Temperate weather, perfect apples, and leaves turning yellow, red, and purple – ‘Fall’ ought to be the most charming time to be in the US. But the season’s natural beauty is defiled by a grotesque American obsession – Halloween.

For all of October (and most of September) Halloween kitsch is as ubiquitous as leaves and acorns on the ground. It’s there in offices, bars, restaurants, and coffee shops. It’s outside houses, inside houses, and on top of houses. Butcher’s knives hang from washing lines. There are six-foot tarantulas, eight-foot zombies, and twelve-foot werewolves, some of which move, cackle or howl as you walk past.

In a world where so many things seem to go to pot, we’ve lost the true meaning of Halloween

There are gravestones with tacky mottos like ‘Woulda, Shoulda, Couda’, ‘Rest in Pieces’, and ‘Deja Boo’. Skulls, loose bones, and skeletons – human and animal – cover front lawns. Cobwebs drape over flowering hydrangeas, and a doll – probably about the size of a one-year-old baby – dangles from a tree.

Then, on the night of Halloween, when gangs conduct their initiations, parents take their children for an American rite of passage: trick or treating. Word of mouth, the local press, and Google Maps will tell you which houses have the most haunting displays. This year, on a New York street famous for its Halloween frippery, the residents of posh townhouses are expecting so many trick or treaters that they’ve asked for donations.

The decorations on my block are commendably restrained, yet even those of us who don’t display so much as an uncarved pumpkin can expect visitors. Last year, as the bells from the nearby Catholic Church chimed for six, the Grim Reaper appeared at my door. He was at least six foot tall and, as I looked through the window, he was raising his scythe.

During the week of Halloween, adult Americans dress up in full costume for parties and bar crawls. Weirdly, going in full costume to a Halloween event does not necessarily mean going in a Halloween costume. Literally, anything goes. Alongside Lord Voldemort, Frankenstein’s creature, and Count Dracula, you’ll find the Little Mermaid, a T-Rex, and Super Mario.

Most ridiculous of all, this tawdry tradition takes place in a nation that has been strongly anti-Catholic ever since John Smith decided to found Jamestown. All Hallow’s Eve, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day are Catholic feasts. Protestant churches don’t canonise saints, and neither do they believe there are souls languishing in Purgatory. In a world where so many things seem to go to pot, we’ve lost the true meaning of Halloween.

To be fair, not quite all of American Halloween is horrific. Some of it is literary. No lover of Shakespeare can bemoan commemoration of three witches. And I did see a decoration that evoked Washington Irving – a gravestone inscribed RIP Van Winkle.

But for every bookish reference there are dozens of mindless clichés, just as for every tasteful pumpkin there are dozens of animatronic monstrosities. Fall, particularly in the northern states, should be a pleasant potpourri of pre-Raphaelite colours. Instead, it is a chiaroscuro of black widows and white-faced ghosts.