Hallowe’en I mean. Was it an “anti-Christian celebration of terror, fear and death” as the Vatican describes it? Were you at a party with ghosts and ghouls present and, if so, was it any scarier than the average office party?

I certainly encountered ghosts. The Hallowe’en season began with giving a lecture in Edinburgh about Orkney’s bard George Mackay Brown. There were a lot of people I hadn’t seen for years in an audience which ranged from youthful university students through academic staff to readers of The Herald and punters with a keen interest in poetry or religion. While not exactly a trembling joust with “terror, fear and death”, it was certainly scary enough for me. Then on to Falkland for a stay at Key House, an ecumenical retreat centre run by long-time dear friends of ours, Lynda Wright, a Church of Scotland deaconess who is trained in spiritual direction, and fellow director Ann Evans. The spirits were, as ever in that nourishing place, refreshed. On Saturday my wife, myself, our three grown-up children and two grandchildren were present at Fife’s Stadium of Light, otherwise known as Central Park, Cowdenbeath, where we watched the Blue Brazil murder local rivals East Fife 2-1. My elder grandson Olly, aged seven, was one of the Cowden mascots, while five-year-old Dan, bedecked in a new Blue Brazil scarf, watched the game now and again.

It was a tribal occasion, evoking the spirits of my father Joe Ferguson and grandfather Alex Ferguson – who only missed a game at Central Park when they were on the brink of death – as well as my great grand aunt, Margaret Pollock, the Cowdenbeath antiques dealer who was the founding mother of Cowdenbeath FC (eight years before the upstart Celtic FC was thought of). Mad Cowdenbeath Disease continues its inexorable sweep through the generations and there is no known antidote. More ancestral voices: right opposite Central Park was where my feisty third cousin, Jennie Lee, was brought up. When she married Aneurin Bevan, she was the political superstar, the passionate street orator who railed against injustice. Communing with spirits like these, especially in these utilitarian, cynical times, is good for the soul.

Yesterday was writing time in Glasgow for The Herald, culminating in a Hallowe’en party at which I found my good self engaging in a Kierkegaardian meditation on the vagaries of human life while sweating inside a chimpanzee outfit. Olly and Dan declined to be scared.

Hallowe’en certainly does have fearful dimensions. It flirts with the demonic. Some of the spirits it conjures up can spook you. The Vatican is right here. But the churches aren’t always sources of light in the darkness, especially when they don’t recognise and acknowledge their own suppressions, repressions and downright evil. The lustful burning of vulnerable women as witches, institutional cover-ups, the manipulation of human vulnerabilities around mortality, poisonous social control and the shameful shielding of paedophile clerics show that the churches are well capable of walking on the dark side.

A church in North Carolina, The Amazing Grace Baptist Church, had a right wee Hallowe’en hoolie at the weekend. They had a bonfire. Not of witches, but books. They put in the flames books they regard as perverse – not just books by the likes of JK Rowling or Philip Pullman, but by Mother Teresa and evangelical leaders Billy Graham and Rick Warren. Too liberal for Amazing Grace. Not only that, they burned copies of the Bible. Or at least Bibles that aren’t the King James version. God, it seems, only speaks Shakespearian English. The scariest Hallowe’en thing on their fruit and nut website is a picture of their pastor on bended knee brandishing a Bible. These crazed people would regard the Kirk’s conservative evangelicals as raving out of control liberals. I couldn’t possibly comment.

Today it’s back in a metal tube in the sky, trusting in the magic of a technology I fail to understand, bound for Orkney, ready for more research for a book about the spiritual journey of George Mackay Brown. It would be a candidate for burning – along with the whole Brown corpus – in righteously blazing North Carolinian fires which fail to warm the spirits.