The History of Halloween: Origins & Traditions

The history of Halloween stretches back more than 2,000 years to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, a harvest celebration that marked the end of summer and the night when people believed the dead returned to walk the Earth. Over the centuries it blended with Christian holy days, crossed the Atlantic with Irish and Scottish immigrants, and grew into the candy-and-costume holiday we know today. Here is how each piece of October 31 came to be.

It all began with Samhain

Long before pumpkins and trick-or-treating, the Celts of Ireland, Scotland, and northern France marked the turn of the year with the festival of Samhain (pronounced "SAH-win"), held from sunset on October 31 through November 1. It was the end of the harvest and the start of the dark, cold half of the year, a season the Celts strongly associated with death.

On this one night, people believed the boundary between the living and the dead grew thin, allowing spirits to cross back into the world. To welcome the harvest, honor their ancestors, and confuse any unfriendly souls wandering the night, they lit huge bonfires and put on costumes. Families also left out food and drink as offerings for their deceased loved ones, an early ancestor of the treats children collect today.

How the church reshaped the calendar

As the Roman Empire and later Christianity spread across Celtic lands, the old festival was gradually folded into the church calendar. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as All Saints' Day, a time to honor all the saints, and it absorbed many of the customs of Samhain. According to the long history recorded by encyclopedic sources, the evening before became known as All Hallows' Eve, and over time that name was shortened to Halloween. A day later, on November 2, All Souls' Day kept alive the idea of the living reaching out to the dead at this point in the year.

Even older Roman customs found their way in. When the Romans conquered the British Isles in 43 AD, their autumn festival honoring Pomona, the goddess of fruit and abundance, blended with the similarly timed Samhain. That mash-up is why apples, sacred to Pomona, became part of the holiday at all.

Where the classic traditions come from

Almost everything we now think of as quintessentially Halloween has its own tangled backstory. The Library of Congress traces the roots of each custom through centuries of folklore and old newspapers.

• Jack-o'-lanterns began in Ireland, carved from turnips rather than pumpkins. The legend tells of Stingy Jack, who tricked the Devil and was barred from both Heaven and Hell, doomed to wander with only a glowing coal inside a hollowed turnip. Locals carved scary faces of their own to frighten his restless spirit away.
• Costumes trace straight back to Samhain, when the Celts wore disguises so wandering spirits would mistake them for fellow ghosts and leave them in peace.
• Black cats earned their spooky reputation in the Middle Ages, when they were seen as a symbol of the Devil and, later, as a witch's "familiar" helping to work dark magic.
• The colors black and orange also come from Samhain: black for the "death" of summer, orange for the warm tones of the autumn harvest.
• Bobbing for apples began as a Roman courting ritual tied to Pomona, in which young people tried to predict their romantic futures through the game.
• Bats joined the cast almost by accident. Samhain bonfires drew insects, the insects drew bats, and the eerie creatures became linked with the festival, with medieval folklore casting them as omens of death.

The many theories behind trick-or-treating

No single custom captures Halloween like trick-or-treating, and historians point to at least three overlapping origins. The first goes back to Samhain itself, when people left food out to appease the spirits, then began dressing as those spirits to receive offerings in turn. The second is the medieval practice of "souling" and the Scottish tradition of "guising," in which children and poor adults went door to door collecting food or money in exchange for prayers, and later for songs, jokes, and tricks. A third theory traces it to "belsnickeling," a German-American Christmas custom where costumed children visited neighbors who tried to guess their identities, with a treat as the reward.

However it started, the costume is still the heart of the night. If you want a ready silhouette to build on, our Halloween costume range covers classic spooky looks for the whole family, while a cosy Halloween onesie doubles as both a quick disguise and warm pajamas for a cold night of knocking on doors.

How Halloween crossed the Atlantic

Halloween was slow to take hold in America. The early colonists were largely Puritans who frowned on the holiday, so for a long time it barely registered. That changed in the nineteenth century, when waves of Irish and Scottish immigrants brought their autumn customs with them, including the belief in a night when spirits might walk the Earth. In the New World, All Hallows' Eve became a time for "play parties," private harvest gatherings where people wore costumes, told fortunes, and shared scary stories.

The pumpkin, native to America and far easier to carve than a turnip, quickly took over the jack-o'-lantern role. Anthropology professor Chris DeCorse credits Washington Irving's 1820 story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," in which a headless horseman hurls a pumpkin at the hapless Ichabod Crane, with cementing the pumpkin as a symbol of the spooky season.

From mayhem to a family-friendly holiday

For much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Halloween in America was less about candy and more about chaos. The phrase "trick or treat" was meant literally: a household that offered no treat might find its windows soaped, its trees draped in toilet paper, or worse. Pranking, sometimes called "Devil's Night" or "Mischief Night," was the main event for young people letting off steam.

The shift toward today's child-centered holiday came in the middle of the twentieth century, driven partly by efforts to curb vandalism and, above all, by the postwar move to the suburbs. As families spread into new neighborhoods after World War II, communities worked to turn Halloween into a safe celebration for children. Candy makers seized the moment, marketing small individually wrapped sweets for trick-or-treating. Before then, children were just as likely to receive coins, nuts, fruit, or small toys at the door. Wrapped candy did not fully take over until the 1970s, when parents grew wary of anything unwrapped.

The sweet history of Halloween candy

Some of the season's most familiar treats have surprisingly precise origin stories. Candy corn was first made by the Wunderle Candy Company in Philadelphia in the 1880s and was originally called "Chicken Feed," sold under the slogan "Something worth crowing for," before the Goelitz Company brought it to the masses in 1898. Candy apples were invented by accident in 1908, when Newark candymaker William W. Kolb dipped apples in red cinnamon glaze for a Christmas window display and found customers wanted the fruit instead of the candy. Both became Halloween staples as trick-or-treating boomed across the United States in the 1950s. Today candy reigns, but as you can see, even the sweets carry echoes of harvest festivals thousands of years old.

So why do we celebrate Halloween today?

Modern Halloween is a layered holiday: an ancient Celtic harvest festival, a Christian observance of the dead, a folk tradition carried across the ocean, and a commercial celebration shaped by twentieth-century America. We carve pumpkins because of an Irish legend, wear costumes because the Celts wanted to fool spirits, and ring doorbells for candy because of customs that are part Samhain offering, part medieval souling. What ties it all together is our enduring fascination with being a little bit scared, and the simple joy of dressing up and gathering with neighbors as the dark season begins.