Cheers, America! It's Halloween

Commentary by author and journalist Gyles Brandreth

Greetings America. Hallowe'en is coming and here in Britain we are getting ready to mark All Hallows Eve in a way we've never quite done before. A generation or two ago, the thirty-first of October came and went in this country almost unnoticed, but gradually we've become Americanised. Just as you introduced us to fast food outlets in the shopping mall and wall to wall game shows on TV, over the past thirty years you've persuaded us to mark this spooky festival by making faces out of pumpkins and setting them, illuminated, in our windows.

When I was a child, we'd never heard of Trick or treating. Now, in the street where I live, there'll be half a dozen groups of kids running up and down dressed as witches and wizards and goblins and skeletons ringing the doorbells demanding cash or candy. But what is especially interesting this year is that it isn't just the children who are getting ready for Hallowe'en. It's the adults too - and they are doing it in a way we've not seen in this country heretofore.

This October, in England, thousands of people are hoping to get in touch with the dead. According to the country's leading spiritualists, there has been a sudden upsurge in interest in contacting those who have gone before, those now dwelling on "the other side". And this isn't old-fashioned hocus-pocus. This is high-tech. People are using the internet to get in touch with qualified, certified, mediums - individuals who claim to have psychic powers and the means to put you in touch with spirits from other worlds. And these twenty-first century mediums offer an on-line service. There is even a college here that is giving pre-Hallowe'en courses to teach you how to get in touch with the dead. It's just outside London and set in a building that looks very like the school Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movies. That may explain its success.

I don't know what to make of it all. I'm just a reporter. And I have enough difficulty making my cell phone work, never mind contacting the ghost of Thomas Jefferson.