Cries of “trick or treat” and children scurrying door-to-door in fanciful costumes are typically the way today’s Halloween is celebrated, but for one Issaquah business-owner the occasion is dead-ly serious.

Ankhasha Amenti, owner of Ankhasha’s Temple of the Western Gate in downtown Issaquah, said this is the time of year the barrier between the living and the dead becomes thinnest.

“For a person like a psychic medium, it’s a special night,” she said. “It’s a time when the ancestors are invited to make contact.”

Formerly an eclectic consignment store, Amenti’s business is now focused on psychic readings, tarot card readings and interpreting the mysteries of the spiritual world.

The name Halloween is derived from the Old English name for All Saint’s Day.

But Amenti argues that as much as Christians like to claim Halloween, it was a pagan tradition before.

She reaches back to the ancient Celtic pagan festival of Samhain (pronounced Sow-Win), which marked the end of summer and remembered the dead before Britain was Christianized.

Many of those traditions live on today, such as Jack o’lanterns, wearing costumes, bobbing for apples and displaying spooky skeletons.

But rather than raise a fright, Amenti would rather see popular culture embrace the spiritual side of honoring ancestors and warding off bad influences.

“It’s not supposed to be something scary or spooky, it’s something that’s done in a very holy, reverent way,” she said.

Her own Temple of the Western Gate experiences some spiritual activity of its own, she said, and suspected the building was inhabited by the souls of two men who once owned the building when it was a truck repair shop in the 1940s and 50s.

“Up in the attic, workmen have heard strange noises … and thought they had seen someone when no one was there,” she said. “(The spirits) seem to enjoy playing tricks on people.”

She also dismissed any suggestion her practices were related to devil worship or “Satanism”.

“I don’t even believe in the devil,” she said. “I’m not trying to stir the ‘cauldron,’ so to speak.”