The creepy stories behind our Halloween traditions

The creepy stories behind our Halloween traditions

Halloween—while now a $6 billion confectionary industry and opportunity to turn empowering roles slutty—originates from the Christian holiday of All Hallows Eve and the Celtic holiday, Samhein, among other pre-Christianity harvest festivals. Samhein means ‘summer’s end’ in Gaelic and marked the Celtic new year; folklore shows it was a day when the spirits of the dead would cross over into the next world, with folklorists explaining Halloween gave people a safe way to engage with the concept of death and the supernatural.

Now apparently the second favourite holiday among millennials, there’s plenty about our modern traditions rooted in the creepy and the spooky.

Costumes

There’s plenty of evidence to suggest the origin of dressing up for Halloween actually serves a purpose. During Samhein, Celtic people believed it was easier to communicate with the spirit world—but not everyone wanted to. To avoid the attention of the ghosts and the spirits finding their way to the other side, people would don disguises so they would be mistaken for spirits themselves and be left alone. Choosing a ghost costume would be the most traditional garb for your Halloween party this year, but other classics hold merit too: according to medieval folklore, bats flying around a house three times used to mean someone in that house would soon die; and if a bat flew into your house on Halloween, ghosts had let the bat in—proof your house was haunted. Spiders are not just creepy in themselves, but superstition held that if a spider fell into a candle-lit lamp and was consumed by the flame, there must be witches nearby. But another myth says if you spot a spider on Halloween, the spirit of a loved one is watching over you. So maybe don’t kill the spiders, just in case.

Jack-o-Lanterns

What vegetable gets carved into a Jack-o-Lantern? While pumpkins may be the official product of the season, traditional Jack-o-Lanterns are carved from turnips. This tradition arrived in the US via Irish immigrants, but since turnips were neither plentiful nor cheap, Americans started using pumpkins instead. Why carve a face into a vegetable in the first place? As ominous legend has it, a conniving local named Jack tricked the Devil into climbing a tree and trapped him there by hacking the sign of the cross into the bark. In exchange for letting him go, Jack had the Devil vow to never claim his soul. Feeling invincible, Jack proceeded to live his life in true conniving drunkard fashion, unwittingly barring his entry to heaven when he died. He turned to the Devil, but Satan upheld his vow and cast Jack away, sending him into the dark with only a burning coal to light his way. Jack put the coal in a turnip to use as a lantern and then set out to wander purgatory for all eternity.

To protect their houses from evil spirits such as Jack of the Lantern, local people started carving terrifying faces into their own gourds to scare them off. In a less spooky version of the tale, Jack tricked the Devil into paying for his drink, so the Devil handed Jack a hellish ember. Jack placed the ember into a turnip to carry it without burning himself, carving the turnip into a hellish face to scare away any future devilish encounters.

Trick or Treating

A 1951 Peanuts comic strip can be credited with the spread of trick or treating in the US; if you want your Halloween party with a side order of historical accuracy, dress up as Snoopy. Getting to the point of children going door to door asking for sweets requires a winding path from ancient Celts via medieval England. The Celts dressed up as evil spirits to confuse the demons they believed were visiting from the spirit world; fast forward and dressing in disguise and visiting neighbourhoods while dancing and doing tricks had a name: mummering. This was medieval Europe and mummering was a popular pastime on major feast days. In England, ‘soulers’ would go around begging in the more affluent areas for ‘soul cakes’ on Halloween. Rather than playing tricks, they would pray for peoples’ souls in return for the cakes. When Irish and Scottish immigrants arrived in the United States, they brought ‘souling’ with them, but modern day trick or treating didn’t become popular until 1920 and remained controversial until the 1950s, when Peanuts made it mainstream.

Apple Bobbing

Bobbing for apples remains a popular—if slightly bizarre­—party game for no other reason than entertainment. Originally, it was a form of divination to determine a future spouse; ladies would bite into an apple to mark it and then throw it into the vat of water. Whoever pulled it out of the water was said to be their destined spouse. This party game wasn’t the only way women consulted the supernatural to find themselves a husband. In Scotland, fortune-tellers recommended a young woman name a hazelnut for each of her suitors and throw the nuts in the fireplace; the nut that burnt to ashes rather than popping or exploding was the girl’s fated husband. Other women ate sugary snacks with nuts before bedtime to increase her chances of dreaming of her future husband; some women went down a different apple-related route and threw peels over their shoulders in the hope the peels would spell the initials of their groom-to-be. Some slightly more desperate women believed they could discern their future by peering at egg yolks floating in a bowl of water, and the more spooky of the group would stand in front of mirrors in a dark room, holding a candle and looking over their shoulders for their husbands’ faces.

Forgetting about conjuring up a husband, the thing you should be most worried about on Halloween is alcohol poisoning. Statistically, that’s your biggest risk on the spookiest day of the year.