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'The hero of Shakespeare’s Hamlet has to decide if his father’s ghost is, as the ghost itself claims, a soul in Purgatory, as Catholics would have it, or a devil in disguise, as Protestant theologians claimed, on the basis that Purgatory does not exist and ghost stories have to be explained somehow:
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn’d,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable.
Protestantism transformed Halloween’s unquiet spirits from ultimately benign, if alarming, reminders of our mortality to evil spirits seeking our spiritual destruction. This has made Halloween into something far darker and more menacing than it was intended to be.'
