“I think my favourite costume was one that a girl made from 3,000 polo mints.”
Jacqueline Whoriskey told me this as her three-year-old son was climbing over her and her publicity material for Derry’s 2018 Halloween festivities. Jacqueline is the organiser of the local council’s carnival, which will see around 40,000 people on the streets in and around the walled city of Derry – for what could well be the world’s best Halloween-night experience. If you’re there and you’re not in fancy dress, you’re the one likely to get the strange looks from the zombies, film stars, Trumps, mermaids, witches, warlocks and Pac-Man ghosts. The Pac-Man suits were worn by my children about 10 years ago. (They may still be in the garage if you’d like to borrow them.)
Ireland may have invented Halloween (see the old Samhain festival for evidence) but Derry’s celebrations are not as old as you might think. As a child in the 1960s, 31 October was when we had a bonfire in the garden, lit a few sparklers, put on cheap cardboard masks (“false faces”) and dressed up in whatever old clothes we could find. We then went knocking on doors in our street asking, “Any nuts or apples?” If we were feeling adventurous, we would dunk for apples in a plastic basin.
Sometime in the 80s, customers of a city-centre pub decided to wear fancy dress to add a bit of craic to the night’s drinking. A bomb scare meant they had to leave the bar so, with pints in hand, they trooped down the street to another pub. And that, according to legend, is how the modern Derry Halloween came about. The following year, half the population took to the streets in their own homemade outfits. The city council got in on the act by putting on a huge fireworks display (a novelty for us, as personally buying fireworks was still illegal – thanks to the Troubles) and Derry found itself with a new tourist hit.
The celebration has grown into a week of events but it’s still based around the small city centre and the efforts of the participants on the streets. Highlights this year include Le Bal des Luminéoles, illuminated floating creations from the French arts company Porté par le vent, which will be dancing above St Columbs Cathedral on the city walls. On the ground, there’s a pre-Christian pilgrimage around pagan sites, standing stones and druidic altars in the Halloween Origins Tour, a murder story called Johnny Cash Made Me Do It, and the Wheelin’ Banshee Bike Ride.
Tourists who stop long enough to fill in the tourism surveys say they go back every year because of the people they meet. Not taking anything for granted, the council has continually developed its own programme to keep locals and visitors entertained. For much of the year, the city’s arts groups prepare for the Carnival Parade, when a 1,000-strong procession threads through the gates and hilly streets, with ranks of skeletal drummers following fluorescent dragons, huge tricycles and whatever else has been created in homes, workshops and industrial units around the neighbourhoods.
The Walls Of Derry have been the boundary of the old city for 400 years, withstanding siege, bombs, riots and teenagers drinking their way through cans of beer and bottles of cider in blue plastic bags. They have all gone, along with the British army lookout posts.
In the past 30 years, the Walls have become the location of choice for arts centres and theatres such as the Playhouse, the Nerve Centre, Millennium Forum, Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company, Verbal Arts Centre and the Centre For Contemporary Arts. Each is either attached to the stone ramparts or across the street from them. Under the title Awakening The Walls, the nights leading up to Halloween will see plays, ghost stories, fires, illuminations, acrobats and storytellers around the mile-long circuit.
Last year I joined hundreds on top of the wall in Artillery Street, looking across at the Playhouse, waiting for a nun’s face to appear at one of the windows. Well, obviously I knew it wasn’t real but the Playhouse used to be a convent school and people there say her ghost still haunts the place. So maybe that’s why I was almost jumping up and down with excitement and pointing with the rest of the crowd at the apparition that lit up one of the windows. We moved on, clockwise around the walls, and at the section overlooking the Bogside, we navigated through acrobats, jugglers and flaming torches to work our way downhill to the Guildhall. The building was renovated during Derry-Londonderry’s year as UK City Of Culture and was the setting last year for Luke Jerram’s Museum of the Moon. A huge, scale model of the heavenly body, it lit up the wood panelling and stained glass of the main hall. It returns this year after travelling around the planet. Just like the real one.
Thirty years ago, tourists were so rare in Derry that if you saw some in the street you would tell people about it later. We’re still not overrun with them in the summer, to be honest. But come Halloween, I know there will be a couple of thousand of them, somewhere out there in the dark with the rest of the nuns, nurses, pirates, priests, Lego men and polo mint girls.
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