HIS face in shadow, his eyes closed, white witch Jack Daw taps a beater on the side of a bronze ‘singing bowl’ and then runs it around its rim, creating a beautiful resonant tone.

While children across the country are dressing as witches and ghosts to collect sweets, Mr Daw, 45, from Parsons Place, Oxford, is celebrating what he says is the real meaning of Halloween – or Samhain.

Tomorrow, when the night is longer than the day and ‘the veil between the living and the dead is at his thinnest’, he and other pagans across the world celebrate the deceased.

He says the ‘singing’ of the bowl enables him to clear his mind and meditate and welcome ‘in’ the ancestors who have died before him.

No pumpkins, no scary masks, and definitely no candy, this is the real celebration of Halloween from a pagan point of view.

“It’s hard not to be a bit upset by what Halloween has become – a collection of cheap, tacky toys you can buy,” he said, talking at the Inner Bookshop, where he works, in Magdalen Road, Oxford.

“A lot of that is down to the need for people to make money out of it. But for pagans like me, Samhain is a very important festival and the complete opposite of the scary, horror film image it has today.”

Mr Daw is a white witch: “Although it’s not a good term,” he explains, “because to a lot of people it would signify that there are ‘black’ witches, with pointy hats, cats and broomsticks, and there aren’t. I have got a broomstick, but that’s it.”

He adds: “When I was a child, we would celebrate Samhain with a meal and there would be one empty chair at the table, for the dead.

“Some might think that’s spooky, but it wasn’t. Samhain is not about being afraid of death. It is about celebrating it and the dead people we have lost. We welcome back our dead, hold parties, where we remember them.

“Samhain would once have been a night when children, even little ones, could run riot and enjoy themselves, while trick or treat now is probably more a way parents can let their children have fun.”

This Samhain, Mr Daw will mark the night alone.

He said: “I will be in Cornwall and will go into the woods at night, alone. I will sit and meditate and think of the people I have lost and how one day I will be with them again.”