The undead are dying

Jure Stojan

A curious transition befalls Slovenia in late October. Seemingly out of nowhere, supermarket aisles fill with sugar pumpkins, plastic skeletons, and rubber spiders. Children dress up as witches, adults explore the stylistic possibilities of fake blood, and the hospitality industry celebrates yet another occasion for seasonal parties.

Undeniably, Halloween has become a fixture of Slovenian life. Brought over by American television shows of the 1990s, it has gained enthusiastic devotees and equally eager detractors. Ethnologists complain about creeping Americanisation. Children, quite understandably, prefer sweets to cultural studies. The fun is mostly harmless, and occasionally cheap. The problem is not Halloween itself, but the way it overwrites what came before.

Weixelstein, under new management. The Adriatic, after Valvasor (1679)

Consider the British, who have been suffering from a supernatural crisis of their own. Their undead apparitions, apparently, are disappearing.

For centuries, every respectable castle was expected to have at least one ghost, just as it had draughty staircases and exorbitant maintenance bills. The preferred spectres were those of unhappy noblewomen, battered by their husbands or by their relatives, condemned to wander the corridors until the ancient injustices were finally resolved. Ghosts were a core part of cultural heritage.

Then came modernity. In 2001 Tony Cornell, a researcher associated with the Society for Psychical Research, blamed mobile phones for the decline in paranormal manifestations. The undead, he suggested, found electromagnetic signals disturbing. The theory was never accepted by scientists, but it seemed to resolve an old challenge: it is surprisingly difficult to meet a ghost.

More recently, Paul Lee, a British paranormal researcher, surveyed thousands of supposedly haunted properties. In many of them, he discovered, there was no longer any discernible supernatural activity. The traditional inhabitants of haunted houses had become less reliable than the plumbing.

Slovenia, meanwhile, has no shortage of ghosts. They haunt old castles, dark forests, and country roads. At Rajhenburg Castle, the spirits of two brothers are said to continue their murderous quarrel. At Pišece, a little girl is still imprisoned inside a tower and cannot find the exit. At Negova Castle, the cellar is still haunted by the screams of a woman tortured to death.

In the 19th century, some Slovenian ghosts even achieved international fame. Long before Hollywood exploited the commercial possibilities of the supernatural, the country’s apparitions were mentioned in the spiritualist press of Europe and America.

In September 1879 the London newspaper The Spiritualist published a remarkable account of a haunting at Weixelstein Castle (Novi dvor, near Radeče), supplied by Captain Richard Francis Burton. The celebrated explorer, then British consul at Trieste, had come across the dusty tomes of Die Ehre dess Hertzogthums Crain, Janez Vajkard Valvasor’s great survey of Carniola, published in 1689, and was happy to recount the story of a spirit preoccupied with an unpaid spiritual debt. It claimed to have misappropriated 60 florins and demanded 30 masses for the salvation of its soul. A servant named Anka had become its principal medium. When the required masses had been performed, the ghost announced that it was finally going to heaven. An unexpectedly satisfactory conclusion, reached through faithful Catholicism rather than the dark arts.

In 1897 the Leipzig journal Psychische Studien reported on a ghostly visitation at the Franciscan monastery of Nazarje. The apparition, identified as a deceased friar from Ljubljana, had reportedly appeared to Father Dominik in the 18th century to ask for prayers and assistance. The story had already been told in 1892 in Cvetje z vertov sv. Frančiška, a Slovenian Catholic publication.

Not every ghost was so concerned about its salvation. In 1893 the German-language occult journal Sphinx reported on a noisy flat in Ljubljana. Imagine the horror! For 18 months, beds creaked without apparent cause. The author, Franz Potočnik, initially poked fun at the witnesses, before becoming a believer himself.

These stories have something the cheap Halloween decorations lack: a past. They are tied to actual buildings, reflect particular anxieties, and preserve the preoccupations of the people who regaled listeners with them. These ghosts seek justice, forgiveness, or redemption, or simply make a bed unusually noisy.

And they are not necessarily extinct. The folklorist Ambrož Kvartič has documented the legend of a mysterious woman who appears to motorists travelling through Huda luknja, the gorge between Velenje and Slovenj Gradec, only to vanish from their cars. This apparition is a devotee of modern transport. Folklore does not have to remain frozen in the past to survive.

A belief in ghosts is hardly a prerequisite for enjoying a good ghost story. What Halloween is displacing is the storytelling itself. The plastic skeleton has no biography. The artificial witch has no local address.

Tete-a-Tete

Because someone has to

Marko Grad left high school at 16 to build a career in business. He became the youngest winner of MIT's international business competition and the youngest brand manager in Jägermeister's history, then left the corporate world to run the Global Shapers Institute, a non-profit that speaks for young people in Slovenia. The institute runs free educational events, AI workshops and public debates in high schools and universities across the country. In September President Nataša Pirc Musar awarded him and the institute the presidential memorial coin for their work with young people.

Marko Grad, co-founder of the Global Shapers Institute. Svit Savnik

Also on the site:

Rules of the game

Out of their depth

Matters of trust

Sharp, but narrow-minded

The Adriatic

Slovenes know more about science than most Europeans, yet no other country in the EU is as quick to call scientists narrow-minded. In the European Commission’s Eurobarometer survey, 47.4 per cent of Slovenes chose the word, against 27.6 per cent across the union, and the most educated are only somewhat less likely to say so than the least.

That gap set the agenda for a debate in Ljubljana on 19 October, held by the Institute for Strategic Solutions, which publishes The Adriatic, together with Alpacem Cement. Tomaž Vuk, who chairs Alpacem Cement’s management board, and Andrej Krajner of NLB Group described what it takes for a company and a bank to earn trust back.

Tine Kračun, ISR’s director, chairing the debate at Center Rog in Ljubljana. Žiga Čibej

“An institution cannot demand trust, nor can it create it with a better-crafted message,” said Tine Kračun, ISR’s director. “It has to show through its conduct that it deserves it.”

“Trust collapses very quickly,” said Andrej Krajner, head of brand and communications at NLB Group, “and then it takes years of long, tedious, stubborn work to build it again.”

Why showing all the data is not enough, and why the speakers kept coming back to consistency, are in the full story.

In Brief

Protesters in Belgrade broke into the offices of Informer, a pro-government tabloid, days after the ruling party lost a snap election. Among them was the mother of a victim of the station-canopy collapse in Novi Sad, who told the editor-in-chief on live television to apologise to the public. He walked out of his own studio. The journalists’ union has since moved to have the channel’s licence revoked. Meanwhile the new editors at RTS, the public broadcaster, apologised on the evening news for what it had left out until now.

Opposition MPs in Albania lit flares in parliament, filling the chamber with smoke, to demand the resignation of Edi Rama, the prime minister, who was attending a vote. Protests in Tirana began in May against a luxury hotel in a nature reserve backed by Jared Kushner, and more than 350 people have since been injured in clashes. The government answered with a law that fines anyone who stays in a violent crowd or hides their face up to 500,000 lek, about 5,500 euros. Rama said the idea came from France. The average monthly wage is about 930 euros.

Slovenia’s president, Nataša Pirc Musar, invited Pope Leo XIV to visit the country, and he promised to come within two years. John Paul II, who came in 1996 and 1999, is the only pope to have visited since independence. In a meeting of almost 40 minutes they discussed migration, artificial intelligence, the Vatican’s mediation between Russia and Ukraine, and the pay of Slovenian priests. She gave him a wooden pectoral cross and a pair of white trainers, size 44, with his name on them.