Colchester’s Castle Park is a much-loved location, of peace and tranquility, wherein there are occasions when we have events of great fun and real entertainment.

There are wonderful flower gardens and children’s play areas.

What Colchester Council is hosting later this month is grossly offensive.

READ MORE: Gruesome 'execution experience' could be coming to Colchester's Castle Park

So-called Halloween entertainment is not funny.

Mock executions and glorifying torture from Colchester’s less savoury historic past is not entertainment.

Nor do I see how it can be entertainment to have a “Hopkins attraction” featuring someone who tortured and had innocent women killed on the trumped-up charges that they were witches.

Such barbarity should not be regarded as a subject of entertainment.

Reference to “hanged participants” is particularly distressing.

Gruesome deaths should not be the subject of humour.

Castle Park is also the location which has witnessed ethnic cleansing when Boudica put thousands of men, women and children to their deaths when Ancient British Tribes sacked Colchester in AD60 – including those dragged from the vaults of the Temple to Claudius, a building which is mentioned in an earlier newspaper report as part of the entertainment.

Some of the Colchester martyrs were burnt at the stake outside the Castle.

Their names are recorded on a memorial at the top of the stairs near the entrance to the Moot Hall.

I recognise the American-driven frenzy of Halloween has taken hold in the UK.

But, please, do not allow our lovely Castle Park to become the venue of entertainment featuring the real events of torture and killings which have taken place here, nor to host the appalling concept of mock executions where people have been executed and brutally murdered over the centuries.

Colchester deserves better than this.

I hope the offensive features I have outlined can be deleted from the programme of events.

If people want to celebrate Halloween, it is a free country after all, then so be it.

But please do not include real events from history which are not matters that should form entertainment.

They should be regarded as sombre and matters of quiet reflection on a past which has no place in modern times.

Sir Bob Russell
Catchpool Road, Colchester