October has thirty-one days. This year, that seemed like a perfectly reasonable number of opportunities to make questionable decisions.
Welcome to October, the month when Britain finally stops pretending it is still summer. The mornings smell of wet leaves, the evenings arrive before we are quite ready for them, spiders become inexplicably enormous and every walk through the woods comes with the possibility of finding something beautiful, poisonous or both.
And, for possibly the first time in the history of Mysterious Times, I can tell you exactly what we are doing for the entire month.
I know.
I’m frightened too.
October takes its name from the Latin octo, meaning eight, because it was the eighth month of the old Roman calendar before January and February shuffled everything along. The name survived the reorganisation, which means we have spent more than two thousand years calling the tenth month “the eighth one” and collectively deciding not to worry about it.
In Britain, October is the month when autumn stops being decorative and gets down to business. Leaves colour and fall, nights lengthen rapidly and the woods suddenly smell of damp earth, fungi and decay. That decay is anything but lifeless. Dead wood becomes habitat and food, while fungi perform the essential business of breaking it down and returning nutrients to the woodland. October is one of the best times of year to see fungi, from the almost offensively cheerful fly agaric to dead man’s fingers, which look exactly as delightful as their name suggests.
As always, a note from your editor who would quite like you all to survive until November: do not eat a mushroom because an app, photograph or bloke called Dave on Facebook says it is edible. Fungal identification is difficult, edible species can be confused with poisonous ones, and the Woodland Trust recommends expert confirmation if there is any doubt. Admire first. Risotto considerably later.
The hedgerows are changing too. Blackberries are coming to the end of their season while crab apples, rosehips, hawthorn berries, nuts and seeds provide an autumn larder for wildlife. Beneath the oaks, acorns are falling. Jays are particularly enthusiastic collectors and can bury thousands for later, inevitably forgetting some and accidentally planting the next generation of oak trees in the process.
There is something wonderfully appropriate about the jay spending October hiding things in the ground and then losing them.
I feel represented.
October is also rutting season for several of Britain’s deer. Fallow bucks establish rutting stands, call, thrash vegetation and clash antlers with rivals, while red deer stags produce those extraordinary bellows that can make an autumn woodland sound as though something considerably less wholesome is wandering around in it. Watch from a sensible distance. Rutting deer are magnificent, but they are large wild animals currently fuelled almost entirely by hormones and poor decision-making.
Above us, October 2026 is putting on quite a show.
Saturn reaches opposition on 4 October, placing Earth between Saturn and the Sun. It will rise around sunset, remain visible through the night and be at its brightest and closest for the year. You will be able to see Saturn itself with the naked eye as a bright point, although you will need a telescope to see the rings.
Then come the meteors.
The Draconids are active from 6 to 10 October and peak on the evening of 9 October. Unlike many meteor showers that require standing in a field at three in the morning questioning your life choices, the Draconids are best viewed in the evening. Even better, the Moon will be only a thin waning crescent rising shortly before dawn, giving us properly dark skies if the British weather can refrain from putting a cloud over Derbyshire for five minutes.
The Southern Taurids reach their October maximum on the 10th. They are not prolific, with the Royal Observatory giving a rate of around five meteors an hour, but the Taurids are slow-moving and can produce conspicuous meteors. Then the Orionids arrive, peaking on 21 October. These are fragments left behind by Halley’s Comet, burning up in our atmosphere at around 41 miles per second. Unfortunately the waxing gibbous Moon will interfere with the view this year, but brighter meteors may still put on a show.
The Moon itself starts October waning. Last quarter falls on 3 October, followed by the new moon on the 10th and first quarter on the 18th. Then, at 4.12am on 26 October, we get the full Hunter’s Moon. The name is one of several popular names now used for October’s full moon rather than an ancient universal British designation, but I’ll forgive it because Hunter’s Moon during Halloween month is almost indecently appropriate.
And it gets better.
On Sunday 25 October the clocks go back. At 2am British Summer Time becomes 1am Greenwich Mean Time, giving us an extra hour in bed and plunging the evenings properly into darkness.
An extra hour of darkness during the final week of the Mysterious Times Halloween Tarot.
I swear I did not arrange this.
October has always been a month of thresholds. The agricultural year is winding down, the abundance of harvest gives way to winter stores, leaves fall and the landscape visibly withdraws. Across Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man, Samhain traditions marked this seasonal turning, and later Halloween customs became tangled with All Hallows’ Eve, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day.
It is worth being careful here because modern Halloween history is frequently served with an enormous helping of invented ancient tradition. There was no single handbook of Celtic Halloween containing pumpkins, witches, ghost costumes and precise instructions concerning what everybody in pre-Christian Britain was doing at 7pm on 31 October.
Folklore is messier than that.
And considerably more interesting.
By the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Halloween traditions across Britain and Ireland included divination, games, disguise, food, fire and stories of supernatural activity. Some customs were concerned with marriage and discovering the identity of a future spouse. Others involved fortune-telling with nuts, apples or mirrors. The dead and the Otherworld remained close to the season, while Christian observances brought their own traditions of remembrance.
The modern phrase that “the veil between the worlds is thinnest” at Halloween should not simply be presented as a verbatim survival from ancient Celtic religion. But the idea it expresses fits comfortably into a much older collection of beliefs about Samhain, seasonal boundaries, the dead and encounters with the Otherworld.
Which brings us neatly to what we are doing here this month.
For once, I know.
Every single bloody day.
On 1 October, Mysterious Times begins something we have never attempted before: the Halloween Tarot.
It is not a traditional tarot deck and it is not pretending to be one. There will be no recycled Major Arcana with a folkloric hat balanced precariously on top. Instead, we have created thirty-one cards of our own, drawn from the subjects that have always fascinated us here: folklore, ghosts, witchcraft, cryptozoology, strange history, anomalous experiences, old magic and the unexplained.
One card will be turned each day.
Each has its own story, its own history and its own meaning. Some lead into very old folklore. Others take us into modern mysteries. There are things in the woods, things beneath the water, things hidden inside walls and things that have apparently been knocking on doors for considerably longer than anybody sensible would have continued answering them.
There are four suits running through the deck: The Shadows, The Wild, The Otherworld and The Forbidden.
And I am not telling you what all the cards are.
Where would be the fun in that?
You will get one each day. Some are beautiful. Some are sad. Some are genuinely unsettling. A few contain the sort of entities for which the only sensible folkloric advice is “absolutely do not follow that”. One particular card contains dogs which should under no circumstances be petted, however good a boy the spectral hound appears to be.
We have followed the evidence wherever we could. The folklore is treated as folklore rather than conveniently upgraded into fact. Where a wonderful story turns out to have been embellished, misremembered or invented, we will say so. Where something remains genuinely unexplained, we will say that too.
Because “we don’t know” remains one of my favourite answers.
It leaves the door open.
And all thirty-one cards are leading somewhere.
I am not telling you where.
There is a final card waiting for Halloween itself, and after everything that comes before it, I think it deserves to remain face down until 31 October. No clues, no peeking and absolutely no turning it over early.
By then the clocks will have changed, the Hunter’s Moon will have risen and waned, the leaves will be falling hard and Halloween will be waiting at the end of the road.
Until then, October has plenty of its own mysteries to keep us occupied.
Look up. Saturn is watching from the October sky and Halley’s Comet has left fragments behind for us. Look down and jays are burying future forests beneath the fallen leaves. Deer are bellowing in the woods, fungi are quietly dismantling the dead and turning it into life again, and the nights are drawing steadily closer around us.
And every morning, another card will turn.
Thirty-one days.
Thirty-one cards.
One final card face down on the table.
You’ll have to come back on Halloween to see what it is.
October begins with the leaves turning and ends with the dead at the door.
Frankly, we wouldn’t have it any other way. 🖤🍂🎃
