Talk:Witching hour

World's longest run-on sentence?

Anyone else notice that the first paragraph of this article is one meandering run-on sentence? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.20.187.106 (talk) 21:26, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

Daylight savings?

The witching hour is apparently also used to refer to the hour that occurs twice when daylight savings is removed, but I can't find any reference to it outside certain unix command manuals. Is this a common enough expression to include in the article, or just an idiosyncrasy? αγδεε (ε τ c) 11:13, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

Earliest known use?

While the article states that "The earliest known use of the exact phrasing "the witching hour" is from 1835, in the last line of a short story by Washington Irving", I have in my hand a copy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein contained in which is a letter composed by Shelley that contains the following line: "Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by, before we retired to rest." This letter was from the introduction to the 1831 edition of the novel and is thusly dated October 15, 1831.

In Shakespeare's "Hamlet", written sometime between 1599 and 1602, prince Hamlet says "Tis now the very witching time of night" in act 3, after watching the play that reenacts his father's murder. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.131.193.6 (talk) 02:16, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

Would this not change the earliest known use of the phrase? I only discovered this because I searched for the phrase 'witching hour' after reading this introduction and seeking to confirm my belief that the witching hour was midnight.

Ckostovny 07:15, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

This sentence: "There is little evidence the term has had any practical use prior to this, and that Irving coined the phrase after having grown up around New England and touring areas where the Salem Witch Trials took place." seems to mean to say that Irving coined the phrase but implies the opposite. It needs clarification. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.85.13.171 (talk) 17:11, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Witching Hour

The poet, John Keats, uses this phrase in his poem "A Prophecy" which is contained in a letter to his brother, George. It was written on October 25, 1818. The poem begins: "Tis the witching hour of night, Orbed is the moon and bright, And the stars they glisten, glisten, Seeming with bright eyes to listen--For what listen they?"

Others beleive the witching hour is at 11pm. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.0.67.211 (talk) 23:55, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

In Australia, the 'bewitching hour' is usually thought of as midnight. For example, if someone says "I must finish this before the bewitching hour", the implication is that if it is not finished by midnight, bad things will happen. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Leshawl (talk • contribs) 23:39, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

The correct time for the witching hour is 3:00am or 3:15am is when the devil is his strongest Purple jewel 12 (talk) 14:23, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

Amityville Horror

Hey, I was just wondering if 3:15 glop from the Amityville Hopper also is considered a "Farting Hour?" This was the same time when Ronald Dufe murdered his fans in the house, and also the same time where George Klutz kept on waking up and where most of the square dancing activites began to take place.RehmanK786 (talk) 20:24, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Copyvio or just citogenesis?

The first listed ref points to this which has text in it very similar to what's in the current article. Not sure which came first. Matt Deres (talk) 11:16, 21 September 2017 (UTC)

What happened to the other page?

So last year, Witching Hour (disambiguation) was merged with this page and the other page and its history disappeared? Why? The witching hour page before was better in my opinion. Can someone explain to me what happened to the other page? Thanks! 24.150.196.3 (talk) 02:30, 15 November 2018 (UTC)

Requested move 28 November 2019

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: moved first one as proposed. Moved second to Witching hour (disambiguation) as there is no proposed new target for Witching Hour. – bradv🍁 05:02, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

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• Witching hour (supernatural) → Witching hour
• Witching hour → Witching Hour

– Per WP:DIFFCAPS / only use of this term in lowercase. _{ZXCVBNM (TALK)} 16:40, 28 November 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose. As someone said in some others in this series of "takeovers", DIFFCAPS properly applies when the capitalization scheme in question is very distinctive; it doesn't really work in a case like this. That would leave us with a WP:PRIMARYTOPIC argument for the move, and I don't think the supernatural concept qualifies. Most people don't believe in that sort of stuff (and haven't for several generations), and the phrase survives primarily in pop culture references like song lyrics, etc. I wouldn't oppose moving the DAB page to be capitalized, though, since most entries are.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:12, 29 November 2019 (UTC)
  Changed to Support per Crouch,_Swale's stats. I have no idea why it's a popular reading topic, and it might be some kind of recentism thing that will fade over time, but I guess we can reassess if that happens.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:13, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose because lower case title remain ambiguous with upper cased titles because users search for upper case title in all lowercase. And WP:SNOW close. --В²C ☎ 01:44, 3 December 2019 (UTC) see below. --В²C ☎ 23:34, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
• Support per views [[1]] the supernatural gets 32,451 views with Witching hour (investing) only getting 64 while the upper case titles get 718. This means that the supernatural gets over 507x the views of the other topic called in lower case, clearly meeting primary topic by a large margin. It gets over 41x the views of the other topics called Witching Hour and Witching hour so even if we ignore WP:DIFFCAPS its clearly primary. When I search on Google all the results are for this topic. This is also the only topic I've heard of. While the article is not that much more than a dictdeff its clearly the primary topic. Its also likely the primary topic by PT#2 since its likely that all the other uses refer to this topic (at least the upper case ones). @Born2cycle and SMcCandlish: you might want to reconsider. Crouch, Swale (talk) 22:48, 3 December 2019 (UTC)
• Support per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC/Crouch, Swale. Nom's reference to DIFFCAPS is misleading. --В²C ☎ 23:34, 3 December 2019 (UTC)

  I wouldn't say nom's reference to DIFFCAPS is misleading, you have usually supported DIFFCAPS such as Woman in the Dunes/The Woman in the Dunes , Friendly fire/Friendly Fire, Mass hysteria/Mass Hysteria and the Slip knot articles but I think the point is that the easier a term is to type the more weight we need to give to it for PT#1 since many readers probably won't bother to capitalize even when searching for upper case terms while few would capitalize the 2nd "F" when looking for the generic topic (I might if I wasn't that familiar with WP). Crouch, Swale (talk) 13:33, 4 December 2019 (UTC)

• Support moving this page to the primary title, but suggest moving the dab to Witching hour (disambiguation) instead – not all the entries there are proper names. —swpb^{T • go beyond • bad idea} 17:26, 4 December 2019 (UTC)
• Support. Historic meaning of the phrase. Hyperbolick (talk) 20:52, 7 December 2019 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

"Women caught outside without sufficient reason during this time were sometimes executed on suspicion of witchcraft".

When and where did this happen, and how often? It's a very vague accusation, and seems excessive even by the standards of witch trials. The source given for this isn't accessible from the UK, so I can't check what it actually says. Iapetus (talk) 09:09, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

The link to Witch trials in the early modern period is there to provide that information. The source says what the sentence says – that being outside during that time was sometimes used as evidence in witch trials. It does not specify exactly when and where this occurred. It would be great to be able to cite that info, but not being able to does not make "sometimes" a weasel word. The inline template {{vague}} could be justified. —swpb^{T • go beyond • bad idea} 18:08, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

OK, I've added the tag instead. I can't find anything in Witch trials in the early modern period that says anything about "being outside during that time being used as evidence in witch trials". If it was, I would think it should be added there. Is this Discovery article reliable? I've heard of all sorts of things being used as evidence of witchcraft, but never "being outside in the small hours". Iapetus (talk) 09:14, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't see anything about it either. Swpb, where are you seeing this information? I also tried to search for that Destination America episode and found nothing that matched the title. -- Fyrael (talk) 14:41, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

The link may be dead. If I get time, I'll try to find another source for the statement; if we don't have one in a few days, I'm fine removing it until we do. —swpb^{T • go beyond • bad idea} 15:34, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

Shaming/Persecution

I want to call into question the following sentence, under section "Origins"

"The association with witches could have been one way in which to shame and persecute women who were believed to go against the status quo.[4]"

Without disputing that the general idea of "witches" may have done precisely this, it's not clear to me that the idea of a "witching hour" could have done so, nor how exactly it would have - how associating a pre-dawn hour with witches would have added to the shaming or persecuting of women. FWIW, the reference (4) does not actually reference the witching hour.

I suspect there is a real idea here that has been somewhat garbled in the sentence above, but unless someone can help it express itself, I recommend this sentence be deleted. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.225.219.18 (talk) 17:55, 11 May 2021 (UTC)

I agree with your analysis and have boldly removed the unsupported statement. -- Fyrael (talk) 05:31, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

Modernism.

"time between 3:00 am and 4:00 am."

This is a new invention from Paranormal Activity, the movie. There is no reference to it elsewhere that predates this movie. The witching hour has always been either the hour AFTER midnight, or 11:30 to 12:30. 4AM at some latitudes is literally daylight so daylight isn't very spoopy. But yeah, from my research on the topic besides it now being accepted as a 'fact' because Wikipedia says so (thus a circle of references of journalist articles quoting Wiki as 4am as a source then wiki potentially quoting the journalists) it appears ALL of the 3-4 stuff is directly from Hollywoods imagination nothing else, and solely because the 'paranormal activity' in the first movie was set around that time. 124.190.192.47 (talk) 10:55, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

The origin isn't Paranormal Activity (2007), but it may be an earlier movie, The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) (see https://www.pluggedin.com/movie-reviews/exorcismofemilyrose/) – I can't immediately find a solid reference earlier than that for the 3-4am timeframe. —swpb^{T • go beyond • bad idea} 13:29, 29 June 2022 (UTC)

Exactly. I grew up (I am 53) referring to midnight as the witching hour. I never heard of the 3am thing until I saw the Emily Rose movie in the theater. Afterwards, it seemed to become ubiquitous in supernatural movies and then ghost hunting TV shows into common usage. Additionally, I remember a DC horror comic of the 1970s called the Witching Hour that explicitly identified the time as midnight. There has obviously been a shift in usage. I think this transition itself would be a fascinating subject of study. 174.106.217.218 (talk) 20:28, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

While he didn’t use the term “witching hour” per se, this concept does appear in Ray Bradbury’s 1962 novel, “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” to describe the hour beginning at 3 AM:

”Oh God, midnight’s not bad, you wake and go back to sleep, one or two’s not bad, you toss but sleep again. Five or six in the morning, there’s hope, for dawn’s just under the horizon. But three, now, Christ, three A.M.! Doctors say the body’s at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You’re the nearest to dead you’ll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but three in the morn, full wide-eyed staring, is living death! You dream with your eyes open. God, if you had strength to rouse up, you’d slaughter your half-dreams with buckshot! But no, you lie pinned to a deep well-bottom that’s burned dry. The moon rolls by to look at you down there, with its idiot face. It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead – And wasn’t it true, had he read somewhere, more people in hospitals die at 3 A.M. than at any other time...” 68.80.15.197 (talk) 05:11, 21 May 2023 (UTC)

References in modern culture

Used in TV series “King of Queens” Episode Horizontal Hold 2001. 170.205.129.168 (talk) 04:00, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

Sounds like a trivial reference. Those don't usually bear mentioning. -- Fyrael (talk) 05:09, 1 July 2022 (UTC)