Every year since 1990, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine—the fourth largest Christian church in the world, located in New York City’s Morningside Heights neighborhood—hosts an event one wouldn’t expect to witness on holy grounds. At the Cathedral’s Halloween Extravaganza, visitors are greeted by a ghoul playing the cello and a giant, quivering spider hanging on the Rose Window.
The evening begins with a screening of a silent classic (F. W. Murneau’s Nosferatu this year), whose score is performed on the Great Organ. After the final credits, the ghouls emerge: one by one, a gang of macabre creatures step out of a Hellmouth, engulfed in fog, and process down the central nave of the Cathedral as the organ pipes fill the space with a loud, devilish tune.
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The majority of the puppets have been crafted by Ralph M. Lee, who runs the Mettawee River Theatre Company with his wife Casey Compton. Lee is responsible for the first-ever Greenwich Village Halloween Parade held in 1974, which he then directed for 12 years. Many of the costumes from the procession of the ghouls at the Cathedral were originally created for the parade—making some of them about 40 years old.
“I had been doing various kinds of events at the Cathedral starting in the 80s, when there was a lot of adventurous stuff going on up there. Then they approached me about working on this Halloween event. I had the puppets and costumes in stock, and they were rumbling and making signs that they wanted to be out in the world again.” The spider in the Rose Window, for example, had originally been made for the tower of the Jefferson Market Library. A giant skeleton, which would rise up in the arch at Washington Square during the parade, was repurposed and rigged to the Cathedral ceiling.
Lee, who is 80 years old, still orchestrates the entrance of all the characters during the performance. “My wife and I, along with a small crew of people, get everybody dressed. Some of the large puppets require a certain amount of agility to get into.” Most of the heads are made out of a kind of paper maché that is “very lightweight and very strong.” Early on in the procession, a ghostly bishop appears and mounts the pulpit, where he waves his crosier over the audience and the parading ghouls. “The bishop’s head was made for a play I directed at NYU. It was supposed to be the head of a statue,” says Lee. “And the outfit was originally made for a mummers’ play I did at the Cathedral, as part of a Christmas event. I combined the two.”
The setting plays no small part in making this event so exceptional. Visitors are left grappling with the inherent contradiction of the scene before them: a band of evil spirits being summoned within the sacrosanct walls of an actual church. “It’s a great space to work in,” Lee says of the Cathedral. “It’s so alive.”
Photo by Catherine Bonnet
The Cathedral of St. John the Divine’s Halloween Extravaganza will be held twice on the night of October 30. For more information, go here.
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