Halloween Haunts: Against the Fog: Halloween by the Sea
By Juno Guadalupe
Every October, I make a pilgrimage to Salem. It has become a tradition, not just for the theatrics of Halloween but for the way the town itself seems to breathe history. In Salem, the sea is never far away. You feel it in a creeping chill, in the salt carried on the wind, in the damp cobblestones… At night, the harbor fog drifts in like a costume, covering the streets in something otherworldly. Standing by the coast, you understand why so many horror stories linger in places like this. The sea is never silent—it whispers, it warns, it mourns.
Salem is not Greyfare, the New England town I created in The Lights of Greyfare, but they are similar. Both are coastal places where storms arrive suddenly, where lighthouses blink through the dark like watchful eyes, and where widows once stood on the rocks scanning the horizon for ships that never returned. Both towns carry the weight of memory and the persistence of folklore. And both, when October arrives, seem to belong as much to the dead as to the living.
Turnip Faces
When most of us think of Halloween, we imagine pumpkins—carved, glowing, and perched proudly on porches. But long before pumpkins became the lanterns of choice in America, the Irish and Scottish carved faces into turnips. These humble root vegetables were hollowed out and set in windows or on pathways as protection against wandering spirits. They were a warning, a ward, a reminder to things unseen that the living had their defenses.
The turnip is pinched, its grin twisted by the stubbornness of the root. There is something uncanny about it, as though the earth itself had grown a face. When I first learned this history, I couldn’t shake it. In The Lights of Greyfare, Naomi — a character bound by grief, love, and duty — strings carved turnip faces across her kitchen window. They are not decoration; they are guardians, watching the sea in her absence, peering through the fog.
In folklore, they were called Jack o’Lanterns — not yet pumpkins but turnips that carried a piece of the old world into the new. They remind me that Halloween, at its core, is about survival. It is about facing the long dark with whatever light you can muster, even if it’s a carved root pulled from the ground.
The Sea
The sea itself is a mask on Halloween. In daylight, it is bright and endless. At night, under October skies, it becomes black glass—a mirror too deep to fathom. It conceals as much as it reveals. You hear the water before you see it. You sense the immensity pressing against the fragile line of land you stand upon. When the fog rolls in, it feels as though the world is holding its breath, waiting for something to step across the threshold.
Every year in Salem, I feel the weight of this liminal time, when boundaries grow thin. And every year, that sensation finds its way back into my writing. Greyfare, in many ways, was born from these coastal Octobers—from the sense that the sea is not just background but a character, restless and eternal, demanding its share of memory and story.
The Old Spirits of Halloween
This is why Halloween endures, and why horror feels inseparable from it. The holiday isn’t about big scares so much as small reminders: the carved turnip, the whispered story, the fog that transforms the familiar into the uncanny. Horror lives in thresholds — between light and dark, sea and shore, life and death. Halloween is when we step to that edge, lantern in hand, and peer across.
So this October, when I return to Salem and watch the fog roll in across the harbor, I will think again of those turnip faces in Naomi’s window. Their crooked grins, their stubborn refusal to look away. They remind me that folklore isn’t just about the past — it’s about how we live with the unknown in the present. Halloween, by the sea or inland, is a night of resilience. A night when the living say: we see you, we remember you, but we are still here.
And maybe those hollow roots in the window will be enough to keep the darkness on the other side of the glass.
Juno Guadalupe is a photographer, mother, and author of The Lights of Greyfare, a supernatural gothic horror novel set in a fog-soaked New England coastal town where folklore, grief, and strange lanterns blur the line between memory and myth. Her work explores how horror serves as both a mirror and a warning, drawing on coastal traditions, root vegetable folklore, and generational hauntings. You can find her and her work at:
Excerpt from The Lights of Greyfare:
Her house smelled like it always does… herbs, wax, wood. She was carving roots. Turnips, maybe. Said it was something she’d done since she was a girl. An old custom for this time of year, when the air thins and things slip through.
She gave me a knife. I carved beside her. The faces came easy. Some sad, some angry, some strange. We baked them so they wouldn’t rot. The smell was awful, but she said it meant they were strong.
We strung them together and hung them everywhere. In her windows, over doors. She gave me a few to take home. I put one near your bed.
She said it’s part of the old ways. That some things are older than people. Hungrier. That this is the season when the lost come back—and when other things do, too.
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