It’s scary night, here at Chateau Shrewsday.

My daughter has been planning it with all the intricate confidence of a wedding planner.

Negotiations are still ongoing. They will finish at midnight tonight, when apparently Death walks anyway. This is a bit of a showstopper at the best of times.

Today I collected the princesses in the bus, and all five of us headed into town to fulfil as much of the Hallowe’en dream as was possible for a tenner.

And laid outside an eclectic store was a half price Hallowe’en sale. Skull torches, garish masks, executioner’s axes, meat cleavers and of course, Death’s indispensable scythe.

Then it was home to raid the dressing up box and Auntie Kate’s eccentric wardrobe for something which would suit the witch-about-town (or sophisticated A-list skeleton).

The littlest princess requested that I police the level of scariness in the car. I said sweetie, this is Hallowe’en and you are sitting next to a skeleton. What can I say.

However I did assure her it didn’t get any scarier than Felix with his mask on. Put on the mask, Felix , I urged, and say Roar. If it’s too scary for the little princess, the whole thing’s off.

It wasn’t, and it isn’t.

Giving a no-scare guarantee is dodgy, because Hallowe’en  goes back a long way. Back to the Celts and their conviction that the elusive membrane between life and death is weaker on this day than on any other.

In that oldest of late-October feasts, when it was believed spirits could cross over in a kind of spiritual osmosis, there were some spirits you really wanted to see again; and then there were those you didn’t.

And so there was this curious duplicity whereby one invited one’s departed loved ones in, while warding off the less welcome spirits, whose motivations were many and varied.

Tale telling on these dark nights is customarily about the latter , and no-one loves a good tale more than me.

Why is that? Why do we tell these things when there’s a good chance we’ll wake up at 2am and attribute the tiniest bump or bang to the Lady in Grey or the headless butler?

Let us try a control experiment, and find out.

Once upon a time, my husband was haunted on the toilet.

It was just a year after we met, and we were waiting to be married. We had not two pennies to rub together and big juicy overdrafts, but we really fancied a stay away from home before we tracked back to Phil’s parents for Christmas.

A kind friend lent us her flat, beautiful little garret rooms, high up,  overlooking the seaside town of Aberystwyth. Just days before, we had a chance to chat tipsily with her, and she let it slip that the flat was haunted.

I won’t say I was undeterred, but I was poor and I needed a break. I wedged the proffered information as far as I could out of my conscious being, and rammed the door shut behind it.

Days later we set out on our odyssey in a little white Datsun that had seen better days. Once we left the motorway we were consigned to tiny country lanes which twisted and turned interminably.

To make matters worse, we were in the teeth of a howling Welsh gale. It was, frankly, intimidating.

But that was nothing to our moment of arrival, when we parked the car and stood, buffeted by the sea winds, looking up at the towering Victorian gothic house.

We climbed upstairs and let ourselves in, and Phil headed straight for the toilet, whilst I made like Doris Day, steadfastly ignoring the unsettling atmosphere which hung about the little flat.

I was unpacking supplies when Phil burst out of the toilet, a look on his face like thunder. “What?” he demanded. “What is it?”

Pop quiz, Dear Reader. What would you do? Clearly my boyfriend had been subjected to something while he was inside the unassuming little cubicle. But to talk about it, here in this flat, in the teeth of a storm?

I think not. I asked no questions.  I said, sorry, had a tough day, and I changed the subject abruptly.

I was like a cat on a hot tin roof for the whole stay. I hated being alone and consequently became tiresome. We made the best of the stay, battered by torrential rain, but finally concluded we should leave early.

Just before we left, I decided to ask. “Phil, when you shot out of the toilet on the first night- what happened to make you cross?”

It transpired, Dear Reader, that a woman had been nagging him through the door, just down the hall from where I was standing.

She had gone on and on, clearly deeply dissatisfied with something, but he couldn’t quite hear what she was saying. He got the message though. He was not up to scratch, no indeed.

“Come to think of it”, he said, “it didn’t sound like you at all. I thought it sounded like someone older.”

When we questioned the strange little caretaker, we found there was no-one living in the flat below. We were alone there, on the top of the world, just us and that toilet.

Such a yarn, isn’t it? I love listening to them, and I love telling them. I have been to see The Woman In  Black at the Fortune just off Covent Garden more times than I care to recount.

Perhaps it is because these are fears we can control, approximately.

Yes, we might lose a little sleep over these myths and legends, but they are small capsule stories. They have an electricity about them, a yah-boo in-your-face unreality.

For those Celts life must have been grim. Death must have stalked very close. And when he took one of your own it was not an entertaining tale, it was an unfathomable chasm. All of a sudden, one’s beloved wasn’t there any more.

Throughout the ages we have been unable to conquer Death. I wonder if putting a face on him we fear most, and on those we have lost and loved, and lost and feared; if that doesn’t rationalise the unthinkable?

Who knows. The answer is long and complex, and I have only a few words left before I give Death permission to dance here on this very spot.

It is Saint Saens who summed him up for me. Death, the undiscovered country, is reduced to a Byronic violinist who summons a whole graveyard to his Grand Ball: the Danse Macabre.