Masters of the dark

Lives in shadows and the myths they inspire

If listening is preferable, you can find an audio version, read by me, here. ⬇️

We were driving through the city one evening when I first noticed them, silhouettes soaring above the bustle, like scraps from a hundred celestial quiltmakers dropped across the dimming sky.

“Fruit bats,” my daughter said, amused at the look on my face.

A few days later she took me to see them properly, an entire “camp” settled into a grove of trees on the outskirts of Sydney. In the mild warmth of a spring afternoon, they hung upside down like cloaked trapeze artists. When she clapped her hands, the air came alive with leathery wings and chatter, a sound oddly domestic, more squabble than shriek. I marveled, then asked her to stop. It felt wrong to disturb them, even for wonder.

They were enormous, these grey-headed flying foxes, with wingspans that would fill a doorway. Their faces made it easy to understand how they came by their common name, though they looked for all the world like the chihuahua I’d met at a recent dinner party. Familiar, furry—just add wings. It’s strange to stand beneath something you’ve been taught to fear and instead feel the tug of affection.

Photo by Peter Neumann on Unsplash

When I was a child, bats appeared with the rest of the Halloween decorations—black paper cutouts strung across porches, perfectly symmetrical and always in a flattened flight pose, eyes two white pinpricks of mischief. When we aged out of our own costumes and door-to-door escapades, one brother took great delight in blasting Night on Bald Mountain through the carport speakers of my parents’ house, scaring away all but the hardiest trick-or-treaters. He probably figured he’d get to eat the candy we didn’t give out.

That sequence from Disney’s Fantasia—the mountain, the music, the eerie shapes oozing out of the gloom, and Chernabog, the massive winged demon who summons them—was my first introduction to the spectacle of evil. At its center: a bat-shaped being ruling the night and everything terrifying about it.

I don’t remember ever fearing bats in particular, but I do remember being afraid of the dark, the closet left ajar, the shadow under the bed, the imagined shift of something just beyond my view. Long before I’d ever seen a bat, I understood what they signified.

Across time and cultures, bats have carried complex meanings. In China, bats are symbols of happiness, longevity, and good fortune, their likenesses used in clothing, furniture, and porcelain. In some Native American traditions, bats are seen as tricksters or keepers of sacred knowledge, creatures of the night that embody introspection and transformation. In Maya mythology, the bat‑god Camazotz represented darkness, sacrifice, and the underworld, while in parts of Africa, bats are associated with witches’ souls or nocturnal spirits. Whether omen or blessing, bats inhabit the stories at the edges of human understanding, and our perceptions were born out of these ancient ideas.

Then came the Celts, who celebrated the harvest festival of Samhain two thousand years ago. They lit bonfires to mark the turning of the year, believing the veil between the living and the dead had thinned. The flames drew insects, which in turn attracted local nocturnal bats. And there’s your origin story: the first bats of Halloween. They came for the bugs, not the souls. But superstition, once sparked, burns hot and long.

When Christianity took hold, it folded old customs into new observances. Samhain’s echoes lingered in All Hallows’ Eve—Halloween—and the bonfires still raged against the dark. The old spirits became ghosts and demons in the Christian imagination, and bats kept flying through the centuries, gathering new layers of myth and misunderstanding. By the time Bram Stoker’s Dracula spread his wings in 1897, the transformation was complete. The bat was the devil’s familiar, a companion of the undead.

It’s telling that in the classic tale, Dracula turned into both a bat and a dog. We forgave the dog.

Bats live in the underbelly—in caves, forests, and dark cavities where human sight fails. They move unpredictably in twilight. They occupy the borderlands of our understanding: a bird that isn’t quite a bird, a mammal that flies, a creature that sees better with sound than with its eyes. They’ve mastered what we never could, and they do it in the dark. Perhaps that’s why they became proxies for all that is uncertain.

Though my love of animals mostly displaces any inherited unease, seeing the flying foxes in daylight fully unsettled the tidy binary of good and evil, cute and cursed. They were too soft, too visible, too ordinary to uphold the myth.

With their long pink tongues, these fox-faced creatures feed primarily on nectar and fruit, aiding pollination as they eat and reseeding forests with what they excrete. Their groups are tender, noisy, quarrelsome, not unlike ours—and many of these colonies, indeed much of the species, are in decline, vulnerable to the pressures of habitat loss, climate change, and human ignorance.

Photo by René Riegal on Unsplash

Standing beneath their trees, I thought about how language betrays us. We speak of “dark” as bad, “light” as good, though one cannot exist without the other. We are apt to dread what moves in shadow, though dusk is simply the hour when other creatures wake. The bats’ only offense was to thrive in a world we couldn’t see.

Maybe Halloween itself is our way of negotiating that discomfort. Once a year, we light our own bonfires, hang our paper bats, and flirt with the dark. We call it play and sweeten it with candy, but it’s ritual all the same, our attempt to make peace with the night.

Later that week, as my daughter and I drove back through Sydney, the fruit bats were rising again. Against a watered-ink sky, they flew, hundreds of them streaming toward sustenance. I thought of Dracula, of Samhain, of my brother’s stereo thundering Night on Bald Mountain, and I felt the long thread of our stories—how awe and apprehension twist together through time.

The bats have never changed, only the stories we tell about them. In trying to name what we can’t understand, we wrote them into our nightmares.

Halloween lets us step into the spectral for a night, but bats have always been fully part of our world. The tales we tell reveal more about us than about them. In truth, they are pollinators, seed planters, noisy neighbors, clever navigators of night, creatures perfectly adapted to the world we only glimpse in the gloaming. Our stories don’t make them anything other than what they are.

~Elizabeth

From my amazing visit with a camp of grey-headed flying foxes, near Narrabeen, Australia. The most noticeable noise in the video is my daughter’s clapping, but the bat chatter is also apparent and impressive.

If this essay gave you a new way to look at bats—or at the stories we tell about the night—I’d love to hear your thoughts. Your comments mean the world! What are your most unnerving or endearing bat experiences? Your fondest memories of Halloween?

I’ve been under the weather lately, so my audio voiceover for this one is a little compromised, but I hope it still beats AI. 🤖

If you’d like to dig deeper into all things bat, you might also like my earlier essay “Tiny Miracles: Going to Bat for Bats.” It’s even more of a myth-buster, exploring some of the smaller species and getting into more nuance about these often‑misunderstood animals.

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