Halloween

• 1. Introduction

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  Halloween falls on the 31st of October, the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows' Day. Its other names tell you where it began. All Hallows' Eve. All Saints' Eve. The word itself comes from the Lowland Scots form of All Hallows' Eve, where even, the Scots word for evening, contracted to e'en. So All Hallow Even became Halloween. Hallow traces back to the Old English halig, meaning holy, and was once used as a synonym for saint. So the name means, quite literally, Saints' evening.

  Yet in popular culture this holy evening has become a celebration of horror, tied to the macabre and the supernatural. How did a Christian vigil for the dead turn into a night of masks, carved pumpkins, and bargaining for candy at a stranger's door? Scholars cannot even agree on where it started. One theory traces its customs to Celtic harvest festivals with pagan roots. Others argue it began independently as a Christian holy day. The answers run through Irish hills, Bavarian graveyards, a trickster named Jack, and an American economy that now spends over ten billion dollars on it every year.

• 2. Saints, Souls, And Vigils

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  After the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire, as one account puts it, there were more martyrs than there were days in the year, and so one day was set apart in honor of them all, and called All Saints' Day. Early commemorations of saints and martyrs landed on various dates, mostly in springtime. In 4th-century Roman Edessa the feast fell on the 13th of May. On that same date in 609, Pope Boniface IV re-dedicated the Pantheon in Rome to St Mary and all martyrs.

  By the year 800, churches in Ireland and Northumbria were holding a feast for all saints on the 1st of November. In 835, the Frankish Empire officially adopted that date, a shift possibly promoted by Alcuin of Northumbria, a member of Charlemagne's court. One practical theory holds that Rome in summer could not house the great number of pilgrims who flocked to it, with added worry over Roman Fever, which claimed lives during the city's sultry summers.

  All Souls' Day, commemorating all deceased Christians, spread in the 12th century and was fixed on the 2nd of November. By the end of that century these had become holy days of obligation. Church bells rang for souls in Purgatory, and criers dressed in black paraded the streets, ringing a bell of mournful sound and calling on all good Christians to remember the poor souls. These three days form Allhallowtide, the stretch of the liturgical year set aside to honour the faithful departed.

• 3. Cakes, Masks, And The Danse Macabre

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  Soul cakes may be the seed of trick-or-treating. The custom dates back at least to the 15th century and turned up in parts of England, Wales, Flanders, Bavaria, and Austria. Groups of poor people, often children, went door to door during Allhallowtide collecting these cakes in exchange for praying for the dead. The practice was called souling. Like the Lenten hot cross bun, soul cakes were often marked with a cross, showing they were baked as alms. Shakespeare even mentions souling in his comedy The Two Gentlemen of Verona, written in 1593.

  Christian minister Prince Sorie Conteh tied costumes to a fear of vengeful ghosts. It was believed the souls of the departed wandered the earth until All Saints' Day, with All Hallows' Eve their last chance to take vengeance on enemies. To avoid being recognized by such a soul, people would don masks or costumes. In the Middle Ages, churches too poor to display relics of martyred saints let parishioners dress up as the saints instead.

  Many Christians in mainland Europe, especially in France, believed that once a year the dead of the churchyards rose for one wild, hideous carnival known as the danse macabre. Christopher Allmand and Rosamond McKitterick write that it urged Christians not to forget the end of all earthly things. Enacted in village pageants and court masques, people dressed up as corpses from various strata of society. This may be the origin of the Halloween costume party.

• 4. Reformation And Candlelit Graves

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  After 1605, Guy Fawkes Night on the 5th of November eclipsed Allhallowtide in England, taking over some of its customs. The Reformation had already turned Protestants against the holiday, attacking Purgatory as a popish doctrine at odds with the Calvinist belief in predestination. State-sanctioned rites of prayer for souls were abolished during the Elizabethan reform, though All Hallows' Day stayed in the English calendar to commemorate saints as godly human beings.

  In 18th- and 19th-century rural Lancashire, Catholic families gathered on hills on the night of All Hallows' Eve. One person held a bunch of burning straw on a pitchfork while the rest knelt around him, praying for relatives and friends until the flames went out. This was called teen'lay. A similar custom existed in Hertfordshire, with tindle fires lit in Derbyshire, some said to guide the poor souls back to earth.

  During the 19th century, candles burned for the dead across Ireland, Flanders, Bavaria, and Tyrol, where they were called soul lights, meant to guide the souls back to their earthly homes. In Brittany, libations of milk were poured on the graves of kinfolk, and food was left overnight for returning souls. In Salerno, until the 15th century, families left a meal out for the ghosts of relatives before leaving for church. In Spain people still bake pastries called bones of the holy, the huesos de santo, and set them on graves.

• 5. The Samhain Connection

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  Samhain is one of the quarter days of the medieval Gaelic calendar, celebrated from the 31st of October to the 1st of November in Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. The Brittonic Celts held a kindred festival, called Calan Gaeaf in Wales, Kalan Gwav in Cornwall, and Kalan Goañv in Brittany, a name meaning first day of winter. For the Celts the day began at sunset, so the festival opened the evening before. Folklorist Jack Santino writes that throughout Ireland an uneasy truce existed between Christian customs and beliefs that were Irish before Christianity arrived.

  Samhain marked the end of the harvest and the start of the darker half of the year. It was a liminal time, when the boundary between this world and the Otherworld thinned. The Aos Sí, the spirits or fairies, could more easily cross over. Most scholars see them as degraded versions of ancient gods whose power lingered in people's minds. To ensure people and livestock survived the winter, offerings of food and drink or portions of the crops were left outside for them.

  Divination ruled the household festivities across Ireland and Britain, with games meant to foretell death and marriage. Apples and nuts featured heavily, alongside scrying, mirror-gazing, and pouring molten lead or egg whites into water. Special bonfires were lit, their flames, smoke, and ashes thought to have protective and cleansing powers. In some places torches lit from the bonfire were carried sunwise around homes and fields. In Wales, bonfires were lit to prevent the souls of the dead from falling to earth.

• 6. Guising And The Carved Lantern

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  From at least the 16th century, mumming and guising were part of the festival in Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, and Wales. People went house to house in disguise, reciting verses or songs in exchange for food. In parts of southern Ireland a man dressed as a láir bhán, a white mare, led youths from door to door. If a household gave food it could expect good fortune from the Muck Olla. In Scotland, youths went about with masked, painted, or blackened faces, often threatening mischief if they were not welcomed. In Wales, men dressed as fearsome beings called gwrachod.

  Pranksters used hollowed-out turnips or mangel wurzels as lanterns, carved with grotesque faces. Common in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands in the 19th century, and in Somerset, they were said to represent the spirits or to ward off evil. In the 20th century they spread across Britain and became known as jack-o'-lanterns. An Irish folktale explains the name. On his way home from drinking, Jack tricks the Devil into climbing a tree, then carves a cross into the bark to trap him.

  Jack bargains that Satan can never claim his soul. After a life of sin and drink, Jack is refused entry to heaven, and the Devil, keeping his promise, refuses him hell, hurling a live coal at him. On a cold night Jack places the coal in a hollowed-out turnip to keep it lit, and has roamed ever since looking for a place to rest. Immigrants to North America swapped the turnip for the native pumpkin, softer and larger and far easier to carve. That American tradition of carving pumpkins is recorded in 1837.

• 7. Crossing The Atlantic

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  Anglican colonists in the southern United States and Catholic colonists in Maryland recognized All Hallows' Eve in their church calendars, as Lesley Bannatyne and Cindy Ott record. The Puritans of New England strongly opposed it, along with Christmas and other established Church celebrations. Almanacs of the late 18th and early 19th century give no sign that Halloween was widely kept in North America. It took mass Irish and Scottish immigration in the 19th century to make it a major American holiday.

  Guising left an early paper trail in the New World. Author Nicholas Rogers cites a 1911 newspaper in Kingston, Ontario, reporting children going guising. The earliest known print use of the term trick or treat appears in 1917, in The Sault Daily Star of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. The practice did not become widespread in North America until the 1930s, with the first national publication using the term in 1939. American historian Ruth Edna Kelley of Massachusetts wrote the first book-length history, The Book of Hallowe'en, in 1919.

  New institutions grew around the night. Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF began as a local event in a Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood in 1950 and went national in 1952, with children collecting more than 118 million dollars since. New York's Village Halloween Parade began in 1974, drawing more than 60,000 costumed participants and two million spectators. The first purpose-built haunted attraction, the Orton and Spooner Ghost House, had opened far earlier, in 1915 in Liphook, England, and still exists in the Hollycombe Steam Collection.

• 8. Faith, Fear, And The Bottom Line

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  On the evening of the 11th of May 1984, the Haunted Castle at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson Township, New Jersey, caught fire, and eight teenagers died. The backlash tightened safety rules, building codes, and inspection frequency nationwide. Smaller nonprofit attractions could not keep up, and better-funded commercial enterprises filled the gap. Theme parks then moved in. Universal Studios Florida launched Halloween Horror Nights in 1991, and Disney now stages Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party in Paris, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.

  Religious views remain divided. Father Gabriele Amorth, an exorcist in Rome, said that if English and American children like to dress up as witches and devils on one night of the year that is not a problem. Many Protestant churches treat it as a fun event, while others mark Reformation Day, recalling that Martin Luther is said to have nailed his Ninety-five Theses to All Saints' Church in Wittenberg on All Hallows' Eve. The American Tract Society says around 3 million gospel tracts are ordered for the night.

  The money tells its own story. Halloween accounts for over 10 billion dollars a year in the American economy. The National Retail Federation projected 12.2 billion dollars in spending in 2023, up from 10.6 billion in 2022, and forecasts 13.1 billion by 2025. Costumes are not only for people. A 2018 report estimated 30 million Americans would spend about 480 million dollars dressing up their pets, up from roughly 200 million in 2010. The most popular pet costume that year was the pumpkin, followed by the hot dog, with the bumblebee in third place.