Buttkickin' Halloween Songs: "Witch Image" - Ghost (2018)

Someone’s flesh is rotting tonight
Like no other to you
What you’ve done you cannot undo
While you sleep in earthly delight
Still, your soul will suffer this plight
Like your father in Hell
What you’ve sold you cannot unsell…

Picking a Ghost tune for our Buttkickin’ Halloween Songs is basically like throwing a rock out the window and hoping you’ll hit air.

So let’s go ahead and pick a Ghost tune, and this time around we’re going with Witch Image. This is for a variety of reasons, most of them because the song is a finely crafted pop tune with all the hooks, melody, and just enough crunch from the Cardinal and his gang. It’s entirely ear-pleasing if you’re in the mood for that sort of thing.

The lyrics though, as I often say, are something wholly other.

You could interpret Witch Image a dozen different ways or more, and come up with a compelling case for any of them. So which one is it? Someone conversing with Death just before their suicide? A father who sold his child’s soul to Satan? The Devil welcoming a lost soul into Hell? Is it a general social statement about the inequities of this world, between those who have and those in need?

I’ve got no idea. I just work here man…

Regardless, Witch Image is draped with all the supernatural imagery you’d expect from Ghost. Death rides a pale white horse and invokes imagery of your father in Hell and your mother trying to save your soul, before it falls into an endless ocean. Sleep in earthly delight and figure this one out for yourselves, Hokeyfolk!

I have always kept you closer
Than you have known
I am riding in the shadows
Behind you on a pale white horse
You would never want me to appear
You never want this to be over…