Rather, it’s to set the mood for Friday night’s special event: “Widows and Wakes: A Victorian House in Mourning.”

And, no, it’s really not because it’s Halloween, said site manager Jennifer Farley.

“It’s not a ghost tour,” Farley said. It is a candlelight reenactment of death and mourning customs typical of the late 1800s when the British Queen Victoria’s public grieving for her husband, Albert, set a style for the English-speaking world.

“She was like a fashion icon,” said assistant site manager Mia Berg.

The historic site, on Duke Homestead just north of Interstate 85, occupies part of the farm where Washington Duke began the tobacco business that, by the 1890s, dominated the U.S. tobacco industry and had spread overseas. It includes Duke’s 1852 farmhouse, where Friday visitors will find black draping on mirrors and a somber mood, guided by 19th-century etiquette books.

In one room, they will find a dying “consumptive” (tubercular) patient and a country doctor. Moving along, they’ll encounter a corpse stretched out on its “cooling board” for display to grieving friends and relations. And in the dining room there will be a séance going on to reach loved ones on the other side – a practice typical of the period when spiritualism was “humongous,” said Berg, who is making period-authentic mourning garb for the reenactors.

Fragrances accent the mood – and help cover unpleasant funereal odors. Farley said the Homestead staff researched Victorian plant symbolism and matched it as they could with what would have been available to a Piedmont North Carolina household of the time, such as pine (pity), dark roses (mourning) and rosemary (remembrance).

Setting the theme, through October the site’s Tobacco Museum has a display, “Death en Vogue”: period jewelry and accessories for mourning, such as brooches, veils, remembrance cards, post-mortem photographs, jet-tipped pins, bonnets and a set of “widow’s weeds.”

Remembrance and rituals for the dead hardly originated with the Victorians, but they set a standard for elaboration. When Prince Albert died in 1861, Victoria decreed a year of mourning dress for her court and wore mourning clothes herself until she died in 1901.

For the general public, according to texts in the exhibit, the socially required mourning period depended upon closeness of kin: six months for uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents and grandchildren for example; a year for parent or child; two years for a spouse – although a grieving husband was allowed to go out in society, while a widow was not.

While such customs may seem quaint and morbid now, Victorians were “surrounded by death,” Berg said. “It wasn’t sanitized like it is today.”

Common diseases were often fatal, people usually died at home (“funeral parlor” originally meant a room in the house used for displaying the body) and, in the United States, the Civil War left death a close presence for a generation.

Linda Humphries and Brenda McLean, local re-enactors who play the roles of 19th-century mourners, lent their collection for “Death en Vogue,” and it inspired Homestead staffer Julia Roberts with the idea for a mourning event, Farley said

October was just the convenient time to do it, she said. Between September’s Hornworm Festival and December’s Christmas by Candlelight, “It’s the time of year we don’t have anything else going on,” Farley said.

So the conjunction with Halloween is just coincidence. So, she said, is the position of “Death en Vogue” in the Tobacco Museum immediately after the exhibit titled “Impact of Tobacco.”

“That’s where it fit the space,” said Farley.