Even a few decades ago, Halloween felt different. In the 2000s and earlier, Halloween costumes were often scarier, most kids were allowed to trick-or-treat to their hearts’ content without adult supervision, and the only Halloween specials available to watch on-demand were the ones you rented from Blockbuster.
But look back a few decades, and you’ll start to see that Halloween used to be a fundamentally different beast. Halloweens of yore were often full of fear, magic, divination, and reverence for the spirits that people believed walked the earth. Many of these traditions can be traced back to the Celtic festival of Samhain, which marked the end of the harvest season. In the 8th century CE, the Christian church moved All Saints’ Day to November 1, likely in order to replace Samhain with a Christian holiday. The night before was considered sacred and came to be referred to as All Hallows’ Eve, which became Halloween.
That doesn’t mean that Halloween and its ancestors were never fun, though—but it does mean that Halloweens of the past were, in general, a bit heavier on the tricks than treats. Here are 10 Halloween traditions that are much less common than they once were.
- Bobbing for apples
- Snap-apple
- Fortune-telling
- Violence and vandalism
- Turnip-Carving
- Souling
- Guising
- Homemade treats
- Tolling church bells all night
- Bonfires
Bobbing for apples
You might remember this one from your childhood, but it's definitely much harder to find at Halloween parties these days. In retrospect, it makes sense—a bunch of people dipping their mouths into the same bucket doesn't exactly scream sanitary, and it’s almost a wonder that this was a staple of Halloween parties for so many years.
This classic party game originated in Europe centuries ago, where it was a popular courtship ritual. In some versions of the game, apples were labeled with boys’ names, and girls would try to bite into the one emblazoned with their crush’s name. If they did so, the pair were said to be soulmates. Another version was built around the idea that the first person to successfully bite into an apple would be the first in the friend group to get married.
Snap-apple
An alternate—and much more dangerous—variant of bobbing for apples, snap-apple stems from All Hallows’ Eve games of the British Isles. This game involved trying to grab an apple with your jaws, just like apple-bobbing. Here, though, the apples were connected to one end of a stick with a burning wax candle attached to the other side.
The stick would be hung from the ceiling and made to spin, and the goal was to grab the apple with your mouth while avoiding the burning candle. In addition to the risk of seriously injuring your face, it’s easy to imagine how this could result in a whole lot of Halloween house fires, too. All things considered, this one makes bobbing for apples look pretty tame.
Another version of this game involved a hoop with treats like cakes, peppers, and apples placed inside it. This contraption would be hung from the ceiling and spun, and players had to do their best to grab one of the treats with their mouths. Legend held that whichever treat you managed to acquire foreshadowed the type of love you would go on to experience.
Fortune-telling
If it isn’t already clear, Halloween was once viewed as a great time to glean some insight about your romantic future. Halloween’s ancestor, Samhain, was traditionally seen as a time when veils between the worlds became thin, making it an auspicious time for divination and other otherworldly activities. Fortune-telling Halloween traditions abound because of this, and many of them focus on matters of the heart.
One tradition, mentioned in the footnotes to poet Robert Burns’ 1785 poem “Halloween,” involves placing one dish in clean water, one in dirty water, and one in no water at all. The person looking for clarity about their future would then be blindfolded and asked to pick one. If they selected the clean bowl, that meant marriage was coming. The dirty one meant they’d marry a widow, and the empty bowl meant no marriage at all.
Another common ritual in Ireland and Scotland involved peeling an apple in a single strip, and tossing the result over your shoulder. If the peel resembled a letter, this was said to be the first initial in your future spouse’s name.
Additionally, tossing nuts into the fire was a common divination ritual that people believed could reveal various details about future romances. Couples would toss hazelnuts into hearths and closely examine how they burned, believing that this could indicate the future of the courtship. This ritual was so popular among Scottish and Northern English folk that October 31 was sometimes called “Nut-crack Night” or “The Oracle of the Nuts” in these regions.
Violence and vandalism
As mentioned previously, Halloween was once much heavier on the tricks than the treats, and some of these tricks could be downright dangerous.
When Scottish and Irish immigrants came to the United States in the 1800s, many of them brought along their tradition of Halloween pranks. As cities became more crowded, they proved perfect breeding grounds for ever-escalating pranks that quickly spun out of control. These could involve lighting fires, tripping bystanders, slashing tires, and other shenanigans that, unsurprisingly, led to frustration, backlash, and more violence.
“Most everybody enjoys a joke or fun to a proper degree on suitable occasions; but when property is damaged or destroyed it is time to call a halt,” read a 1902 article in the Cook County Herald. “We would advise the public to load their muskets or cannon with rock, salt or bird shot and when trespassers invade your premises at unseemly hours upon mischief bent, pepper them good and proper so they will be effectually cured and have no further taste for such tricks.”
Halloween looting, violence, and chaos reached a fever pitch during the Great Depression. Because of this, some communities started scheduling parades, carnivals, and other structured events in order to keep young people busy, and eventually, trick-or-treating became the de facto activity on Halloween night rather than chaos-making.
In some places, however, kids merely decided to move their night of pranking back to the night before Halloween, leading October 30 to become known as Mischief Night. Things came to a head when arsonists lit over 800 fires in Detroit on October 30, 1984, leading to an increase in neighborhood curfews and patrols that, for the most part, put all this mischief-making to rest.
Turnip-Carving
Pumpkins may have Halloween on lock these days, but there was a time when turnips, gourds, and other root vegetables were fair game. Turnips, in particular, were the Halloween veggie of choice in Ireland and other Celtic countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This tradition stems from the ancient practice of carving faces into vegetables and using them as lanterns, which served the dual purpose of scaring off evil spirits and lighting one's way home.
Souling
Like many modern Halloween traditions, trick-or-treating is a lighthearted activity that has its roots in much more serious—and more spiritual—traditions. The act of going door-to-door on Halloween night has its roots in a practice called “souling,” which involved people—usually the poor, minstrels, or children—going door-to-door and offering to pray for the souls of people’s loved ones in exchange for food. They would often be offered “soul cakes,” which were biscuit-like treats typically made from oats. At some point, offering to perform small tricks like songs or dances in exchange for food or cash became common, and it’s not hard to see how trick-or-treating evolved from this.
Guising
Similarly, the practice of wearing costumes has roots in much more serious and spirit-minded traditions. The precise origins of this Halloween tradition are not known, but historians have traced at least some of its roots back to the Celts, who saw Samhain as a time when the spirits of the dead entered the land of the living. Dangerous spirits were also thought to be able to cross between realms during this time, and because of this, many people began wearing masks or disguises in order to blend in with the spirits, a practice known as “guising.” It’s hard not to wonder what a highly religious Celt in the year 1000 might react to some of the costumes out on the streets these days.
Homemade treats
When trick-or-treating first became popular in the U.S. in the mid-20th century, trick-or-treaters were typically presented with homemade goods, from candy apples to special cookies and cakes. But things escalated in 1974 when a man murdered his son after presenting him with poisoned Halloween candy. This enhanced an existing flare-up of worry about potential poisonings and other dangers people foresaw in the act of accepting food from a stranger. Numerous reports about razor blades in candy apples and other risks followed, many of them heavily sensationalized. Soon enough, homemade treats had been all but replaced by prepackaged candies.
Tolling church bells all night
Before Halloween was an occasion mostly designed around play-acting frights and paying to be scared, it was seen as a genuinely spirit-haunted time. Many people believed that the dead walked among the living on Halloween night, and medieval churches would sometimes ring their bells all night long in order to provide solace for the dead, to calm wandering spirits, and to show respect for any departed souls who might be returning for the evening.
Bonfires
Way back before Halloween and its array of jack-o'-lanterns, fog machines, and orange lights, people celebrated Samhain by lighting sacred bonfires. One ancient Celtic tradition involved community members all letting their hearth fires burn out before Samhain. On the holiday itself, they would attend ceremonies led by Druid priests that involved prayers and the lighting of large communal bonfires. Each family would then carry home light from this bonfire to ignite their hearths once again.
Some early accounts describe Samhain as a three-day festival that involved mandatory appearances before local kings or chieftains. These occasions also involved a great deal of heavy drinking—a tradition that, unlike the rest on this list, has largely remained in style in the modern era.