Witchy woman

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/10/2010 (5789 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Then beprepared to cash in big.

According to Mark Ledenbach, the author of Vintage Halloween Collectibles: An Identification and Price Guide, creepy is where the money is when it comes to Halloween memorabilia.

Ledenbach reports that during the 1910s and ’20s, Halloween was geared more towards adults than children, meaning that ornaments and costumes from that era tended to be more realistic than those static window clings you see at your friendly neighbourhood dollar store nowadays.

“More recent Halloween imagery is, by and large, pedestrian, cute and dull (while) the imagery then was meant to provoke a reaction — generally a horrific one,” Ledenbach writes. And since Halloween paraphernalia is notoriously hard to date with any degree of accuracy, Ledenbach’s rule of thumb is simple: the scarier the item, the older — and more valuable — it is.

“Yes, Halloween decorations were a lot more frightening in the early days,” says Winnipegger Leigh Holland. “People used to dress up and make a lot of noise, in order to ward off the goblins and creatures of the night.” (Cue Michael Jackson’s Thriller.)

At regular intervals on Halloween night, trick-or-treaters who arrive at Holland’s front door will glance over her shoulder and comment on the wide array of witches, goblins and ghouls the seven-time grandmother has on display.

What people won’t realize, however, is that at the Holland household, All Hallow’s Eve will live on long after the last miniature Wunderbar is doled out.

“One of my granddaughters asked me one time why I had my decorations up when Halloween was still months away. I told her, ‘Dear, at Grandma’s house, it’s Halloween 365 days of the year,'” Holland says, petting her black (what else?) cat, Lola.

Indeed, almost every square inch of shelf and table space in Holland’s living area is governed by one Jack-o-Lantern or another, as well as a bewitching hodgepodge of antique noisemakers, masks and place settings.

“Halloween is like Christmas to me,” says Holland, who grew up in Elmwood and can still recall which homes on her block handed out the best treats. “No, change that. It’s better than Christmas.”

Holland and her husband, Ron, have always been collectors (her: antique furniture; him: military artifacts) but the Halloween angle didn’t kick in until 1992, when she picked up a holiday-themed postcard at The Forks. Holland, who works at the Antique Mall in Johnston Terminal,now frequents second-hand stores and flea markets across North America, looking for pretty near anything in an orange and black. “Basically, if I like it, I get it,” she says, mentioning Pumkins Pastimes Antiques in Anola as one of her favourite haunts.

Problem is, turning up display-quality collectibles is a formidable challenge, considering the disposable nature of the holiday. “It’s not like Christmas, where people put things out, then carefully pack them away until next year,” Holland says, explaining that before flashlights or glow sticks were the norm, children would carry pumpkins made out of pressed cardboard or papier-maché with burning candles inside them. So unless you luck into one that never saw the light of day, err, night, most of the older ones will have burn marks on them, she explains.

Holland says that it’s not unusual for Holy Grail-type items such as 100-year-old parade lanterns to command as much as $1,500 on eBay, especially at this time of year. Pieces made in Germany — a Halloween hotbed in the 1930s — are particularly sought after by collectors, with prices again reaching into the stratosphere.

On the other hand, one of the rarest pieces in Holland’s personal collection didn’t cost her an arm or a leg.

“I was at a garage sale this summer, and I spotted this black boot sticking out from under a pile of books,” she says. It turned out that the boot “belonged” to a decades-old, metal door-hanger in the shape of a witch. “Normally something that old and in that condition would sell for anywhere from $75 to $100, but the woman running the sale said, ‘Here, you can have it for free,’ after I bought most of the books that were on top of it for my husband.”

Funnily enough, Holland isn’t particularly fond of that other traditional component of Halloween: the horror flick. “As far as movies go, I’m not really into the chopping of body parts,” she says with a laugh. But she does recall one particular Oct. 31 that still sends a shiver up her spine.

“There was a story in the Free Press about 50 years ago, about an editor who spent a night in a house downtown — on Fort Street, I believe — that was supposed to be haunted. After reading that, my girlfriends and I decided to head there on Halloween night, flashlights in hand. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, unfortunately, but it was pretty exciting just the same.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca