BYU created Halloween-themed events on campus to allow students to celebrate the holiday safely, including some events targeted toward those interested in literature and arts.
An email sent by University Communications invited students to watch a performance of ghostly tales and find monsters painted on ancient Japanese scrolls.
Stream a ghostly tale
“Illusionary Tales” is a compilation of three ghostly tales which will be performed by the BYU Department of Theater and Media Arts. Due to restrictions of COVID-19, the performances will be broadcast online at no cost to the viewers.
“‘Illusionary Tales‘ is a free performance of short plays based on beloved stories from around the world, including ‘Balete Drive,’ a legend from Hispanic American folklore; ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ by Edgar Allan Poe; and ‘For Such a Time as This’ from Yiddish folklore,” University Communications said in an email.
The BYU Arts Department described the event as, “a practical research project featuring the Design and Technology area in our department.” The event will be broadcast Thursday, Friday and Saturday night at 7:30 p.m.
Meet some monsters
Special Collections section of the library. (Harold B. Lee Library)
In the L. Tom Perry Special Collections section of the Harold B. Lee Library, students are invited to view a hand-painted scroll which is nearly 400-years old. The “Bakemono no e“ scroll shows the paintings of 35 supernatural creatures.
The creatures on the scroll depict Japanese folklore. “The variety and abundance of bakemono 化物, or yōkai 妖怪 (supernatural creatures and phenomena), in Japanese culture is astounding,” the HBLL website says.
“For more than a millennium creepy creatures and ghastly ghosts have haunted and entertained the imagination of the Japanese, some familiar, widespread, and longstanding, and some new, localized, and mutable,” University Communications wrote in their email. Those who cannot make the trip to the library to view the scroll can read about the scroll on the HBLL website.
