Witching Hour

The phrase “the witching hour” refers to the general time of night when, according to popular lore and superstition, spirits of the dead, as well as a variety of other supernatural beings ranging from ghouls to witches, are said to wander the earth and are at the peak of their fiendish strength and devilish effectiveness.

The term may be found in both an 1831 introduction to Mary Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein (1818) and Washington Irving's famous tale The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) before Ichabod Crane has his fateful encounter with the spectral Headless Horseman. In other forms, the term can be traced to Shakespeare, who uses the phrase “the witching time of night” as a means to set the spooky scene for Hamlet's first attempt at the murder of the conniving King Claudius. Interestingly enough, Hamlet also meets with the ghost of his father at the hour of midnight, the predominant time the witching hour is said to begin.

Historically speaking, the idea of the witching hour, or perhaps as it was more suitably thought of, a time when the unnatural and unorthodox were given free rein, may have arisen from later Roman history when members of pagan cults were persecuted by newly Christianized Romans for carrying out their rituals under the cloak of night when most respectable Roman citizens would be fast asleep. In fact, many neopagans confirm that a true witching hour occurs only at midnight on a full moon. The reasoning behind this seems to [Page 1438]stem from the belief that the aura that surrounds the moon is a harbinger of change, and also that the lunar aura carries an apogee of power when the moon is at its fullest. The moon goddess (in her Roman name, Diana) has long been associated with witchcraft and is still worshipped by practitioners of earth religions and other neopagans (or, as some people like to refer to them, witches, but more properly Wiccans) today.

Further speculation upon the correlation between witches and the witching hour would reveal that the typical witches' Sabbath time is around midnight. These particular scenes of the witches' gathering have often been shown in the theater to be at night, with conditions that meet the idea of the witching hour, usually depicting a full moon in the background. One excellent representation of this is in the film The Crucible, based upon Arthur Miller's play of the same name. Set at the time of the Salem witch trials, the opening act depicts a nighttime witches' Sabbath in which local teenager Abigail Williams kills a chicken as a sacrifice, aspiring to attain the happily married John Proctor's love through magic.

The temptation of Dr. Faust by Mephistopheles also occurs during the midnight hours, and elements of the witching hour are immortalized later during the Walpurgisnacht (the Witches' Night) scene in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust (1808). Walpurgis Night is the time, according to German folklore, when witches gather upon the Brocken summit of the Harz Mountains in northern Germany to celebrate the coming of spring; this holiday is held during the night of April 30. During the midnight hour of Walpurgis Night, similar to a belief in America (except the date is changed to Halloween), it is said that Satan himself is able to walk the earth due to a weakness in the barrier separating the living and the dead.

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