When I left for the bank, my employee Cuttle was happily cueing up a gay Halloween playlist to blare through our overhead system. When I returned, the music was back to the LGBTQ+ radio station we normally listen to, which was fine by me (because Chappell Roan) but still a noticeable difference.
“What happened to gay Halloween?” I asked.
“Eh, it wasn’t great,” Cuttle replied. “It was mainly just Nightmare Before Christmas covers and the Hex Girls.”
“Huh. Weren’t the Hex Girls Scooby-Doo characters?”
“They were,” he confirmed. “They first appeared in Scooby-Doo and the Witch’s Ghost. It was a weird time for the franchise. Instead of battling, like, greedy real estate investors dressed as monsters, Scooby had to deal with legitimately supernatural threats. It got pretty dark.”
Intrigued, I went home after work and poked around on various streaming services until I found the movie. And I gave it a watch, and I had an epiphany.
Y’all, I am about 87% convinced that Scooby-Doo and the Witch’s Ghost is why so many of today’s young Pagans have such negative opinions of Wicca.
Which I get might be a conspiratorial stretch. But here’s a synopsis, replete with spoilers, in case you’re Gen X like me and haven’t watched a Scooby anything since Scrappy got phased out.
After assisting them with a case, famous horror writer Ben Ravencroft invites the Mystery Inc. team to his quaint, New England hometown, which, to his dismay, is in the process of becoming a tourist attraction. Allegedly, the ghost of Sarah Ravencroft — Ben’s ancestor — is haunting the town, and the mayor has decided to capitalize on that with a big festival.
Back in the 1600s, Sarah was executed for witchcraft, but according to Ben, she was actually a neighborly Wiccan who employed her knowledge of herbs and nature to heal people. To clear her name, Ben is determined to find Sarah’s book of Wiccan goodness, which was rumored to have been buried with her, and he conscripts Mystery Inc. to help him on his mission.
While investigating, the gang stumbles upon the Hex Girls, a self-described “eco-goth” band, rehearsing for an upcoming concert. In the middle of the woods. For some reason. Immediately, Fred and Daphne are like, “These chicks are clearly witches,” and decide to stalk follow Thorn, the lead singer, who heads back to her creepy cabin and goes about brewing a mysterious potion, thus confirming Fred and Daphne’s suspicions.
Eventually, the “ghost” is revealed to be Thorn’s dad, the town pharmacist, who, along with a number of other well-meaning citizens, created the legend of Sarah’s ghost to boost the local economy. Thorn also explains that the potion was just a recipe for an herbal throat treatment, adding that she herself is 1/16th Wiccan.
While all of this is going on, Ben finds the book, and plot twist! Sarah was not Wiccan after all: She was an evil witch, and she was mystically imprisoned in her book by a cohort of noble Wiccans. As her descendant, Ben is a warlock, and he is determined to free her and rule the world at her side. So Sarah returns, and she is pissed — furious with her captors and pretty much everyone else, she decides to just incinerate everything and call it a day.
Once he realizes that Sarah isn’t interested in his nepotistic agenda, Ben tries to stick her back in the book, but she’s like, “Nice try, snowflake. Only a Wiccan can do that!” Upon hearing this, Velma coerces Thorn into attempting the ritual, and because of her Wiccan heritage, it works. Sarah gets sucked away, dragging Ben along with her. And then the book accidentally catches on fire and burns up, trapping Sarah and Ben for all eternity. Or possibly killing them good and dead. That part wasn’t clear. Anyway, everything’s fine now, and the Hex Girls put on a peppy show as the credits begin to roll.
So here’s where the epiphany comes in, which we’re going to cover as a kind of meditational journey.
Picture yourself as a 12- to 14-year old millenial or Gen-Zer. You’ve recently learned that witches really do exist, and you’re consuming all of the witchcraft-related content you can get your hands on without catching side-eye from your parents. You’ve seen The Craft and Practical Magic eleventy-thousand times, and at some point, you come across Scooby-Doo and the Witch’s Ghost. It feels geared towards an audience a bit younger than you, but hey, it has witches in it, so you watch it anyway.
And what you take away from it is that Wiccans are nice, wholesome, and virtuous. Witches, on the other hand, are powerful.
You’ve also now had it planted in your head that Wiccans don’t practice witchcraft, and not long after this, you learn that Wicca is not ancient, which reinforces your distaste for it. And so your mind is made up: You are a real witch, and anyone who thinks you’re Wiccan can kick rocks.
And yes, I own that I may be reading way too much into all of this. I mean, as far as I know, no one founded a murderous werecat cult after Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island was released, so why should I think that Scooby-Doo and the Witch’s Ghost skewed anyone’s real-world beliefs? Except the Hex Girls have evolved into low-key icons, which means Thorn’s whole Wicca-not-witchcraft backstory is still floating around in a lot of memories, having its own kind of effect.
The fictional elements of pop culture have always influenced the occult, and this is not inherently a bad thing, especially when we make the decision to apply that influence intentionally. It’s when we’re unaware of how much of an impact pop culture can have, or when we find ourselves unable to differentiate between the fictional and the historical, that we end up blithely accepting stories as facts.
And some stories are just stories, y’all. Some stories are not meant to be true. Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon, and any hot take on reality it happens to present should be considered as imaginary as a talking dog.
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