The freaks come out at night.

Altars to the dead lined the basketball court at Kezar Pavilion: One was a shrine to pets, another memorialized fetuses that didn't come to term, and a third, with photographs of the first thousand U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, mourned the war dead.

They set the stage for a ceremony where a thousand witches, druids and pagans prepared to meet the dead. It opened with a procession of goddesses, including the Virgin of Guadalupe and Demeter, the Greek goddess of fertility, who wore a mask decorated with wheat. A procession of six gods played out a cycle of death and reincarnation.

With emotions building, those in the crowd shook their bodies, flapped their arms and stomped their feet in an ecstatic, pulsing release of energy.

"We feel the ancestors longing for us," trance leader Beverly Frederick told the gathering in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district.

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