Longtime librarian Eileen Kearney will never forget that night at the Lynn Public Library, some 20 years ago, when she found herself alone in the stacks.
"I saw something out of the corner of my eye," she said. "So I turn and look and there’s a woman all in black in Victorian clothing and she’s scooting down one of the alleyways in the stacks … it was not a shadow."
As we reached the scene of the encounter, Kearney explained how she followed the woman to the head of this long aisle, lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves — all the way to the wall.
"And then when you got to the spot that we’re standing on right now, you looked — nothing there, right, and it only took me like two seconds to get here so where would they have gone?" she said. "There’s no place to go, except “pooof … ”
Kearney says she wasn’t scared — even for a moment. She knew exactly who it was: Ruth Edna Kelley, a librarian in Lynn from 1917 to 1955, who was known, decades later, to still haunt the stacks, and the woman who wrote the book on Halloween.
"She worked at the library for a long time — I mean even in her obituary she leaves no near relatives — she was kind of a loner," Kearney said.
"It said in her retirement article that she wanted to derive much pleasure and satisfaction from her home, her pet cat and gardening," chief librarian Theresa Hurley said (Yikes – there’s your stereotype of a librarian … ).
Bur Kelley did leave a lasting, if today little-known legacy: a carefully researched volume, published in 1919 when she was just 26 years old, called "The Book of Hallowe'en."
"It’s certainly the first serious historical book on Halloween," said Somerville author and Halloween authority Lesley Bannatyne. Since Bannatyne started writing about the holiday 25 years ago, Kelley’s book, and its thorough bibliography, have been invaluable guides for Bannatyne.
"There are other sources before then but Ruth Kelley was the one who put it all together — for adults — with the history part," Bannatyne said.
For the history, Kelley delves deep into the ancient roots of Halloween on the British Isles, drawing on everything from the Irish sagas to early Scottish poetry to medieval history and mythology.
"She gets the deep down into what’s Halloween about, which she writes a lot about — the turning of the sun, the changing of the seasons the coming of darkness," Bannatyne said. "All those things that can be opened up into metaphors and how people thought back a thousand years ago or more."
But Kelley also cites volumes of modern American and British folklore, contemporary newspaper articles and women’s magazines, shrewdly noting that the Halloween that was emerging in America was something altogether different.
"America invented a new Halloween that worked for us in the 20th century," she said.
There were parties with a secret guest list where one came dressed as a ghost or witch; romantic, old world, fortune telling games; and kids pulling pranks - like stealing doorknobs and dousing passers-by with flour. One thing Kelley's book does not mention is today’s Halloween centerpiece. That came a little later.
"Trick-or-treating, maybe 1920s, 1930s, definitely by the 40s," Bannatyne said. "It’s an American adaptation of an old medieval costumed begging custom."
So as you head out tomorrow to celebrate Halloween, remember that while it is uniquely of America, it is still not entirely from America, which is, of course, very American, and something we understand today thanks, in large part, to Ruth Kelley.
"What did it keep? It kept that otherworldly seed of what Halloween always kind of has been, this other world, looking into the other world, imagining the creatures that might live right beyond the shadows," Bannatyne said. "And she gets that in her book."
Ruth Edna Kelley, the resident ghost at the Lynn Public Library, wrote "The Book of Hallowe'en," which was at American’s fingertips for the first time when Halloween arrived, 96 years ago this week. Kelley's book is still in print if you'd like to get your hands on a hard copy – or it can be read in it's entirety online.
