This Halloween, witches seen on television will wear pointy hats and fly on broomsticks.

However, real witches wear baseball caps, drive cars and worship nature, say some ISU students.

“Pagans are just regular people,” said Isaac “Kohne” Gitchel, president of the ISU Pagan Community and senior in psychology, who is also a Christian.

At Pagan community meetings, members wear T-shirts with stripes and band logos, not capes. The meetings resemble those of any other student organization at Iowa State.

But unlike other student organizations, Pagan members won’t be seen wearing club T-shirts around campus.

Pagans have been persecuted throughout recorded history; the 2000 year period is known as the Burning Times, said Victor Raymond, graduate student in sociology.

The Burning Times began with the rise of Christianity in Rome, he said.

Many Pagans and non-Christians were tortured and killed, Raymond said.

The word “pagan” is a broad term from a Latin word meaning “country dweller,” he said.

Paganism encompasses many personal beliefs.

“There are as many interpretations as there pagans,” Raymond said.

Today, more than 300 years after the Salem witch trials, Pagans hope the Burning Times are near an end so they can come out of their “broom closet,” members said.

Pagans exercise the freedom to practice any brand of Christianity, Raymond said.

Raymond said a misconception about Pagans is that they are Satanists. However, Pagan beliefs relate to neither Christianity nor Satanism, he said, but Satanism relates to Christianity.

While Pagans differ in their personal beliefs, three elements bind the religion together — the law of three, the Wiccan Rede and the worship and reverence of nature.

Pagans won’t be found trick-or-treating this Halloween because it’s the evolution of a Christian holiday. Halloween as celebrated today evolved from the Catholic traditions of Latin America’s Day of the Dead, Raymond said.

On this day, the Catholics believed the line between the spirit world and the living was the thinnest and spirits could interact with the living, he said.

The costumes were meant to scare off evil spirits and the treats evolved from offerings to the dead, Raymond said.

Halloween, also called Samhain, is the new year for many Pagans. It signals the end of the harvest and beginning of the “dark time in the cycle of life,” Raymond said.

Pagans use the winter months for reflection until the world is “reborn” in the spring, he said.