Like many bright ideas, the start of organised Halloween celebrations in Derry originated in a pub.
About 50 people turned up for a first fancy-dress party in 1985; and this year, 75,000 people will attend four days of celebrations on the city’s streets and 17th century walls, which culminate in a fireworks display by the River Foyle.
The man credited with starting Derry's Halloween tradition is former publican Brian Doherty, who says people were "looking for any opportunity to enjoy themselves" during The Troubles.
“I had just opened Doherty’s Bar in Magazine Street, and we decided that for Halloween we would have a party but insisted that everyone had to come in fancy dress,” he said.
“We thought we’d get a few regulars, but lo and behold about 50 or 60 arrived dressed up, and then suddenly there was a bomb scare...When the army and the police came along and told us to get out they were standing there laughing because of the fancy dress.”
Without a venue, the fancy dress brigade took the party to other bars in the city – and a tradition was born.
“Everywhere we went people said, ‘look at this crowd out enjoying themselves in fancy dress,’” Doherty recalls. “You might say, as we marched down Shipquay Street, that it was the first Halloween parade in Derry.”
Heavy security
At the time, Halloween celebrations were mostly unheard of in the North. The Troubles meant that private fireworks were illegal; public displays were rare, and always surrounded by heavy security.
However, the following year, nearly every bar in the city centre had a Halloween party. “It was the middle of the 1980s, so at the time there was so little happening in Derry entertainment-wise,” Doherty says. “When you have the opportunity to go out in fancy dress, people can lose their inhibitions and really let themselves go and just enjoy themselves.”
In Derry, the enthusiasm for Halloween coincided with the beginning of the peace process, and as the party continued to grow in the 1990s, the city council became involved.
Aeidin McCarter, head of culture with Derry City and Strabane District Council, remembers being brought to the city from Donegal as a child for Halloween.
“The idea of going into Derry at night with children would have been just unheard of, and yet here was a festival which you could bring children to,” she says.
“I was talking to a priest the other day and he said he remembers realising how successful Halloween in Derry had become because it was the first time he’d ever gone out and been inconspicuous...He met all these other people dressed as priests and they didn’t know whether he was in costume or not.”
These days, a good portion of those in the city dress up for the festival. Entire families go as monsters, witches and the rest, with some spending months on their costumes. Spotted at the fireworks one year was a girl dressed as a custard cream biscuit.
Samhain Moon
This year’s theme is the Samhain Moon. “As the division between this world and the otherworld’s is at its thinnest, as supernatural beings and the souls of the dead flood into the city, let your imagination run wild,” the festival programme reads.
For the three nights before Samhain – the traditional Celtic Halloween – an illuminated animation trail of light and fire will fight the darkness on the city’s walls, ahead of the symbolic release of the moon at the firework finale on Halloween night.
“I think that old Celtic tradition probably came out of the need to have in this part of the world some sort of celebration marking the days getting shorter and saying farewell to the light and preparing for the darkness of winter,” McCarter says.
“Equally, it was probably necessary in the Derry of the Troubles to do a similar sort of thing, to have some sort of celebration of light to get you through the winter and, quite literally, the darkness.”
Derry’s Halloween festival has come a long way from that interrupted party in Doherty’s Bar 32 years ago.
“It does put a smile on my face when I see the celebrations today,” says Doherty. “Who knows, all those years ago, had we not had that bomb scare and gone around the town and let everybody see how we were enjoying ourselves, maybe it wouldn’t have flourished and blossomed as it did.”
McCarter says the most remarkable thing about the celebrations is how it spread “organically”.
"Perhaps it's the fact that everyone owns it – it's not something that's for one community or the other, or is just for kids. Everybody, no matter who they are, is part of Halloween." http://www.derryhalloween.com/
