(upbeat music playing) (shrieking) - [Lara Ayad] Experience the art of fear at Double M Haunted Hayrides.

Elizabeth Stack reveals the Celtic origins of Halloween, and catch a performance from Brian Melick.

It's all ahead on this episode of AHA, A House for Arts.

- [Narrator] Funding for AHA has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT venture fund.

Contributors include The Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malisardi, The Alexander & Marjorie Hover Foundation, and The Robison Family Foundation.

- At M & T bank we understand that the vitality of our communities is crucial to our continued success.

That's why we take an active role in our community.

M & T bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.

(upbeat music playing) - Hi, I'm Lara Ayad, and this is AHA, A House for Arts.

A place for all things creative.

Here's Matt Rogowicz with today's spooky field segment.

(Eerie music playing) - Good evening.

Tonight is all about the art of fear.

And what better place to do that than here at Double M Haunted Hayrides, in Ballston Spa, New York.

Now, if you're ready, follow me.

(voice echoing) (eerie music playing) - [Owner] For us in the Capital District, I think we are a tradition here.

We been doing it so long, and people know that we know what we're doing, we know how to scare ya.

(thriller music playing) I grew up here, I'm second generation on the place.

My folks started the place here over 60 years ago.

Haunted Hayrides originally was a franchise out of Syracuse.

And they approach us and asked if we wanted to be part of it, and we jumped on board.

I always loved Halloween when I was a kid, so I was attracted to it.

And my folks were like, "if we want to do this, we want you to run it".

So, I'm the owner here at the Double M's Haunted Hayride for the past 31 years.

(eerie music playing) - [Dan] So we have a pretty massive operation here at Double M, about 100 plus employees.

We have a management team that kinda guides the process and makes sure all of our actors are in their spots and everything's going smooth.

- If you have your makeup done, you know where to go, please go to the wagon.

Thank you.

(suspenseful music playing) - So we gathered our creative brainstorm team in March.

So a handful of us get together.

We talk about the past season, what worked well, what's time to say goodbye, and introduce some new themes.

We'll talk about ideas that each of us has for the next season.

And then we'll kinda sketch out a rough draft of what our haunts are gonna be so we can start planning the process.

Our tractor drawn hayride takes you through our woods, where we have various scenes with different themes.

So each scene is a different theme, it's not like the hayride's one theme.

So you're gonna get a little taste of a lot of different things when you go out there.

Different types of characters, different experiences, some high energy where it's loud and intense.

Some might be a little more low energy where it's more creepy and suspicious.

So everything's a little different.

We try and switch it up as you go through, so you go through kind of a range of emotions as you're going through the hayride.

- Our actors, when they're cast at the beginning of the season, everybody is assigned a specific haunt, is what we call it, which is, a scene throughout either the hayride on the trail, or throughout one of our various houses here.

And they're typically at that spot for the entirety of the season.

What's really fun is seeing people come out of their shells by like, the second weekend.

It usually takes a couple of weekends.

But once they get into their groove, they're awesome, so it'll sort of be looking at their character or their scene that they're a part of and determining if they're struggling, what might motivate their character or what is the objective of their character.

What obstacles do they have to them getting what they ultimately want.

- You have beautiful teeth!

I'm going to add them to my collection.

So wait right here.

(circus music playing) - I am the makeup artist here at Double M Hayrides, and I've been here 16 years.

And on a normal night, I can do anywhere from 60 to 70 people in an hour and a half, in order to get them out on the trail to do their job.

They line up according to haunt and they all come in at once and I do them all assembly line-style, and then send them on their way.

Integrated the sponge technique and then kicked up the airbrush, and now the airbrush is what enables me to get through so many people.

And you can do so much more with it.

(circus music playing) And to be honest, makeup can do so far.

It has one job and that's to make you look a certain way.

If you don't act a certain way, it doesn't matter what you have on your face.

So it all depends on our actors, they are the ones who make things happen.

- It's dinnertime.

(woman laughing) - Come on!

- [Dan] I think people like to experience something that is almost unimaginable in normal day life.

So you get to come here and put yourself in a world that you would never experience on an everyday basis.

And there's so many different fears that we might touch upon.

Some people might go through one scene and think that was nothing.

And then the next one, they might be crying.

Because it's just, we hit on that fear that deep down, they're terrified of.

(spooky music) - Back late 90s, we had a haunt with a wizard.

I purchased a staff with a globe on it.

And it, you press the button and it makes a thunder and lightening sound and it flashes up.

Just so you guys know, I still have that staff from the late 90s.

I've never, ever put batteries in it.

We haven't done the haunt in 20 some years, and it still works.

(people laughing) - Elizabeth Stack is the executive director of the Irish American Heritage Museum in Albany.

The museum strives to preserve and tell the story of the Irish people and their impact on American culture.

How did the Irish influence what we now know as Halloween?

Let's chat with Elizabeth to find out.

Elizabeth, welcome to A House for Arts.

It's such a pleasure to have you.

- Yes it's great to be here, Lara.

Thank you.

(Elizabeth laughs) - So you've been directing the Irish American Heritage Museum in Albany now since 2018.

- Yeah, it changes.

(Elizabeth laughs) - Yeah.

Oh my goodness, well, that's amazing.

And I wanted to come back to the influence of Irish culture on what we now call Halloween in just a minute.

But I want to first start with the museum.

So what kinds of objects or things does the Irish American Heritage Museum hold, and what makes the museum unique?

- To be honest we are unique, because we're actually the only Irish American Heritage Museum in the country.

We are small enough, even though we're 35 years old.

And we just moved last year to our location now on Quackenbush Square.

So we don't, funnily enough, have a lot of objects.

You know, we have some things that talk about the life that maids would have.

We have a huge library which we do use for research purposes, and we loan through inter-library loan.

But most of our exhibitions are actually literal exhibitions on the wall, or we have a reconstructed cottage and a tenement apartment, and then a model of a famine-era workhouse.

So, you know, you'll learn a lot about the Irish American experience.

- So you have like these historical sites, you have collections that focus on maids, I'm guessing there were a lot of maids of Irish descent that were living in the US for a long time.

Is that what makes this collection unique?

- Well, I think, yeah, the fact that we tell sort of the cross, the story from colonial-era America, right the way up, is what is unique.

We're not focused just on railroads or canals or site-specific.

So we try to be biographically-focused, and tell the story of, many of them of course are Irish, famous Irish Americans, or notorious Irish Americans.

But then as you say, the maids, like that's a very uniquely Irish experience.

Because women immigrated on their own, sometimes in more numbers than men.

And a lot of them, particularly working class, of course, girls, found their way to work as a maid in America for a couple of years until they married.

- That's fascinating.

I think we should come back too to that immigrant experience as it pertains specifically to maybe maids, in just a moment, but I know, I mean, the Irish are among so many important groups of people that, for a variety of reasons, whether by force or by their own volition, came to the United States, whether that's African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans.

And that's just a small sample of groups that have come to this country's shores.

And I know that the Irish are among these important groups.

So what is something you know about Irish history in the US that you think would surprise a lot of people?

- You know sometimes people are surprised at the level of pushback that there was in the 19th century to Catholic, of course the Irish were not the only Catholic groups.

But there was a massive strain of nativism, it was called at the time.

And Know Nothings was a kind of a political party that sprang out of that in the 1840s, right through the 1860s.

In fact, the mayor of New York city was a Know Nothing mayor just before the civil war.

- What were the Know Nothings?

- That was just a nickname they gave themselves.

When, if they were seen posting bills, you know, soliciting kind of violence against Irish Catholics, they would say, "Oh, I know nothing," you know, "I didn't put that up."

- And so the movie, Gangs of New York, kind of deals with that era.

But I think that's an interesting concept that, the Irish had a lot of advantages in one way, because of course they were white, they mostly spoke English.

So even though they were dirt poor, a lot of the time, particularly during the great hunger, they were able to use, particularly, politics.

A lot of them were sort of political already in Ireland because of the, trying to gain their freedom from the UK and the whole Catholic emancipation movement there.

So that's interesting.

- So they had this kind of background or history of that political mobility in Ireland kind of near the British Isles.

- [Elizabeth] Exactly.

- And then they kind of brought that over to the US.

- Yeah.

And they convert very quickly.

They take over the running of some machine cities, like Boston, and Chicago, New York.

that gives them patronage jobs in the city.

And so, but I think that the level of pushback against Catholics lasts right the way up until 1928 when Al Smith runs for president and the KKK campaign against him.

And so we forget that I think.

- Incredible.

Yeah.

There's like a strong relationship then between hate groups, not only oppressing and committing acts of violence against African-Americans, or Latino Americans, but also the Irish, which were among those groups, which is amazing.

- But you don't have to be a visible target sometimes.

You think you would be someone who would blend in, but there was a reason to hate you.

And I think our community needs to remember that, like that the exact same language we use today against certain groups was used against our group 100 years ago.

- Yeah.

Well, I've seen some of these, these horrendous political cartoons from the 19th century and even into the early 20th century, kind of stereotyping the Irish, or showing them with very, kind of like, exaggerated features, and things like that.

- Yeah, simian featured.

- Right, right.

I wanted to come back to your origin story in just a moment, but I, I'm curious to know, you brought up Gangs of New York.

- Yeah.

(Elizabeth laughs) - And I was thinking I couldn't help but think of these famous films about the Irish, like Gangs of New York, like The Irishman.

What do you think of these American popular culture portrayals of the Irish in the 19th and 20th centuries?

Do you think that they're accurate?

- You know, I do, in one way, I visually I thought Scorsese's Gangs of New York was beautiful.

It was very accurate.

The source material that it's based on, Herbert Asbury's Gangs of New York, was a little bit salacious.

And of course it's a movie, so they're combining things.

I do think there's an element now today of a little bit more realism.

So it's good to see movies like The Departed, and showing that underbelly too of Irish America, as opposed to the 1940s and 50s, those Bing Crosby movies where it was all very, or even The Quiet Man, very stereotypical images of either Irish people as Catholic or drinking.

So yeah, I think it's good to complicate the story.

And there's a lot of movies coming out of Ireland too, some of them in the Irish language, which was very, I think, important to round out that image, of us either as immigrants or in our own country.

- Right, and you talk about yourself as an immigrant too, right?

- Uh-huh.

- So talk about that a little bit.

I mean, what was your experience as an immigrant coming here to the United States?

Was there anything that surprised you?

- To be honest, and I think it's a conversation that needs to be had, maybe on a wider scale, it is very difficult to come here as an immigrant, when, even the "right way".

I'm highly educated, I have a job.

But the paperwork is a very oppressive kind of thing.

I'm not a citizen, even though I've been here since 2009.

You have to renew your visas.

And so, it's difficult, I think, even to be an immigrant who chose to come here, which of course, I did.

The one thing that that has helped me see though, is that people, even 150 years ago from Ireland, chose to come.

And so sometimes we take that agency out of the story, I think.

- Right.

Well, I think it's so fascinating that you also came from like, what's called a heritage town in Ireland, and you've come here and now you're directing the Irish American Heritage Museum.

(Lara laughs) So it's like, you're like a master of heritage, right.

I understand too, you have a background as a college professor, right.

That you've taught courses on the history of Irish immigration to the US, is that right?

- That's right, yeah, down at Fordham.

So yeah.

I suppose, we grew up in a town that's very famous for its writers, John B. Keane and Brendan Kennelly, and Bryan MacMahon, and more.

And so, and we live, the town is the last one to fall to Queen Elizabeth Tudor in 1603.

So there's- - There's famous castle right?

- [Elizabeth] There is, exactly.

- From the 14th century or something like that.

- Exactly, so we're surrounded by those old buildings.

And so, I think the love of history is maybe innate in a lot of Irish people.

And then, I did, I was a high school teacher at home in Ireland, finished my PhD, and then I taught at Fordham.

And so, coming to take over the museum has just been an extension sort of.

I do love teaching, and storytelling ,and history, and the the university was fantastic.

But now the museum is allowing me to do public education on a more informal kind of level.

- Right.

So I want to come back to Halloween.

- [Elizabeth] Okay.

(Elizabeth laughs) - Because I don't think I'm just speaking for myself when I say Halloween was, hands-down, my favorite holiday as a kid.

- Yeah, people love it, yeah.

(Elizabeth laughs) - Even as a teenager.

Yeah, absolutely.

So many Americans love Halloween.

But, explain to us the Irish roots of this holiday that is so famous and people love so much.

- Yeah, and it's what I think's so fascinating about it.

It's an ancient Celtic Pagan holiday called Samhain, which was kind of the harbinger of winter.

The harvest is over, and you're finishing up the last of the nuts and the apples, all these iconic symbols, of Halloween.

- And Sahmain's, I think it's spelled S-A-M-H-A-I-N-- - I-N, right.

- if you were to look it up, but that's the Celtic pronunciation of that word.

- Exactly, yes.

"Sal-wen" or "Sal-ween" depending on what part you're from in Ireland.

So it's the word for actually November, the month of November.

But it was also the time in the year where the veil between this world and the next was the thinnest.

And so, Irish stories dating back a thousand years, talk about Pookas, which were kind of shape-shifting spirits.

And they say that's even where the idea of dressing up came from, that it was kind of a protection against other spirits, that if you looked other-worldly, the spirits wouldn't touch you.

- Wow.

Well I mean there is something kind of a bit of a trickster element in Halloween, right.

Like, people love dressing up and just imagining even for one night, being something else.

- [Elizabeth] Exactly, yeah.

- And in a way it kind of almost protects yourself, right.

You get to kind of blend in with a sort of other worldly realm.

- Exactly, yeah, and trick or treating.

It was all part of leaving tokens for the gods or the fairies or whoever "they" were.

And then Irish immigrants bring those traditions with them, because particularly in the 19th century, they weren't always catechized, because of the penal laws and all this horrible oppression in Ireland.

So the folk religion was very, very strong.

And so even what we think of as quintessentially American, the carving of the pumpkin, is actually an Irish tradition.

It would have been a rutabaga or a turnip.

And it comes from a really old story about a character called Stingy Jack, who was long story short, eventually thrown out of hell and given an ember from hell and kind of condemned to walk the earth.

And this was the jack-o'-lantern or the-- - Comes from Stingy Jack, jack-o'-lantern.

- Exactly, yeah.

- That is fascinating.

So what's one of the scariest ghost stories (Elizabeth laughs) from Ireland, that still spooks or haunts American kids and adults today?

- Yeah, I think probably most Irish Americans and probably even non-Irish Americans would be familiar with the idea of the "banshee" or this woman who's a harbinger of death.

And so that idea that somebody will foretell a death.

Or if that, if you hear her crying, that it might be an omen, and so, I think that one has absolutely lived.

And poltergeists, there were some very famous instances of Irish immigrants, apparently bringing poltergeists with them - [Lara] Oh wow.

- from yeah, from Ireland, and so the haunting continued, in the new country.

But, and Darby O'Gill of course made the banshee famous too.

So-- (Elizabeth laughs) - Right, right, right.

I've absolutely heard of the banshee.

So what kinds of programs do you have coming up at the Irish American Heritage Museum?

- Well, we have, of course, one more last one for Halloween this month, with a professor from Trinity college, Dublin.

She's going to talk about the use of the Irish superstitious maid in American Gothic fiction, which I think will be brilliant.

- So that will be on Zoom 'cause she's in Dublin.

- And then what's her name?

- Dara Downey, yeah.

And we're looking forward to that.

And then in November, we've a wide variety.

We're doing a great series called Irish Activism that's going to continue, we've got Toss the Feathers who are going to be performing songs about Irish work culture in the Capital region.

And then we've got a Community for Immunity, where we're doing a vaccine awareness, kind of series of talks about science and vaccines, and medicine, and disease, and immigration.

So it'll be great.

- That's really great.

Those all sound really fantastic.

And I'm sure that people can find that on the website for the museum.

- On the website yeah exactly.

- [Lara] That's great.

- And Facebook.

We're very active on social media.

- Perfect.

Well, Elizabeth, those all sound amazing.

Thank you so much for being on A House for Arts.

It was such a pleasure to have you.

- Thank you for having me.

It was great.

- Please welcome Brian Melick.

- Hi, my name is Brian Melick and this piece I would like to feature some pretty incredible instruments that were designed and created by an artisan by the name of David Russell.

David is a paper artist.

And if I remember what he said correctly, a lot of the techniques that he employs in his work is following the Japanese tradition of paper making.

And he's a sculptor with this paper.

He pulls the fibers apart to create three dimensional objects.

I met David when I was participating, and exhibiting, and doing workshops at a music therapy convention.

And I fell in love with his instruments.

His drums are made, you can see there is no shell to these drums.

It's basically a hoop instrument with no shell.

And the membrane of this instrument is created by the pulp, that is the by-product, if you will, of beating fabric in a trough, with blades, it busts, it rips apart, the fabric, and what's left is just the pulp.

And then he skims the pulp off of the surface of the water, puts it in big pails and then dyes each of those pails of pulp, a different color.

And then he uses screen, and he lays out whatever pattern he is inspired to do, using all of these different colors.

And then he compresses it, with a very, very powerful press to get rid of all the water.

And then what he does is he has these metal hoops made of different diameters.

My instruments today feature an eight, a 10, a 12, a 14, a 16 and an 18-inch drum, that he affectionately calls "Earth drums", because you can see that in many cases with the swirling of the different colors, he actually can create almost what appears to be a planet.

So what I wanted to just show you is that, it's interesting, he wraps the fabric over top of the metal hoop.

And then by simply taking and compressing the overage over the hoop, and then applying a little bit of water with a sponge, the fibers of the paper, actually, as they dry, they infuse together.

And so then I use heat, and the reason why I use heat, from the lamps underneath the drums, is because there's a little bit of moisture in the air.

And with any kind of a fixed drum, many times they use goat, sometimes antelope, sometimes calf, fish, in this case paper.

So what happens is with thin skins, or I should say any skin for that matter, it takes in the moisture.

And if we don't have a way to mechanically tune it, then what happens is that we have to use either heat to draw the moisture out, bringing the pitch of the drum up, or we have to add moisture to the skin if it's way too high in pitch.

So when you're dealing with fixed, what they call fixed-headed instruments, it's a little tricky.

But today I wanted to perform a piece that I affectionately call Pulp Fiber.

(percussion music playing) (silence) (eerie music playing) - Thanks for joining us.

For more arts visit wmht.org/aha.

And be sure to connect the WHMT on social.

I'm Lara Ayad.

Thanks for watching.

(man screaming) (thriller music playing) - [Male Speaker] Funding for AHA has been provided by your contribution and by contributions to the WMHT venture fund.

Contributors include The Leo Cox Beach Philanthropic Foundation, Chet and Karen Opalka, Robert and Doris Fischer Malisardi, The Alexander & Marjorie Hover Foundation, and the Robison Family Foundation.

- At M & T Bank we understand that the vitality of our community is crucial to our continued success.

That is why we take an active role in our community.

M & T Bank is pleased to support WMHT programming that highlights the arts, and we invite you to do the same.