped inside what amounts to a luridly decorated sermon on the evils of homosexuality, abortion, or whatever the bugaboo is this year...

And then there's these guys...

Another paper tries to 'clear up misconceptions' about Wiccans and pentagrams, but ends up creating a few more. (For the record, Satanists did not 'steal' the Wiccan pentacle and 'flip it.' They had it first- and the original Wiccans used both upright and 'reversed' pentacles.)

More Halloween links:

Put a stake through the heart of that myth about demons

Ask a witch