How Protestantism changed Hallowe'en and fairies and why Scooby-Doo reflects Catholic teaching

'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.'

Dr Joseph Shaw in an interesting article. In Catholic countries the souls of the dead in Purgatory are regarded as people needing our help. 

Catholic countries have ghost stories too. But in those stories the ghosts are benign figures. 

When unexplainable, malicious spiritual activity does occur in Catholic traditions, it is never attributed to human ghosts but as demonic activity. Therefore, Scooby-Doo is  in line with Catholicism: the ghosts in that cartoon programme always turn out to be human beings in disguise and inevitably unmasked as such. 

I lived in a village in England, St Osyth, which had many ghosts supposedly. My own house was haunted but it's not coincidental that that village was the scene of the two most important series of witch trials in England, separated by about 100 years, after the Reformation. Witch hunting received an enormous boost in Protestant countries. Which leads me to quote my favourite poem. My favourite not because it's about Catholic England but because it's so beautiful. It's by a Protestant bishop, Richard Corbet (1582–1635).

Farewell, rewards and fairies,
Good housewives now may say,
For now foul sluts in dairies
Do fare as well as they.
And though they sweep their hearths no less
Than maids were wont to do,
Yet who of late for cleanness
Finds sixpence in her shoe?

Lament, lament, old Abbeys,
The Fairies’ lost command!
They did but change Priests’ babies,
But some have changed your land.
And all your children, sprung from thence,
Are now grown Puritans,
Who live as Changelings ever since
For love of your demains.

At morning and at evening both
You merry were and glad,
So little care of sleep or sloth
These pretty ladies had;
When Tom came home from labour,
Or Cis to milking rose,
Then merrily went their tabor,
And nimbly went their toes.

Witness those rings and roundelays
Of theirs, which yet remain,
Were footed in Queen Mary’s days
On many a grassy plain;
But since of late, Elizabeth,
And later, James came in,
They never danced on any heath
As when the time hath been.

By which we note the Fairies
Were of the old Profession.
Their songs were ‘Ave Mary’s’,
Their dances were Procession.
But now, alas, they all are dead;
Or gone beyond the seas;
Or farther for Religion fled;
Or else they take their ease.

A tell-tale in their company
They never could endure!
And whoso kept not secretly
Their mirth, was punished, sure;
It was a just and Christian deed
To pinch such black and blue.
Oh how the commonwealth doth want
Such Justices as you!