One of Newcastle’s most historic landmarks is embracing its darker side this October. Newcastle Castle, the 12th-century fortress that gave the city its name, will host a month-long programme of Halloween events, bringing centuries of chilling tales and ghostly legends to life.
00:00Newcastle Castle is gearing up for a month of eerie events as Halloween approaches,
00:05offering a mix of historical storytelling, family friendly activities and ghostly experiences throughout October.
00:12So really it's just our absolute love for everything wonderful and spooky.
00:17You know, we work in this fantastic old medieval building, which does have a bit of a local reputation as somewhere that is haunted.
00:26And all the staff have got that excited this year and we were just trying to plan a really nice varied Halloween programme that's got something for everyone really.
00:34I think when you bring up ghosts and stuff, I think the temptation is always to kind of make things up.
00:39Whereas I think actually when you start to delve down into the history, not just of the castle, but of the city generally in this region,
00:46you know, actually there's loads of fantastic, really kind of quite grim and grisly and spooky events and goings on,
00:52as well as some really old kind of ghost stories in their own right.
00:56But the castle has this really rich history, a lot of which links to its use as a prison between the 1500s and the 1800s.
01:06So there's all kinds of stories of imprisonment and executions and things like that going on around the castle.
01:12So in a way it's kind of quite easy, you know, we draw on that history and just on the atmosphere of the building, you know,
01:19to really try and bring that to life for people in a way that we hope is really like fun and engaging, you know, for like young ones.
01:25But also, yeah, has a bit of that historical content makes people go, oh, I didn't know that.
01:31We've got some of our favourite speakers coming in to do talks and lectures and things, as well as film screenings and what have you,
01:39which we've we've done previously and people people love, you know, we love putting them on.
01:43But we've got a couple of newbies this year.
01:46So this is the second year actually of our Gothic Market, which is a collaboration between us and Northern Gothic Collective.
01:54That's going to be on the 25th, the evening of the 25th of October.
01:59And there's going to be all kinds of excellent kind of Gothic goods for sale down here in the castle.
02:06And we've also got a very exciting collaboration with Lush, who are coming in on the 26th of October during the daytime
02:15and to make pumpkin bath bombs, which is going to be absolutely great.
02:19So like I love that kind of it's almost like alchemy or like witchcraft, isn't it?
02:23We've got we're showing two films this Halloween season.
02:26We've got The Addams Family, the classic 1991 Addams Family, kind of back in people's brains because of Wedding's Deep being on the telly at the moment.
02:35And we're showing The Lost Boys as well.
02:38We've got an amazing one person theatre performance of some Victorian ghost stories by a company called Don't Go Into The Dead.
02:44They're performing a show called The Phantom Coach. It's going to be loads of like classic 19th century ghost stories in the Great Hall of the Keep.
02:53It's going to be really, really good, really spooky, I think.
02:55So for people who like that sort of thing, that kind of nice little chill up your spine.
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