Friendly Ghost Floating Over a Pond Dock

A large, sheet-like ghost hovers above the end of a short wooden dock. It has round eyes, small curved brows and a wide open smile, and its wavy arms stretch out to both sides as if greeting a friend. The bottom of its body ends in soft, rippling points. The dock is built from long planks and finished with two thick round posts at the front corners. Behind it, a calm pond is covered with gentle ripples, a row of bushes lines the far shore, and a tall cattail with long leaves grows at each side of the picture.

Cattails and the Roots of Halloween Ghosts

The tall plants with brown, sausage-shaped heads are cattails, also called bulrushes in Britain. Each brown spike is made of thousands of tiny flowers packed tightly together, and in autumn and winter it breaks apart into fluffy down that carries hundreds of thousands of seeds on the wind. Their thick underground stems help hold pond banks together and give shelter to frogs, fish and nesting birds.

Friendly ghosts are a favorite Halloween image, and the holiday itself has old roots. Many of its customs trace back to Samhain, a Celtic festival marking the end of the harvest, when people believed the boundary between the living world and the spirit world grew thin.