More Opinions Columnists

• V.B. Price: Preserving our water is greatest challenge the city, state faces
• Jeffry Gardner: End of The Trib is part of the demise of serious journalism
• Katherine Augustine: Time with friends from Japan provides treasured memories

MOST RECENT TRIB STORIES

• ABQTrib.com to remain available
  08:48 a.m., February 25, 2008
• Congressman is indicted
  08:37 a.m., February 23, 2008
• Series of attacks target Green Zone
  08:36 a.m., February 23, 2008
• Iran is defying U.N., agency says
  08:35 a.m., February 23, 2008
• Waterboarding approval probed
  08:34 a.m., February 23, 2008

TRIB IN THE BLOGOSPHERE*

• Ty Murray Invitational thrills fans in Albuquerque
• Is Rome Burning?
• Ominous Skies
• The Road to Invalidation
• Albuquerque company participates in “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition”

*Note: The Tribune does not create and is not responsible for the blogosphere's headlines and stories. These links to blogs talking about ABQTrib.com are automatically generated. Use them at your own risk.

STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• Comments
• iPod friendly
• Printer friendly

SHARE THIS STORY [?]

The spirits of the dead emerge at this time of year and converse with the living, we were told long ago - before the idea was branded as superstitious, unscientific, mere child's play, if not sinful.

Surely, though, after all those millenniums of confirmation and belief, the dead do appear on Halloween and the days that follow - if only we have the eyes to see.

I've sat outside on many an Oct. 31 night hoping to catch a word with my father, with his progenitors from the gray shores of western Sweden, with the gossamer denizens of the Celtic Sidhe, with the wood sprites of the dense Bohemian forests.

No such luck. Until last night.

Suddenly - finally - a small, dark rift opened in the ground. Out, indeed, drifted Dad and the ancestors, in an awesome, solemn file - but not individually approachable. They were part of an underworld procession that glowed like the northern lights. The spirits of many people known to and loved by me were there, but so were more-general apparitions who were related - fairies and hulders; mound-folk still groggy from thousands of years asleep in the cold and damp; huge, female disir long forgotten for all the care they put into guarding their Nordic clans.

More distant, less engaged, but still apparent, were the saints, who looked on disapprovingly - except for Martin de Porres, who seemed to share an affinity for the magical. Mexican skeletons from the D¡a de los Muertos were there, grinning with much better senses of humor than the rest. There were Pueblo figures I couldn't recognize, and what looked like aboriginal Australian dancers, radiant with paint. Loki and Freya, Ares and Artemis and other Western gods of old were visible but, as usual, not terribly interested in the human crowd.

Closer to the Homo sapiens sapiens I knew were a dozen or so spirits of Neanderthals whose lineage we had truncated, their brows furrowed with concern. A Homo erectus tribe, millions of years old, watched quietly and intently.

The mood overall was grim, breathless. Behind the visitors the skies expanded, and trillions of stars, planets, gaseous clouds and quasars shone clearly and distinctly. In their presence, the whole, grand Halloween parade in front of me on Earth seemed so small, so brief, so fragile.

I burned with intimate questions I had hoped to ask the ancestors. But they made it wordlessly clear that something even more important was going on.

A mound man explained to me that such apparitions often arise in times preceding great cataclysms, such as ice ages and their glaciations, when Earth endures immense winnowings that determine the futures of species and of life itself. Only some 2,000 Homo sapiens sapiens passed through the cooling caused by the Toba volcano 72,000 years ago - ancestors of us all.

Life will prevail, he said. But humans are rare in their ability to behold, recognize, remember and understand life. In a way, humans have the joy and the burden of making it all "exist." At the least, they must survive, if anyone is to appreciate ghostly processions such as this one, he said.

I am still stunned by the experience but am trying to make sense of it all.