Halloween Come Early?

It's that time of year - the time of creeping Halloween, as the decorations associated with the season start appearing.  Not just in shops, but also in people's gardens and homes.  It all starts with the odd fake cobweb lighting up someone's window, an occasional plastic pumpkin on their doorstep, but before you know it, gardens are full of illuminated fake skeletons, inflatable witches are hanging out on top of porches and kids are wandering around dressed as ghouls attempting to scare old age pensioners to death by leering through their windows and shoving burning, petrol soaked, rags through their letter boxes, shouting 'trick or treat you old bastards'.  Only this evening, I encountered the creepiest Halloween related 'decoration' I've seen so far.  Strolling back home along my street from where I had parked my car, after having had to take a massive diversion on my way back from the local Toy and Model Train Fair thanks to a road closure which had magically appeared, without warning, in the time I had been looking at old Tri-ang locomotives, I noticed a strange flickering light, low on the ground, as I approached the terrace which contains my house.  Approaching, I saw that in the gravelled area outside the last house before the steps up to the terrace, there were three large candles of varying heights, in weird looking holders, all flickering away just below the doorstep of the front entrance.  

At first, I assumed that they were artificial flames, that I was looking at some sort of battery powered lantern.  But no, when I got closer, I could clearly see that these were actual flames coming from the lit wicks of actual candles.  Obviously, the first question which came to mind was, why?  I mean, it seems a little early to be burning creepy looking candles (they were black) in your garden if they are meant as some sort of Halloween decoration.  They'll be burned out well before the thirty first, probably before morning.  But who would think that black candles were a suitable Halloween decoration - Satanists, witches?  Usually, the only lit candles you see on Halloween are in hollowed out pumpkins.  Then again, I reasoned, perhaps the people who live there are Satanists or witches and that the candles were there as a signal to other members of the coven that there was a meeting there tonight.  But my next thought was that maybe the house's occupants themselves hadn't put the candles there - perhaps they weren't Satanists or witches, but had somehow crossed the local representatives of one or the other and were now being marked for a terrible revenge.  Perhaps those candles were there so that the devils and other supernatural entities raised against them knew where to go to wreak bloody vengeance.  Personally, I had always assumed that marking the front door with a pentacle would be the way to do this, but what do I know?  Clearly, I'm not going to know whether they have become victims of a Satanic cult until tomorrow, when the police break in and find the place full of blood and dismembered entrails.  I'm sure that the sound of the sirens will alert me.