A Sneak Peek at Home Depot's Halloween Decorations for 2024Uh, that's Easter, isn't it? As you can see in this picture by Farker dbrunker, a 12-foot skeleton comes in handy for decorating your home any time of the year. If you don't already have one, you'll have to wait a while to purchase yours at Home Depot. But we have a bit of information as to what will be available by late summer to make your home the scariest on the block for Halloween 2024. YouTuber Haunt 365 was at Home Depot's annual manager’s meeting in Las Vegas and managed to bring back some images of what's new and what's returning.
Our First Look at Beetlejuice BeetlejuiceAs if we needed another reason to look forward to fall, now we are waiting for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Don't say it three times, or he will appear! Well, you know that's going to happen no matter what. Michael Keaton return as the prankster demon from the afterlife 36 years after the original Beetlejuice, and we now have a teaser. In the sequel, the women of the Deetz family reunite at their family home. Catherine O'Hara returns as Delia, Winona Ryder returns as Lydia, and Jenny Ortega stars as Lydia's daughter Astrid. It's Astrid who accidentally conjures up Beetlejuice. Tim Burton has been trying to get this movie made for a long, long time now; let's hope it's worth the wait. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice will be in theaters September 6.
Witch Hunts Snared Thousands of Innocent Women, But Not in WalesIn the fourth installment of what has turned out to be "witch week," we turn to the witches of Wales, and the story is more than just the tale of a Welsh witch named Rhiannon. From 1450 to 1700, around 35,000 people, the great majority of them women, were executed for witchcraft in Europe. Those numbered 4,000 or so in Scotland and 1,000 in England. But in Wales, only five women were sent to their death as witches. Those thousands in England and Scotland may be due to particularly enthusiastic prosecutors, which extended to royalty. But what was going on Wales? A new book exploring the horror of witch trials poses a couple of reasons why Wales was different, and a reason to admire the Welsh for it, plus the real motivations behind the witch hunting craze in other parts of what eventually became Great Britain. -via Fark​(Image credit: Henry Ossawa Tanner) 
The Strange Early Skepticism About Flying WitchesIn the folklore surrounding witches, there are clues in the literature that show there were always men who knew that accusing someone of witchcraft was, deep down, a religious theater of sorts designed to control unruly women. If you believed that a witch could put a hex on someone or consort with the devil in the pale moonlight, why was their ability to fly a bridge too far? A manuscript from 1451 depicts witches flying on staffs and brooms to their witch's sabbath. Other texts followed that either furthered this notion or tried to explain it away with drugs. The witch's ointments and potions gave them the illusion that they flew through the air. The church actually held that view from the 10th century that demons seduced women into the thinking that they could fly. But accounts of drug use that led to the illusion and the actual flying both came from authorities that did the accusing, not from women who were considered to be witches, unless they were under torture to admit such things. Read about the idea of flying witches and what it says about witchcraft mania at the Conversation. -via Strange Company(Image credit: Martin Le France) 
The Swedish Witches of EasterWhere there is a holiday, there will be witches involved somewhere. Halloween is, of course, full of them. We also have Christmas witches and Epiphany witches. Is it any surprise that we also have Easter witches? In Sweden, several thousand people were accused of witchcraft in the 1660s and 1670s, and several hundred were put to death. The folklore that grew at the time tells us that witches rise up on Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday, and fly to the legendary island of Blåkulla to consort with the devil, taking kidnapped children with them. They would then return to their homes on Easter Sunday.
The Legacy of Molly Leigh, the Witch of BurslemOn Halloween night, there are always a few children in the village of Burslem in central England who venture out to a graveyard to perform a ritual at a witch's grave. They recite a chant handed down over generations while they skip three times around Molly Leigh's grave. The grave is easy to find, since it's the only grave oriented north-south instead of east-west. That's because Molly Leigh was considered a witch. Leigh fit the typical description of a witch in the late 17th and early 18th century. Born of a poor family, she seemed an odd child, then kept to herself most of her adult life. Leigh's only companion was a tame blackbird (or raven, or jackdaw). She sold low-quality milk, and people just plain disliked her. Legends of strange phenomena grew around her. But the final straw was when a mysterious illness came over the local priest, and he blamed Molly Leigh. She was accused of witchcraft, but escaped trial by dying first. It was Leigh's ghost that convinced the local parish to re-orient her grave to separate it from the God-fearing parishioners buried around her. Read the story of the witch of Burslem at Daily Grail. -via Strange Company ​(Image credit: J. Wedgwood Myatt)