Hogwarts can be pretty scary on normal days. What with the ghosts floating around all the time, making you shiver when they pass through you and Peeves, the poltergeist, hiding in rusty old armours and everything.
But on Halloween the average ghosts are the less scariest thing of all.
Floating candles everywhere, but not the one I’m used to, with the warm yellow light. No, special candles that glow cold blue and that not so much as lighten the darkness but enhancing the shadows and giving them the impression that something evil lurks in every corner.
Of course, there are carved pumpkins at Hogwarts. And carved they are. I mean there surely are artists in the Muggle world that can carve pumpkins into anything they want, with shadows and tiny details, and wonderful to behold, but the objects they create are fixed. In the Wizarding world, they move. The smile in a typical Jack-o-‘lantern stretches wide, then contracts, then opens to a silent yawn, revealing very pointed teeth and you just know they can easily bite off your fingers.
Pumpkin patch
The Halloween feast was spectacular. The food was generally a bloody mess, potatoes looking like eyeballs, beans wriggling like slimey green worms, bananas carved into bones and the steaks exceptionally rare. But everything tasted delicious, as always and was cooked exactly to the point and only the appearance was altered to look scary. However, I still had to pluck up all my courage to take a bite out of the severed sausage fingers 😉
At the hight of the feast, the Headless Hunt trampled – well, in a very silent fashion as they are all ghosts, even the horses 😀 – through the Great Hall, playing polo with their chopped-off heads. After some time Professor Sprout made them to leave the hall and afterwards the hunt continued up and down the Marble Stairs and the Entrance Hall.
A rare picture of Forbidden Forest ghosts
Very colourful fireworks marked the end of the Halloween feast. I tried to snap a decent picture of them, but it was moving too fast and almost all pictures were blurred and even the sharp ones couldn’t catch the colours and special effects. And it took ages to finish. I was already in bed and could still see sparkling rockets passing my window and hear the whizzing of fireworks.
Now I’m quite curious what wonders Christmas hat Hogwarts has in store.
Charlotte Miller, Witch 