University of Texas Permian Basin Halloween Conference 2024 is set from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Oct. 31 in the library event space on campus.
With a theme of “Ghosts,” it includes presentations on short stories, the paranormal, poetry and popular media and the supernatural to name a few.
Presenters come from UTPB, Odessa College, Italy and the United Kingdom. A panel discussion titled “Popular Media and the Supernatural” will include presenters from Midland College. There will be refreshments.
Past themes have included zombies, vampires, doppelgangers and werewolves, Senior Lecturer Jennifer Paxton said.
“They’re basically … seasonally appropriate themes. The idea is, because a lot of people think academic equals boring, and it really is not. Certainly history is my field, and you can study the history of literally anything. There are historians who use comic books as their sources to look at pop culture. … Anything and everything that interests anyone has a history, and looking at the history, the literature, the psychology of these topics can be really interesting. You can learn some really interesting things. It’s a worthwhile field of study, but it’s also just fun. It’s a good event, I think,” Paxton said.
The fifth annual event is meant to be fun, but also show that scholarly research and thinking about things in a scholarly way can be fun.
UTPB didn’t have one last year.
“I’m presenting. I’m doing one about the Fox sisters who in the mid-1800s basically kicked off spiritualism. It started with a prank that they were playing on their parents, where they were making these knocking sounds, and their parents were saying, oh, this is so spooky. They thought they were ghosts, and the sisters just went with it,” Paxton said.
“The oldest sister realized that there was a lot of potential in this, so she kind of took the helm, and they made it into this whole huge thing of performances on stage,” Paxton said.
The sisters created the stereotypical haunting with knocking, things moving and objects being thrown at people. She added that it’s kind of like the things shown on ghost hunting shows.
“They kind of shaped that, and they also set up the classic communicating with ghosts, but science kind of methodology. They would ask questions, and they would get raps and response,” she said.
This is the first year that Paxton has headed up the Halloween Conference effort.
“I’m glad that it’s going to make, that we’re going to have enough proposals to actually get it off the ground … Ideally, it’ll get bigger next year,” Paxton said.
She would encourage everyone to check out the event.
“It’s just come and go. Come and get a couple cookies and listen to what you want and then go about your day. It should be fun, and it should be pretty accessible, too. It’s not intended only for rarefied scholars,” Paxton said.
