The Country of The Living Dead: How a First-World Nation Turned Its Privilege into a Ghost Story
The streetlights hum their glow in the cooling air as the season begins to shift. Porch lights flicker on, illuminating carved pumpkins, ghosts swaying on thin strings, and skeletons scattered about. A faint scent of chimney and fog machine smoke, candy, vanilla, spice and damp leaves drifts through the neighborhood.
The kind of night that feels caught between two worlds, and for a fleeting moment, time folds in on itself. You can almost feel the presence of every Halloween that came before, when wonder still outweighed the weight of the world.
The trees have begun their slow transition in anticipation for the coming winter. Their leaves turning shades of burnt ochre, red, yellow, and orange, before falling to the ground or blowing in the wind. The days grow shorter, the night air has a bite, and soon All Hallow’s Eve will be here.
Some say the traditions of Halloween can be traced back to the Druid’s of old Scotland and their pagan festival of death, Samhain on Oct 31, while others may suggest it was the Ancient Romans Christian Holiday, All Saint’s Day on Nov 1, that inspired what we now celebrate as Halloween. Which, in the U.S there was no mention, celebration or idea of until the 19th century, when it came with the Scottish and Irish immigrants.
The word “Halloween” itself is a Scottish variation of All Hallows Even (evening), and according to historians was first used in Old English as far back as the 16th century.
You, like myself, may associate Washington Iriving’s famous 1820 short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow with the spooky season. Its tall tale of a headless horseman terrorizing a small town in upstate New York in the 1700s during peak Autumn has Halloween written all over it — only it wasn’t. Irving didn’t even live in the states at the time he published the book and it has nothing to do with Halloween.
So, where did we come up with this concept of what we know today as the fun festive holiday of dressing up in costumes, trick-or-treating, and decorations?
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
In our country, it wasn’t until the mid 20th century that Halloween, the way we know it, became what it is, and let’s not candy-apple coat it — the ultimate consumerism machine that it is.This year, Americans are expected to spend $13.1 billion on the holiday itself, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF), which is substantially up when compared to past years.
Don’t get me mixed-up like a bag of candy, I love this holiday, with all its silly costume whimsy and cheap wig smelling magic. It marks the official start to the holidays, that transition time between seasons. What we know and love to be Halloween now, in this century, is a blending of other people’s traditions and celebrations, along with the tall-tales of witches, ghouls, and goblins that they brought with them. And when you think about it, is what America really is— one big cauldron of varying ingredients that’s been simmering over a fire, waiting for someone to either keep stirring the pot or take us off the embers.
But maybe that’s where the story starts to take its dark twist, turning into something wicked, not in the ghosts or ghouls kind of way, but in us.
Somewhere along the way, the privilege of comfort became the curse itself, of disconnect and discontent. In much of the world, terror and death aren’t seasonal concepts or dress-up themes; they’re lived realities. Yet here, in our well lit suburbs and aisles of plastic skeletons, we’ve packaged mortality and made it marketable. We’ve taken a night meant to honor the dead, to face the mystery of what lies beyond, and turned it into an event of temporary thrills and sugar highs.
That’s the strange paradox of living in a first-world, privileged country: abundance dulls the senses. The more we have, the less we feel.
We forget these rituals once had a true purpose, to bring communities together, to face the dark as one, to prepare for the coming winter months.
Maybe that’s why so many have felt the heavy pull of nostalgia lately, that ache for something lost, even if we can’t name it. The yearning for those nights when the streets were alive with laughter and the warm aroma of simple joy, of community, when the world still felt big and mysterious. The good days weren’t good because the world was better; they were good because we were actively living in them, present and unmediated.
Back then, the world seemed as small as our neighborhoods. Except it wasn’t, we just didnt have constant access to every single conflict, tragedy, cruelty unfolding across the globe. There was a strange mercy in that ignorance, even if it wasn’t pure. Our communities were smaller, our focus narrower, our sense of belonging more tangible. And maybe that’s why those memories feel like home. Because they remind us of a time when the scale of life still matched the size of the human heart.
“Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.”
Society may never have been meant to grow so large. Ancient civilizations thrived not because of sprawling out in every direction, but because of rootedness. Tribes, villages, towns built on interdependence and necessity. You knew your neighbors not through screens, but through shared harvests, shared grief, shared nights around the fire and under the same stars. Any maybe somewhere deep down beneath it all, that’s what the nostalgia is trying to tell us, that our souls were made for smaller circles, for slower living, for something more human than all this noise.
Maybe that’s what haunts us most, not the spirits of the dead, but the quiet echo of what we’ve lost.
And yet, as the season darkens, it’s hard not to notice the cracks showing beneath our painted smiles. Even in our first-world, privileged country, the cheap Halloween makeup is beginning to smear, melting under the weight of its own performance. The masks we wear year round are starting to run. Beneath them, the face of something tired, restless, and starved for meaning begins to show.
We like to think of the undead as things that rise from graves, shuffling aimlessly in search of flesh. But what if that’s us?
A nation still moving, still functions, but drained of all vitality. Staggering, shuffling from one destination to the next, mistaking consumption for connection, progress for purpose. How fitting that we celebrate the dead each October, while our own society wanders the waste half alive.
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.”
Though young by historical standards, ours is one of the few countries that has yet to truly collapse, be overthrown, or rebuild itself from the ashes. Perhaps that’s both our triumph and our tragedy. We’ve never had to reimagine who we are. We’ve simply kept reapplying the makeup, repainting the illusion, pretending it still fits. But the edges are cracking. The paint is running. The masquerade cannot last forever.
Maybe that’s what we’re truly feeling, the collective nostalgia, this strange ache for “the good ol’ days”, is the whisper of our deeper selves, begging to be acknowledged and reawakened. That life wasn’t meant to be lived, not consumed. That meaning isn’t found in comfort, but in connection. That we are more than the masks we wear.
So, as the veil thins this Halloween, maybe the haunting isn’t from the other side at all. Maybe it’s from within, a restless stirring of the living who’ve forgotten what it truly means to be alive.
Happy Halloween.
