The Witching Hour

The Witching Hour! I'm sure all of you heard this sentence a lot of time but maybe not all of you know what exactly it is and the origin of this term.. Here's some info about it:

"The witching hour is a the time of day when supernatural creatures such as witches, demons and ghosts are thought to appear and be at their most powerful, and black magic at its most effective. This hour is typically past midnight or the "time in the middle of the night when magic things are said to happen."

One of the earliest, if not the first, appearances this term makes is in Washington Irving's short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (which I talked you about a few posts ago ;). Here, Irving uses "witching hour" and "witching time" interchangeably. Both terms reference midnight, and are used to conjure in readers a sense of supernatural anxiety. There is little evidence the term has had any practical use prior to this, and that Irving coined the phrase after having grown up around New England and touring areas where the Salem Witch Trials took place.

In several of Shakespeare's plays - specifically Macbeth and Julius Caesar - ghosts and other supernatural phenomena take place around midnight, but the term "witching hour" never appears. But in the play 'Hamlet' we hear young Hamlet saying 'Tis now the very witching time of night'

According to the American horror film The Exorcism of Emily Rose, the term can also refer to the period from midnight and 3am, when a character notes at "3am [is] the devil's hour, as opposed to 3pm, when Jesus was said to have been crucified". The devil is at exact opposites with God. 3:00 pm the hour of mercy. 3:00 am the hour of darkness, the devils hour."

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About the witching hour, do you know the UK goth band called Witching Hour ? I think they are amazing! Very old school goth in my opinion.. As they say in their VampireFreak profile they are "a bit of The Cure, The Mission,

The Sisters Of Mercy and Siouxsie And The Banshees" altogether!

"Witching Hour formed in 1991 with Trevor Barnes on guitar and vocals, Alys Sterling on bass and D.B. on keyboards. D.B. was later replaced by Al Winton. When Al left the band, Ash took over on keyboards, aided by the lovely Morticia, who appears on keyboards in the video for Slave To The Night. Since Ash's return to his home planet, the band have performed as a two-piece. After a hiatus during which Trevor and Alys joined the computer game industry and discovered overtime, Witching Hour returned to the scene on Halloween 2006. Since then, they have headlined gigs in London and Madrid and more recently in Blackpool. They are hard at work on a new album, Raven. In the meantime, all their hits like Hourglass, She's Alive and Exhumation have all been re-mastered."

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