10 surprising facts about the origins of Halloween

Halloween reads like a holiday engineered by candy companies and costume shops, yet it predates both by roughly 2,000 years. The origins of Halloween sit with Samhain, a Celtic festival marking the end of the harvest and the start of winter. Celtic communities in what is now Ireland, the U.K. and northern France treated that turning point as a night when the boundary between the living and the dead thinned. Everything layered on afterward — Christian holy days, Irish and Scottish folk practice, Victorian parlor games, mid-20th-century American marketing — attached itself to that seasonal frame rather than replacing it.

That layering explains why so much of what people repeat about the holiday does not hold up. Claims circulate every October about its pagan character, its supposed Satanic links, or the hidden meaning behind trick-or-treating, usually with little connection to the documented record. What the record actually contains is more specific. A pope fixed All Saints' Day on November 1. The evening before it became All Hallows' Eve, which shortened into Halloween. Medieval households handed out soul cakes in exchange for prayers for the dead. Scottish children went door to door in costume for coins and food. Turnips were carved into lanterns long before anyone in Europe had seen a pumpkin. Famine-era migration carried those customs across the Atlantic, and candy manufacturers rebuilt the holiday around individually wrapped sweets after World War II.

Each of the 10 items that follows stands on its own, built on history rather than folklore repeated until it sounds like fact. Some trace a familiar symbol to its source — the jack-o'-lantern, the black cat, the pointed witch hat. Others correct a widespread assumption about what Halloween originally was and was not. A few run against the version most people learned, including the idea that the holiday began as an occult observance. Together they describe a holiday that never stopped absorbing material from the cultures it moved through. Its most recognizable traditions are often far newer, or far older, than they appear.

Illustration: Quartz

Halloween descends from Samhain, a Celtic festival marking the end of harvest and the start of winter, observed roughly 2,000 years ago across what is now Ireland, the U.K. and northern France. It ran from sunset on October 31 through November 1, the hinge between the year's light half and its dark half.

One belief defined the night: the barrier separating the living from the dead thinned, letting spirits move between the two. That idea shaped the practices attached to it. Communities lit large fires. Disguise figured in as well — animal skins and heads worn to confuse wandering spirits rather than for show. The English word "bonfire" traces to the Middle English "bonefire," literally a fire of bones, a term that fits a season built around livestock slaughter.

Samhain also did practical work in the farming calendar. Herds came down from summer pasture. Surplus animals were killed and salted for winter, and the stores meant to carry a household through to spring were counted and closed out. The supernatural element sat on top of a hard agricultural deadline rather than apart from it.

What survives of the festival is incomplete. The Celts kept no extensive written records of their own religion. Nearly everything known about Samhain comes from later material, starting with the Gaulish Coligny calendar — a bronze fragment unearthed in France that names a month called Samonios. Medieval Irish manuscripts fill in more. In the Ulster Cycle tales, Samhain repeatedly serves as the setting for assemblies, battles and encounters with the otherworld. Christian monks wrote those texts down centuries after the pre-Christian religion had faded.

That gap matters. Several commonly repeated details about Samhain ritual rest on folklore collected in the 18th and 19th centuries, not on evidence from the period itself. Historians treat parts of the picture as reconstruction rather than documented practice.

Illustration: Quartz

Pope Gregory III fixed All Saints' Day on November 1 during the eighth century, and the evening before it, All Hallows' Eve, is the direct source of the word Halloween. The date was a move rather than an invention: Rome had honored all the saints on May 13 since the early seventh century.

Gregory III dedicated an oratory in St. Peter's Basilica to all saints and tied the November observance to it. About a century later, Pope Gregory IV extended the feast across the Western church, turning a Roman practice into a calendar fixture kept from Ireland to Italy. November 2 was later set aside as All Souls' Day, devoted to prayers for the dead not yet believed to have reached heaven.

The three days together became known as Allhallowtide. Parishes lit candles, rang bells for the dead and held processions through the period. "Hallow" is an older English word for a saint or holy person, which makes Halloween a worn-down contraction of a church phrase rather than an occult coinage.

Whether Rome chose the November date to overwrite Samhain is still argued among historians. The popular account says the Church planted a Christian feast on top of a pagan one to absorb it. Against that, November commemorations of the dead were already circulating in Frankish and Germanic territory, so the Irish festival may not have been the target at all. The evidence supports debate rather than a settled answer.

Better documented is what medieval parishioners did during Allhallowtide. In parts of Britain and Ireland, poor households went from door to door asking for soul cakes — small spiced buns — and promised prayers for a family's dead in return. The exchange was explicit: food handed over, intercession pledged. The practice, called souling, belonged to the church calendar first, and its link to later Halloween customs is a matter of resemblance rather than an unbroken line of descent.

Illustration: Quartz

The first jack-o'-lanterns were turnips rather than pumpkins, and they came out of Irish folklore rather than American harvest custom. The legend attached to them concerns Stingy Jack, a man who outwitted the devil more than once and was refused entry to both heaven and hell after he died, left to roam with an ember inside a hollowed turnip to light his path.

Households across Ireland and Scotland cut faces into turnips, beets and large potatoes, set a candle or coal inside, and stood them in windows and doorways. The purpose was defensive rather than decorative. A grotesque face turned toward the road was meant to drive off Jack's restless spirit and any other dead thought to be moving about during the Samhain season.

Turnips are dense, and hollowing one out by hand takes real effort. That changed once Irish and Scottish families settled in North America during the 19th century and encountered pumpkins, which are native to the Americas. A pumpkin is far larger, and its flesh is soft enough to scoop and cut with ordinary kitchen knives, so it replaced the turnip as the standard lantern within a few generations. The custom narrowed in timing too, fixing on October 31 instead of the longer seasonal observance it had belonged to in Ireland.

The older version has not vanished. Turnip lanterns are still carved in parts of Ireland and Scotland, particularly in rural areas that keep traditional folk practice going, and the results look nothing like a grinning orange pumpkin — smaller, browner and closer to a shrunken head.

The term itself predates all of this. "Jack-o'-lantern" once described a man carrying a lantern, a night watchman in particular, and it was also applied to the flickering lights that appear over marshes and bogs, better known as will-o'-the-wisp. Folklore explained those lights as souls with no resting place, the same explanation it gave for Jack.

Illustration: Quartz

Trick-or-treating has no single clean origin. It emerged from at least three older customs — medieval souling, Scottish and Irish guising, and American neighborhood pranking — that merged into one practice in the U.S. during the 1920s and 1930s.

Souling is the oldest thread. Poor people, often children, went house to house around All Souls' Day in Britain and Ireland asking for soul cakes and promising prayers for the household's dead in return. The exchange was explicitly religious: food for intercession, not food for nothing.

Guising supplied the performance element. In Scotland and parts of Ireland, children in disguise called at houses on Halloween and earned fruit, nuts or coins by singing, reciting a verse or telling a joke. The treat was payment for a turn, and the expectation that a child should do something to earn it survived in Scottish practice long after it faded elsewhere.

The threat came from somewhere else entirely. Halloween night in late 19th and early 20th century North America was heavily associated with vandalism — soaped windows, upended outhouses, gates carried off, streetcar tracks greased. Civic groups and parents responded by offering organized parties and door-to-door treats as a trade: candy in exchange for leaving property alone. The bargain embedded in the phrase "trick or treat" is a fairly literal description of that deal, and the phrase turns up in North American newspapers by the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Sugar rationing during World War II stalled the custom's spread in the U.S. It resumed with force afterward, helped by suburban development that put large numbers of houses and children within easy walking distance of one another, and by the growing habit of handing out factory-wrapped candy rather than apples, popcorn balls or coins.

The result is a tradition that feels ancient but was assembled recently. The religious bargain, the costumed performance and the implied threat each predate it by centuries. Their combination into a single ritual is less than 100 years old.

Illustration: Quartz

Black cats earned their Halloween role through centuries of European folklore tying cats to witchcraft, not through any ritual practiced at Samhain. The association took shape in witch trial testimony and was fixed in place much later by commercial illustration.

English witch trial records supply the clearest documentary thread. The Chelmsford trial of 1566, among the earliest in England, included testimony about a familiar spirit that appeared as a cat. Pamphlets printed about later trials named cats repeatedly among the animals said to serve accused witches. A familiar was understood as a demonic helper in animal form, a belief that turned ordinary household pets into evidence for accusers.

A separate strand of folklore held that a witch could take a cat's shape to move unseen after dark. That belief circulated across parts of Europe during the early modern period and made cats targets during outbreaks of witch panic.

The superstition was never universal. British sailors often treated a black cat aboard ship as a sign of good fortune. In parts of the U.K., a black cat crossing a person's path reads as lucky rather than ominous, the reverse of the common American reading. The same animal carried opposite meanings depending on the region.

The pairing of black cats with October arrived late, through Victorian and Edwardian Halloween postcards that printed them beside witches, bats and jack-o'-lanterns. Greeting card publishers, and later film and advertising, repeated the combination until it read as inherited tradition. The visual shorthand is roughly a century old rather than ancient, and it now functions as decoration rather than warning.

Animal shelters deal with what the superstition left behind. Some U.S. shelters restrict or pause black cat adoptions in late October as a precaution. Others run October adoption promotions instead, arguing that documented cases of Halloween-related harm are rare and that blanket restrictions slow placement for cats that already wait longer than most to find homes.

Illustration: Quartz

Bobbing for apples is older than Halloween in its modern form. The game is most often traced to Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit trees and orchards, whose autumn associations overlapped with Celtic end-of-season observance after Rome's conquest of Britain.

Centuries of contact blended the two seasonal calendars, though the documentary chain running from a Roman orchard rite to a tub of water in a Victorian parlor is incomplete. What survives clearly is the apple's role in British and Irish divination.

The fruit served as a fortune-telling device long before it became party entertainment, and the games attached to it concerned marriage rather than mischief. Whoever bit a floating apple first was said to be the next to wed. Another version had participants peel an apple in one unbroken strip and throw the peel over a shoulder, where the shape it formed on the ground supposedly spelled the initial of a future spouse.

Scotland called the game dooking for apples, and the night itself carried alternate names tied to the fruit. Snap $SNAP-Apple $AAPL Night referred to a related game in which an apple hung from a string or a rotating stick while players tried to bite it with their hands behind their backs. Daniel Maclise's 1833 painting "Snap-Apple Night" depicts that scene at a Halloween gathering in Blarney, Ireland. Robert Burns recorded the wider family of Scottish Halloween divination rites in his poem "Halloween," published in 1786, which describes villagers burning nuts in pairs to see whose match would hold.

Irish and Scottish emigrants carried the games to North America, where apple bobbing became a fixture at Halloween parties through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The fortune-telling purpose faded as the holiday shifted toward children. Hygiene objections to dozens of people dunking their faces in one basin have since pushed many schools and community events toward hanging-apple versions, which keep the bite and drop both the water and the prophecy.

Illustration: Quartz

The witch on a Halloween decoration descends from a period when accusations of witchcraft carried legal consequences, including execution. European witch trials ran from roughly the 15th through the 17th centuries and killed tens of thousands of people, most of them women.

Printed manuals drove much of the prosecution. The Malleus Maleficarum, published in 1487 by the Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, set out procedures for identifying and trying witches and spread quickly once the printing press made such books cheap to reproduce. Scotland passed its Witchcraft Act in 1563. King James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, took part in the North Berwick trials himself and published Daemonologie in 1597, a treatise arguing that witchcraft was real and that the state should punish it.

In colonial Massachusetts, the Salem trials of 1692 produced 20 executions — 19 people hanged and Giles Corey pressed to death under stones after refusing to enter a plea. Several more accused people died in jail while awaiting trial. Those accused were often women on the margins of their communities, including the elderly, the poor, the widowed and anyone already at odds with powerful neighbors.

The costume version of the witch came together much later and from thinner evidence. The pointed hat has no single documented origin, though one common explanation links it to the conical headgear worn by alewives, women who brewed and sold ale in medieval England and who drew suspicion as independent tradespeople. The broomstick is similarly uncertain, tied in folklore both to the domestic work assigned to women and to the flying ointments described in trial testimony.

By the time American magazines and postcard printers were illustrating Halloween in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the witch had been reduced to a fixed silhouette of pointed hat, cloak and cauldron, with the trial records left out. The decoration that hangs on front doors each October carries no trace of that legal history.

Illustration: Quartz

Halloween became a broadly observed American holiday only in the mid-19th century, carried across the Atlantic by Irish and Scottish immigrants, with the Great Famine migration of the late 1840s supplying the decisive wave. More than a million people left Ireland during the famine decade, and the folk calendar they knew at home traveled with them.

Colonial America had no unified Halloween. Observance appeared in pockets where Scottish and Irish settlers had already established communities, particularly in Maryland and parts of the southern colonies, and in rural areas where harvest gatherings absorbed bits of imported folk practice. Puritan New England offered the least hospitable ground. Religious authorities there rejected most of the traditional European festival calendar, Christmas included, which left little room for an autumn night rooted in Catholic and pre-Christian custom.

The famine-era arrivals changed that balance. Immigrant households kept guising, divination games, seasonal fires and the late-October gatherings that framed them, and those practices spread outward from Irish and Scottish neighborhoods into the wider population over the second half of the century.

American publishers then did the standardizing work. Ladies' magazines, newspaper features and party-planning columns of the 1880s and 1890s printed instructions for Halloween entertainments, decorations and menus, giving readers in Ohio and Kansas the same template as readers in Boston. A holiday that had varied household to household acquired a recognizable national look within about two decades.

The audience shifted alongside it. American Halloween in the 1800s skewed adult, organized around fortune-telling amusements and courtship rituals for young men and women. Civic groups and schools promoted supervised community events in the early 20th century, partly to curb the property damage and pranking that had attached themselves to the night, and children moved to the center of the holiday.

What emerged was a distinctly American version. Its structure came from Samhain-derived custom, but its reach came from migration patterns, mass-circulation print and local adaptation rather than any unbroken line back to the Celtic original.

Illustration: Quartz

Candy became Halloween's default handout only after World War II. For most of the holiday's American life, households gave trick-or-treaters whatever the kitchen already held: homemade cookies, popcorn balls, nuts, apples, slices of cake or a few coins dropped into a paper bag.

Sugar rationing in the U.S. ended in 1947, and candy makers came out of the war into a market suited to them. Suburban subdivisions were filling with children, and door-to-door collection was settling into a fixed October routine in neighborhoods built densely enough to make it practical. Individually wrapped miniature bars solved the problems a homeowner faced on October 31. They cost little per unit, sold in bulk, required no baking and could be handed out one at a time to an unpredictable number of visitors.

Manufacturers pushed the association deliberately, through seasonal packaging in orange and black, in-store displays timed to late September and advertising that cast wrapped candy as what children expected at the door. Across the 1950s and 1960s, Halloween grew into one of the confectionery industry's major selling seasons, alongside Christmas and Easter.

Fear of tampered treats in the 1970s and 1980s pushed the shift further. Rumors spread about razor blades hidden in apples and poison slipped into homemade sweets. Joel Best, a sociologist who has reviewed reported cases of Halloween candy tampering in the U.S. and Canada going back decades, found no confirmed case of a child killed by candy poisoned at random by a stranger. The rumors changed behavior regardless. Parents came to read an unbroken factory wrapper as proof of safety, and homemade treats largely disappeared from porches.

The National Retail Federation now surveys U.S. Halloween spending each year, with candy consistently among the largest categories alongside costumes and decorations. The candy-centered holiday is barely three generations old, a commercial layer applied long after the rest of Halloween had taken shape.