The night before All Saints
Halloween is short for All Hallows' Eve, the evening before All Saints' Day on 1 November, when Christians remembered the saints, or hallows. The date sat on top of a much older festival. The Celtic peoples of Ireland, Scotland and elsewhere celebrated Samhain at the end of October, marking the end of the harvest and the start of the dark half of the year. It was believed to be a time when the boundary between the living and the dead grew thin and spirits could walk abroad.
Our Celtic mythology page covers the gods and stories of those peoples.
Where the costumes and the pumpkins came from
Dressing up has a long history on this night. In Scotland and Ireland, young people went guising, going from house to house in disguise and performing a song, a poem or a joke in return for food or coins. One explanation is that the disguises were meant to confuse wandering spirits. In England, the poor went souling on All Souls' Day, offering prayers for the dead in return for small spiced soul cakes. The words trick or treat were first recorded in print in Canada in 1927.
The first lanterns were carved from turnips and swedes, with a candle inside, and a folk tale tells of Stingy Jack, a man who tricked the devil and was doomed to wander with only a coal in a turnip to light his way. When Irish and Scottish families emigrated to North America in the 1800s, they found the PUMPKIN much bigger, softer and easier to carve than a turnip, and the jack-o'-lantern was born. The heaviest pumpkin on record, grown in Minnesota in 2023, weighed more than 1,200 kilograms.
Monsters with a history
Several of the monsters in the grid began in books. Bram Stoker, an Irish theatre manager, published DRACULA in 1897, and FRANKENSTEIN began as a story written for a competition on a rainy holiday, told on our classic novels page. The ZOMBIE comes from the folklore of Haiti, and the WEREWOLF from old European stories of people who turned into wolves at the full moon. The MUMMY became a film monster after the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922 filled the newspapers.
Real BATS are much less frightening than their reputation. Of more than 1,400 species, only three drink blood, and most eat insects or fruit. A single little brown bat can catch hundreds of insects in an hour.
Apples, costumes and candy
Many old Halloween games were really about fortune-telling. Bobbing for apples in a tub of water was said to show who would marry first, and a young woman who peeled an apple in one long strip and threw the peel over her shoulder hoped it would land in the shape of her future husband's initial.
Today Halloween is huge in the United States, where people spend billions on CANDY and COSTUME outfits each year, from a WITCH with a BROOMSTICK and CAULDRON to a VAMPIRE, a GHOST, a GOBLIN or a SKELETON. A SCARECROW, a LANTERN, a COBWEB with a SPIDER, a bubbling POTION, a HAUNTED house and every SPOOKY MONSTER complete the grid.