The History of Halloween

AlexDalenberg

October 31, 2023

How an ancient Celtic harvest festival became ‘Spooky Season.’

Explore the ancient (and not-so-ancient) origins of Halloween traditions, including the surprisingly sultry history of bobbing for apples, the devilish legend behind the Jack-o-Lantern, and why everybody loves rewatching Hocus Pocus.

 

What Is Samhain? What to Know About the Ancient Pagan Festival That Came Before Halloween

Cady Lang

Dressing up in costumes and trick-or-treating are popular Halloween activities, but few probably associate these lighthearted fall traditions with their origins in Samhain, a three-day ancient Celtic pagan festival.

For the Celts, who lived during the Iron Age in what is now Ireland, Scotland, the U.K. and other parts of Northern Europe, Samhain (meaning literally, in modern Irish, “summer’s end”) marked the end of summer and kicked off the Celtic new year. Ushering in a new year signaled a time of both death and rebirth, something that was doubly symbolic because it coincided with the end of a bountiful harvest season and the beginning of a cold and dark winter season that would present plenty of challenges.

According to historian Nicholas Rogers, author of Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night, Samhain was a “time of stock-taking and perhaps sacrifice” — including probably animal sacrifice — during which “pastoral communities [prepared] to survive the winter.”

Rogers also notes that little is firmly known about the particulars of the holiday, since the limited sources available are either folkloric literature like the Celtic sagas and Roman authors who would have likely “trashed” the traditions of a culture with which they were often in conflict.

To understand what we do know about Samhain, it’s important to recognize how the structure of the year’s calendar affected the Celts’ religious practices. According to The Guardian, much of modern pagan practice is based on the wheel of the year, a major determining factor in Celtic worship. The Celtic year was divided into two halves — light and dark, which were delineated by two of their four annual fire festivals. In between, rituals or ceremonies were celebrated marking solstices (when night is either the shortest or longest) or equinoxes (when day and night are equal). Samhain, the fire festival that marked the beginning of the dark half of the year, is situated between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice.

Encyclopedia Britannica notes that, during this festival, the world of the gods “was believed to be made visible to humankind,” leading to supernatural tricks and trouble; ghosts of the dead and spirits from the Otherworld were also thought to return to the earth during Samhain. To appease deities during this time, sacrifices (generally of crops and animals) were burned in bonfires as a protective measure from from evil otherworldly beings and offerings were left out for other visiting mischievous spirits. Tricks and pranks were often played, but blamed on fairies and spirits during the three-day period when the line between the two worlds blurred.

The spiritual undertones of the Samhain festival also lent themselves to looking to the future, an activity quite apropos to the start of the Celtic new year; History.com notes that Druids, or Celtic priests, thought that “the presence of otherworldly spirits made it easier…to make predictions about the future.” At the bonfires of the festival, fortune-telling was done alongside sacrifices, and many participants also donned costumes, often masquerading as animals or beasts, in hopes of fooling spirits who might want to harm them.

The practices of this fire festival evolved over time — most notably with the spread of Christianity and the Catholic church, by 43 A.D., following Rome conquering most of the Celtic lands. In Jack Santino’s Halloween in America: Contemporary Customs and Performances, he explains how, during this time, many of Celtic traditions were reframed with a Christian narrative in an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of the pagan practices while spreading the new religion. That reframing created many of the Halloween traditions that people still participate in today.

It was May 13 in the year 609 that Pope Boniface IV declared a celebration called All Saints’ Day, also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas in Middle English; the day before it was thus known as All-hallows’ Eve, as History.com explains. The festival was a day to honor Christian martyrs and saints. Later, in the mid-eighth century, Pope Gregory III strategically moved the celebration to November 1, coinciding with the time Samhain would have typically been held. The homage paid to martyrs and saints who passed closely paralleled the appeasement of ghosts of the dead during Samhain. The church’s capitalization on Samhain traditions didn’t end there, however; participants in the new version of the holiday celebrated in much the same manner as their Celtic forebears had — with bonfires and costumes that reflected the spiritual and otherworldly. The offerings of food and goods to protect themselves from spirits and ancestral ghosts became offerings of food and drink to the poor, displays of generosity and goodwill. And the tricks and pranks attributed to otherworldly and evil spirits manifested themselves in the spirit of the saints.

Eventually, All-hallows’ Eve evolved into Halloween, becoming more popular in secular culture than All Saints’ Day. The pagan-turned-Christian practices of dressing up in costume, playing pranks and handing out offerings have evolved into popular traditions even for those who may not believe in otherworldly spirits or saints. However, whether Halloween celebrants know it or not, they’re following the legacy of the ancient Celts who, with the festival of Samhain, celebrated the inevitability of death and rebirth.

Why Black Cats Are Associated With Halloween and Bad Luck

Elizabeth Yuko

Among superstitions, one of the oldest and most enduring is that crossing paths with a black cat will bring on bad luck. The dark-colored felines have also been folded into modern Halloween symbols, giving them the (unearned) reputation of being spooky.

But how and where did the association between black cats and bad luck begin? Here’s what is known about the connection between Halloween and black cats, including the lasting impact of this superstition that remains today.

Origins of Black Cat Superstitions

The connections between humans and cats can be traced back to some of the world’s earliest civilizations, most notably, ancient Egypt, where cats were considered divine symbols. Cats also made an appearance in Greek mythology, specifically Hecate, goddess of magic, sorcery, the moon and witchcraft, was described as having a cat as both a pet and a familiar (a supernatural creature that assists a witch, according to European folklore).

Written records link black cats to the occult as far back as the 13th century when an official church document called “Vox in Rama” was issued by Pope Gregory IX on June 13, 1233. “In it, black cats were declared an incarnation of Satan,” says Layla Morgan Wilde, author of Black Cats Tell: True Tales And Inspiring Images. “The decree marked the beginning of the inquisition and church-sanctioned heretic and/or witch hunts. Initially it was designed to squash the growing cult of Luciferians in Germany, but quickly spread across Europe.”

Cats and Witches Seen as Threats to Early Christian Church

History of Witches

In addition to their early association with Satan, cats also became inextricably linked to witches in medieval Europe. According to Cerridwen Fallingstar, Wiccan priestess and author of Broth from the Cauldron: A Wisdom Journey through Everyday Magic, witches were the pre-Christian pagan practitioners of Europe.

Although the early Christian church in Europe coexisted with witches, as the church gained power, she says that they saw witches as their direct competition in gaining the hearts and minds of the people. That’s when the church began hunting, persecuting, torturing and killing witches in vast numbers, she explains.

“Witches honored the natural world, having deep respect for plants and animals,” says Fallingstar. “Affection between human and animal therefore began to be seen as 'diabolical', or devilish, and the old lady with her cats became seen as suspect.”

But it wasn’t only the connection they fabricated between witches, cats, and the devil that the early Christians feared: they also saw them both as threats. “Cats, like the women accused of witchcraft, tend to exhibit a healthy disrespect of authority,” she notes. “They don't fawn, like dogs, upon even the unworthy. In the church, neither independent women, nor independent animals, were to be tolerated.”

At some point, the pairing of witches with cats narrowed to black cats, although Fallingstar says that it’s not entirely clear why that happened. “The relationship between witches and black cats, in particular, is probably imaginary, but it is possible that black cats make better mousers, since they cannot be seen at night and therefore have a hunting advantage,” she explains. “Witches do tend towards the practical.”

Eventually, the fear surrounding black cats and their association with witchcraft made its way across the Atlantic, courtesy of Puritan colonists, says Daniel Compora, associate professor of English language and literature at The University of Toledo. “The idea that witches could turn into their familiar likely evolved from those accused of witchcraft having cats as pets,” he explains.

Cats Blamed for Spreading the Plague

During the Middle Ages, it wasn’t uncommon for cats to be killed, given their association with evil, Compora says. Some people even went as far as blaming cats for spreading the Bubonic plague and used that as another reason to get rid of them. However, their ill-conceived plan backfired.

“In a particularly bizarre piece of irony, the killing of the cats helped fuel the spread of the plague,” Compora explains. “With the reduced number of cats to control the rodent population, the disease spread rapidly.”

Origins of Black Cat Crossing Your Path Superstition

Given the belief in medieval Europe that the devil and witches were capable of taking the form of black cats, it makes sense that the superstition surrounding crossing their paths developed, says Phoebe Millerwhite, a folklorist and artist. “Therefore, a black cat crossing your path might very well be on a mission from a witch,” she notes. “Just as easily, it could be the devil in disguise—and no one wants to cross paths with the devil. This explains why a black cat crossing your path is considered a bad omen.”

This notion continued into the Renaissance, says Fallingstar, when a black cat crossing your path might have indicated that a witch had sent her familiar to do you harm. “Many fearful peasants of the day might have hurried to the nearest church and paid for a priest to bless them and rid them of any curse that might have been laid by the cat,” she says. “As this was a source of income for the church, such fears would have likely been encouraged.”

But the idea that black cats are bad luck isn’t universal, according to Compora. In fact, some cultures believe that black cats bring good luck.

“Their resemblance to the cat-goddess Bastet led them to be honored in ancient Egypt,” he explains. “In other countries, such as Scotland and Japan, they have been known to represent prosperity. Apparently, whether a black cat is viewed as a benevolent creature or an evil supernatural force is entirely based on whichever lore one is likely to embrace.”

The Story of Jack-O’-Lantern: ‘If You Knew the Sufferings of That Forsaken Craythur'

Jessica Traynor

Stories rarely stay the same over time. They change, evolve, become symbol and metaphor - especially when people move to new places and different myths and cultures intermingle.

Samhain, the root of Halloween, was a Celtic festival - a night when spirits walked the earth, and the living would prepare themselves for visitations of guests both welcome and unwelcome. From this atmosphere of anticipation and unease come traditions, which are both celebratory and defensive. Masks were worn to frighten away demons. Turnips and other root vegetables were carved with terrifying faces in order to scare unwelcome guests, both living and dead - and tricks were played on the unsuspecting.

We often hear carved pumpkins referred to as jack-o'-lanterns, an Irish-sounding term mostly used in America. There's a rich mythology behind the name of the familiar carved pumpkin or turnip, a folk tale found across Ireland, Scotland, and in Somerset on "Punkie night".

Jack-o'-the-lantern initially referred to the natural phenomenon of ignis fatuus, the flickering marsh-lights that appear over bogs and can often lead travellers astray. Also known as Will-o'-the-wisp, Irish folk stories offer explanations for this phenomenon. In the 18th century, the eponymous Jack, or "Stingy Jack" was said to be a mean-spirited blacksmith who tricked the devil and in return was given an ember from hell to light his lantern. An article in the 1836 edition of the Dublin Penny Journal explores the myth in detail. The author, when travelling with his excessively talkative uncle through a dark night, is confronted by the phenomenon. His uncle tells the tale of Jack-o'-the-lantern, showing his pity for this cursed figure doomed to wander with his lantern:

“If you knew the sufferings of that forsaken craythur, since the time the poor sowl was doomed to wandher, with a lanthern in his hand, on this cowld earth, without rest for his foot, or shelter for his head, until the day of judgment… oh, it ‘ud soften the heart of stone to see him as I once did, the poor old dunawn, his feet blistered and bleeding, his poneens (rags) all flying about him, and the rains of heaven beating on his ould white head.”

The story recounted by the uncle is intriguing and complex, with Jack, the mean peasant, beginning the tale with an uncharacteristic act of virtue - helping an old man by the roadside. The old man transforms into an angel and grants Jack three wishes. Jack wishes for anyone who sits in his chair, plucks a bough from his sycamore tree, or attempts to borrow his cobbling tools to be stuck to the spot. The angel, disappointed, grants the wishes but Jack is now barred from heaven. When the devil send messengers to claim him, they are tricked each time by Jack’s false hospitality, but there’s no happy ending for Jack - barred from heaven and hell - he wanders the earth alone.

It’s fitting that a character trapped in an earthly purgatory should become the lasting symbol of Halloween, a time when people are as wont to offer a “trick” as a “treat”. The character of Jack, a figure who doesn’t fit into heaven or hell, is unusually complex for a figure from a folk tale.

Jack-o'-lantern's transformation from folk antihero to carved root vegetable is another chapter in the story. There are references to the carving of turnips, beets and potatoes at Halloween in Ireland in the 19th century, but the conflation of the Jack-o'-lantern story with pumpkin-carving seems to have happened in North America, with immigrants from Ireland adapting their traditions to American harvest customs. The first North American reference to Jack-o'-lantern comes courtesy of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1835 story, The Great Carbuncle, about a group of adventurers seeking a precious stone with mystical qualities:

“Hide it under thy cloak, say’st thou? Why, it will gleam through the holes, and make thee look like a jack-o’-lantern”.

While the image evoked here suggests a carved pumpkin, it’s just as possible that Hawthorne is referring to a Will-o’-the-wisp. An earlier reference, in Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow (1820), has the headless horseman fling a pumpkin at Ichabod Crane, but it’s not mentioned whether the pumpkin is carved - it could merely be a useful head-shaped object, readily available to a prankster on a dark autumn evening. The first definite connection between pumpkins, Halloween and the Jack-o’-the-lantern comes in a Canadian news report from Daily News in 1886:

“The old time custom of keeping up Hallowe’en was not forgotten last night by the youngsters of the city […]There was a great sacrifice of pumpkins from which to make transparent heads and face, lighted up by the unfailing two inches of tallow candle”.

Later, the myth seems to have evolved again so that the carved pumpkins were intended to scare away the spirit of Stingy Jack, rather than to symbolise the lantern he carried - another example of the rich layers of myth, folktale and ritual that inform our Halloween traditions.

The Secret, Steamy History Of Halloween Apples

Alison Richards

A Halloween apple bob may seem as homespun as a hayride, but that shiny red apple has a steamy past. It was once a powerful symbol of fertility and immortality.

Apple bobbing and eating candy apples are "the fossilized remnants of beliefs that ultimately go back to prehistory," British apple expert and fruit historian, Joan Morgan, tells the Salt.

Morgan and I co-wrote The New Book of Apples several years back. I asked her this week for a refresher on the fruit's Halloween-specific tricks and treats.

Throughout Europe, Morgan says, "apples, apple peels and even pips have long been used to peer into the romantic future." And when early European colonists brought the first apple trees to North America as seeds — also known as pips — in their pockets, these customs came with them.

Bobbing for apples was one of them. In one popular version of the game, girls would secretly mark apples before tipping them into a barrel of water. Apples float, and as the girls' potential sweethearts ducked to catch the fruit with their teeth, future couplings were determined — or foretold.

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Girls also continued the tradition of using apple peels to divine their romantic destiny. Every fall, communities in New England would prepare mountains of apples for the great kettles of apple butter that were put up for the winter. An eligible young lady would try to peel an apple in a single unbroken strip, toss the peel over her shoulder, and peer nervously to see what letter the peel formed on the floor: This was the initial of her future husband.

But, as Morgan emphasizes, the playful connection between apples and courtship reflects a more serious and ancient link between apples, fertility and a life without end.

"Apples once grew wild across western Asia and Europe and were regarded as sacred across many cultures," Morgan says. Early Indo-European mythologies tell of goddesses "like the Norse Idun, who dispenses magical apples to her fellow deities to keep them young."

Avalon, where the dying King Arthur is said to have been laid to rest, is an "Isle of Apples," Morgan recalls, and "the Irish hero Bran is beckoned to his paradise by a branch of apple blossom from Emain Ablach, an island in a marvelous archipelago beyond the sea, where apple trees bloom and fruit at the same time."

It's not hard to imagine how apples became such powerful symbols of fertility and renewal. As the leaves turned, and the days shortened, the arrival of apples on the menu of hunter-gatherers and the first farmers would have been eagerly anticipated. It didn't really matter whether the apples were large or small, sweet or sour. They could be eaten fresh, boiled or baked; strung up to dry for the winter months; or allowed to ferment into a hard cider that must have made the dark and cold easier to bear.

In the failing autumn light, a shiny red or golden apple might have seemed like a promise — or an entreaty — that the sun would come again. Apple blossoms heralded the renewal of life each spring. And in the magical mix of image and meaning, ripe apples acquired the power and allure of a fertile woman's body.

The specific connection between apples, fortune-telling and Halloween goes back to the Celtic festival Samhain. It fell around the end of our modern October, and marked the end of summer, the end of harvest and — revelers worried — perhaps the extinction of life itself.

To encourage the sun deity to return the following year, ancient Celts burned huge bonfires into the night and tied apples to evergreen branches. Gifts of fruit and nuts, and animal sacrifices were offered to the gods.

According to this tradition, barriers to the Underworld were temporarily suspended to allow the year's dead to enter. But this liminal state also allowed ghosts and mischievous spirits to visit the living. It was a time when divination was supposedly especially powerful.

The Romans and then the Christian Church hijacked Samhain and grafted on their own celebrations, but many elements endure.

And as for those candy apples? That's a more recent invention. "It's claimed they were invented accidentally in 1908 by William Kolb a candy maker in Newark, N.J.," says Morgan. "He dropped some apples in his candy syrup" and in a region with plenty of fruit trees — and a sugar refinery — a new Halloween tradition was born.

When ‘Dumb Suppers’ Were a Halloween Love Ritual

Anne Ewbank

These days, Halloween is a spooky holiday, devoted to ghoulish fun. But for young women in the British Isles and United States, Halloween once was the prime time for love rituals: the day when occult ceremonies could offer a glimpse into the future. Romanticized by poets such as Keats and Burns, these love rituals supposedly allowed young women to divine the identity of their future husbands. Out of all such ceremonies, the most elaborate, meaningful method was the dumb supper.

“Dumb,” in this case, is a synonym for mute or silent, as the most essential rule was that a dumb supper be conducted in complete silence. “Perhaps for many centuries,” writes scholar Paul B. Frazier, “young women have tried to use magic in this manner.” According to folklorist Wayland D. Hand, the dumb supper has roots in an English “love divination,” one that was once “fairly well known.” Americans, especially in rural regions, perpetuated the custom into the 20th century. From Oxfordshire to Ozark county, Hand observes, the ritual was performed with “considerable conformity.”

Young women typically held dumb suppers, but men sometimes attended as well. The setting was usually an isolated place free of disturbances, such as an abandoned or otherwise empty house. In Frazier’s account of a dumb supper, two teenage girls in turn-of-the-century Kentucky “prepared a supper backwards in every respect. The tables were set as wrongly as possible; the chairs were turned backwards; the meal was to be served dessert first.” If anyone spoke a word, the spell was broken. When everything was prepared exactly right, then, at midnight, the spirits of the husbands-to-be would walk through the door, or even arrive in person.

Whether apparition or real, whoever sat next to a girl was sure to be her future husband. In romantic novels and short stories, a dumb supper was the ideal time for a long-lost sweetheart to coincidentally show up. Victorian newspapers, especially in the American South, outlined the process of conducting a dumb supper, while Edwardian novels made them into thrilling plot points. After all, for many young women (and occasionally men), dumb suppers were party games with a supernatural thrill. But in spookier accounts, dumb suppers could herald spinsterhood and death. If a coffin appeared at midnight, that meant that one of the young women wouldn’t marry at all, and would likely die soon.

Sometimes, as Frazier relates, the dumb supper could even predict murder. According to one account from Missouri, two young women set their table in a deserted house. At the stroke of midnight, one saw a coffin, which, horrifyingly, “moved of its own volition” to rest beside her. The other woman was probably happy to instead see a young man walk through the door at midnight, his apparition summoned by the ritual. The young man arrived holding a knife, which he dropped the moment he sat next to his future bride. She picked up the knife and put it in her pocket, and after the silent meal was over, the young man stood and left the room, as “the coffin slid along beside him and followed him out the door.” Soon, the young woman met the man and married him. One day, she showed him the knife. On seeing it, he flew into a rage and stabbed her in the throat and chest until she died.

Of course, this was a folk tale, likely designed to warn young women away from superstitious midnight rituals. The ones that end badly, says Frazier, seem to be warnings that “the use of magic in love affairs is unfair and doomed.” During actual dumb suppers, the only danger was interruption by neighborhood pranksters. According to Hand, the participants’ mothers encouraged boys to burst in, sometimes through the windows.

But the dumb supper, along with other Halloween love rituals, did address a deeply felt need. In a time when a young woman’s future depended on whom she married, discovering the man’s identity in advance was powerfully motivating. As the author of a dumb supper story from 1849 noted, “A young maiden will go through a great deal in order to get some kind of answer to a question that so deeply involves her happiness.”

Another, simpler Halloween love ritual was to simply look into a mirror while walking backwards. In a horror-movie fashion, this caused the face of one’s future husband to return one’s gaze. Such rituals weren’t necessarily tied to Halloween, either. According to folk belief, a young woman who observed an evening of silence and went to bed without dinner—on the night before the Feast of St. Agnes—would dream of her future husband. Another ritual called for eating a hollowed-out egg filled with salt, in hopes of inducing one’s future spouse—in a dream—to provide a cup of water. Nevertheless, writes Hand, dumb suppers usually were held at liminal times between the seasons: In California, New Year’s Eve was the day of choice, while in Maryland it was May Eve.

The appeal of the dumb supper was widespread and long-lasting. Hand collected 35 dumb supper accounts from the British Isles and 100 from the United States, some dating from as far back as the 17th century. He noted that in England and Scotland, young women focused on baking special “dumb cakes” for the midnight supper, while Americans emphasized the backwards meal and settings.

By the 1950s, though, dumb suppers had largely disappeared. In an investigation of Halloween’s romantic roots, journalist Niraj Chokshi points out that children had become the holiday’s main focus. Plus, women had won more control over their destinies, making marriage rituals less enticing.

But dumb suppers are still observed in one quarter: as a soulful ceremony for Samhain, the ancient Celtic festival of the dead and the start of winter. (Practicing witches and warlocks, a small but fast-growing spiritual group in the United States, often celebrate Samhain on or around the traditional date of October 31.) Taking place in such appropriate locales as Salem, Massachusetts, the age-old ritual of the dumb supper memorializes and honors the beloved dead. Participants eat meals, often containing the favorite foods of the departed, backwards, starting with dessert and ending with dinner rolls. Of course, the meals are conducted in unbroken silence.

How British Colonialism Determined Whether Your Country Celebrates Halloween

Max Fisher

Halloween is a controversial day in Australia. The holiday is not traditionally observed there widely, but kids are still aware of it from TV and movies. So, every year, an increasing number of Australian children dress up in costume and go door-to-door for candy, as the grown-ups debate whether they should continue to resist the foreign cultural imposition.

"If any children approach my building, I’m just going to silently admire them from the intercom screen and pretend that I’m not home. I won't be the only one," Australian writer Van Badham declared in Wednesday's Guardian, as part of the annual Australian tradition of refusing to enjoy Halloween. "For people like my mother, it’s a deliberate rejection of the kind of U.S. imperialism that suckered her generation not into witches hats and candy, but Australian participation in the Vietnam war."

Badham goes on to note that, even if you don't see Halloween as American cultural imperialism, it's still awfully unseasonal for the South Pacific. The holiday is full of autumnal iconography, but October is springtime in Australia.

The annually recurring Australian Halloween debate actually raises an interesting question: Why is it that the United States and so many other countries celebrate the holiday, but Australia does not? The answer is kind of fascinating: It turns out to be a weird historical quirk of British colonialism and of Britain's brief but world-changing experiment with severe social conservatism in the 19th century. Those two British forces, it turns out, have actually shaped much of the world's Halloween customs today.

Halloween's origins go too far back in history to be known with absolute certainty, but historians generally agree that it began with Celtic-speaking people on the British Isles. It's an especially big deal in Ireland but has also long been observed, in some form or another, among the English, Welsh and Scottish. When British settlers headed over to the new world in the 17th and 18th centuries, they brought the Halloween tradition with them. That's why Americans and Canadians celebrate the holiday today.

The irony is that, while the British were responsible for spreading Halloween, they also spent several decades trying to stamp it out. In the latter half of the 19th century, Great Britain experimented with a form of social conservatism known as Victorianism, after then-monarch Queen Victoria. The strict Victorian social code called for, among other things, a rigid class hierarchy, gender roles that privileged men over women, sexual restraint, an obsession with manners and a deep disdain for all things that might be perceived as indulgent. One of many things to come under Victorian suspicion was Halloween, filled as it is with superstitions and flamboyant costumes and other forms of fun. So the holiday fell out of favor for a while.

The Victorian backlash against Halloween just happened to coincide with much of the British imperial expansion. That included the colonization of Australia and New Zealand. So the Brits who filed in to these new colonies in the South Pacific didn't bring the Halloween tradition with them. One also wonders if they didn't import a certain Halloween skepticism that might explain their continued resistance to the holiday, long after much of the rest of the Western world has adopted it.

Victorianism spread more than Halloween skepticism, of course. Social scientists who study Africa, the Middle East and South Asia often argue that these regions are today some of the worst societies in the world for women and for gays because 19th-century British colonial overlords ingrained their legal systems and social codes with those very Victorian ideas. And those have persisted.

Then why didn't Victorianism wipe out Halloween in the United States? By the time the Victorians kicked off their anti-Halloween campaign, the American colonies had already broken away from the crown.

You can see the legacy of British imperialism in other Halloween traditions around the globe. Hong Kong and Singapore, the two East Asian city-states long a part of the empire, are both known for their raucous Halloweens. While both, like Australia, were established during the Victorian era, perhaps the difference is that they remained British possessions after Victorianism ended around 1900. As the holiday returned to early 20th-century Great Britain, it may have been resurrected as well in Hong Kong and Singapore. But Australia and New Zealand became independent commonwealths in 1901 – the same year that Victoria died and her namesake moral code began to ebb. So the post-Victorian resurrection of Halloween that happened in Great Britain may have never had a chance to spread directly to Australia and New Zealand.

Of course, more recently there's been a second wave of Halloween proliferation, as American culture has spread the holiday far and wide. That's been particularly true in developed countries that consume a lot of American movies and TV shows, such as Western European nations and Japan. Countries with American military bases, such as the Philippines and South Korea, also seem to have relatively well-observed Halloweens, although it's not clear if this is a direct product of the presence of American military families or just a coincidence.

You can get a pretty good sense for Halloween's global spread from this map, produced by Quartz, showing which countries see their candy imports peak during October. It's a clever, indirect method for measuring where Halloween is most popular, although candy is not central to all versions of the holiday:

You may notice a few former British colonies marked in pink, such as Kenya. While Thailand was never colonized, it came under heavy British imperial influence, and American culture is popular there, as well. But even if the Americans are more to blame for Halloween's spread to a lot of these countries, such as Russia or Chile, it still all goes back to Britain. When American children go out trick-or-treating, they're following a tradition from their nations'  English heritage. And when Australians refuse to celebrate "Americanized" Halloween, they're actually resisting an originally British holiday and holding on to Victorian ideals that died out over a century ago.

This little quirk of global cultural trends is a reminder of just how deeply European imperialism, particularly of the British sort, shaped our world, and in ways that we normally wouldn't think to consider as colonial artifacts. But they are.

When Halloween Mischief Turned to Mayhem

Lesley Bannatyne

Imagine. Pre-electricity, no moon. It’s late October, and the people whisper: This is the season for witchery, the night the spirits of the dead rise from their graves and hover behind the hedges.

The wind kicks up, and branches click like skeletal finger bones. You make it home, run inside, wedge a chair against the door, and strain to listen. There’s a sharp rap at the window and when you turn, terrified, it’s there leering at you—a glowing, disembodied head with a deep black hole where its mouth should be.

It’s just a scooped-out pumpkin, nicked from a field by some local boys and lit from the inside with the stub of a candle. But it has spooked you. When you look again, it’s gone.

Halloween in early 19th-century America was a night for pranks, tricks, illusions, and anarchy. Jack-o’-lanterns dangled from the ends of sticks, and teens jumped out from behind walls to terrorize smaller kids. Like the pumpkin patches and pageants that kids love today, it was all in good fun—but then, over time, it wasn’t.

As America modernized and urbanized, mischief turned to mayhem and eventually incited a movement to quell what the mid-20th-century press called the “Halloween problem”—and to make the holiday a safer diversion for youngsters. If it weren’t for the tricks of the past, there’d be no treats today.

Halloween was born nearly 2,000 years ago in the Celtic countries of northwestern Europe. November 1 was the right time for it—the date cut the agricultural year in two. It was Samhain, summer’s end, the beginning of the dangerous season of darkness and cold—which according to folklore, created a rift in reality that set spirits free, both good and bad. Those spirits were to blame for the creepy things—people lost in fairy mounds, dangerous creatures that emerged from the mist—that happened at that time of year.

Immigrants from Ireland and Scotland brought their Halloween superstitions to America in the 18th and 19th centuries, and their youngsters—our great- and great-great grandfathers—became the first American masterminds of mischief. Kids strung ropes across sidewalks to trip people in the dark, tied the doorknobs of opposing apartments together, mowed down shrubs, upset swill barrels, rattled or soaped windows, and, once, filled the streets of Catalina Island with boats. Pranksters coated chapel seats with molasses in 1887, exploded pipe bombs for kicks in 1888, and smeared the walls of new houses with black paint in 1891. Two hundred boys in Washington, D.C., used bags of flour to attack well-dressed folks on streetcars in 1894.

In this era, when Americans generally lived in small communities and better knew their neighbors, it was often the local grouch who was the brunt of Halloween mischief. The children would cause trouble and the adults would just smile guiltily to themselves, amused by rocking chairs engineered onto rooftops, or pigs set free from sties. But when early 20th-century Americans moved into crowded urban centers—full of big city problems like poverty, segregation, and unemployment—pranking took on a new edge. Kids pulled fire alarms, threw bricks through shop windows, and painted obscenities on the principal’s home. They struck out blindly against property owners, adults, and authority in general. They begged for money or sweets, and threatened vandalism if they didn’t receive them.

Some grown-ups began to fight back. Newspapers in the early 20th century reported incidents of homeowners firing buckshot at pranksters who were only 11 or 12 years old. “Letting the air out of tires isn’t fun anymore,” wrote the Superintendent of Schools of Rochester, New York in a newspaper editorial in 1942, as U.S. participation in World War II was escalating. “It’s sabotage. Soaping windows isn’t fun this year. Your government needs soaps and greases for the war … Even ringing doorbells has lost its appeal because it may mean disturbing the sleep of a tired war worker who needs his rest.” That same year, the Chicago City Council voted to abolish Halloween and instead institute a “Conservation Day” on October 31. (Implementation got kicked to the mayor, who doesn’t appear to have done much about it.)

The effort to restrain and recast the holiday continued after World War II, as adults moved Halloween celebrations indoors and away from destructive tricks, and gave the holiday over to younger and younger children. The Senate Judiciary Committee under President Truman recommended Halloween be repurposed as “Youth Honor Day” in 1950, hoping that communities would celebrate and cultivate the moral fiber of children. The House of Representatives, sidetracked by the Korean War, neglected to act on the motion, but there were communities that took it up: On October 31, 1955 in Ocala, Florida, a Youth Honor Day king and queen were crowned at a massive party sponsored by the local Moose Lodge. As late as 1962, New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. wanted to change Halloween to UNICEF Day, to shift the emphasis of the night to charity.

Of course, the real solution was already gaining in practice by that time. Since there were children already out demanding sweets or money, why not turn it into it a constructive tradition? Teach them how to politely ask for sweets from neighbors, and urge adults to have treats at the ready. The first magazine articles detailing “trick or treat” in the United States appeared in The American Home in the late 1930s. Radio programs aimed at children, such as The Baby Snooks Show, and TV shows aimed at families, like The Jack Benny Program, put the idea of trick-or-treating in front of a national audience. The 1952 Donald Duck cartoon Trick or Treat reached millions via movie screens and TV. It featured the antics of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, who, with the help of Witch Hazel’s potions, get Uncle Donald to give them candy instead of the explosives he first pops into their treat bags.

The transition could be slow. On one episode of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, costumed kids come to the door, and Ozzie and Harriet are baffled. But food companies—Beatrice Foods, Borden, National Biscuit Company—quickly took notice and got into the candy business, and even tobacco companies like Philip Morris jumped in. Halloween candy and costume profits hit $300 million in 1965 and kept rising. Trick-or-treating—child-oriented and ideal for the emerging suburbs that housed a generation of Baby Boomers—became synonymous with Halloween. Reckless behavior was muted, and porch lights welcomed costumed kids coast to coast.

Today, trick or treat has more variants: trunk or treat, where kids go car-to-car in a parking lot asking for candy; and trick or treat for UNICEF, where youngsters collect money for charity along with their treats. Few children, especially young ones, have an inkling of what mischief was once possible.

For those nostalgic about the old days of Halloween mischief, all is not lost. Query the MIT police about the dissected-and-reassembled police car placed atop the Great Dome on the college’s Cambridge campus in 1994. Or ask the New York City pranksters who decorated a Lexington Avenue subway car as a haunted house in 2008. There’s even an annual Naked Pumpkin Run in Boulder, Colorado.

The modern Halloween prank—be it spectacle, internet joke, entertainment, or clever subversion—is a treat in disguise, an offering that’s usually as much fun for the tricked as it is for the trickster. Halloween is still seen as a day to cause mischief, to mock authority, and make the haves give to the have-nots—or at least shine a light on the fact that they should. For that, Americans can thank the long line of pranksters who came before us.

From Pagan Spirits to Wonder Woman: A Brief History of the Halloween Costume

Marianna Cerini

A black-and-white photo from the early 1900s shows a woman in rural America, her face covered with a sinister white mask. In another, from 1930, a tall figure stands in a field tightly wrapped in what looks like a white sheet and black tape, while a 1938 image shows three people driving to a party in hair-raising skull masks.

Halloween costumes from the first half of the 20th century were terrifying. Drawing on the holiday’s pagan and Christian roots – as a night to ward off evil spirits or reconcile with death, respectively – people often opted for more morbid, serious costumes than the pop culture-inspired ones of today, according to Lesley Bannatyne, an author who has written extensively about the history of Halloween.

“Before it evolved into the family-friendly, party occasion we know it as, October 31 was deeply linked to ghosts and superstitions,” she said in a phone interview. “It was seen as a day ‘outside of normal,’ when you act outside of society’s norms.

“Wearing ghoulish costumes – not horror-inspired like today’s, but plain frightful – was an essential part of it.”

Ancient roots

The genesis of Halloween costumes may date back over 2,000 years. Historians consider the Celtic pagan festival of Samhain, which marked summer’s end and the beginning of the year’s “darker” half in the British Isles, to be the holiday’s precursor.

It was believed that, during the festival, the world of the gods became visible to humans, resulting in supernatural mischief. Some people offered treats and food to the gods, while other wore disguises – such as animal skins and heads – so that wandering spirits might mistake them for one of their own.

“Hiding behind their costumes, villagers often played pranks on one another, but blamed the spirits,” Bannatyne said. “Masks and cover-ups came to be seen as means to get away with things. That’s continued throughout Halloween’s evolution.”

Christianity adopted October 31 as a holiday in the 11th century, as part of efforts to reframe pagan celebrations as its own. Indeed, the name “Halloween” derives from “All Hallows Eve,” or the day before All Saints’ Day (November 1). But many of the folkloristic aspects of Samhain were incorporated and passed on – costumes included.

In medieval England and Ireland, people would dress up in outfits symbolizing the souls of the dead, going from house to house to gather treats or spice-filled “soul cakes” on their behalf (a Christian custom known as “souling”). From the late 15th century, people started wearing spooky outfits to personify winter spirits or demons, and would recite verses, songs and folk plays in exchange for food (a practice known as “mumming”).

American influence

As the first wave of Irish and Scottish immigrants began arriving in the US in the 18th century, Halloween superstitions, traditions and costumes migrated with them.

Once Halloween entered American culture, its popularity quickly spread, according to fashion historian and director of New York University’s costume studies MA program, Nancy Deihl.

“People in rural America really embraced its pagan roots, and the idea of it as a dark occasion, centered around death,” she said in a phone interview. “They wore scary, frightening get-ups, which were made at home with whatever was on hand: sheets, makeup, improvised masks.

“Anonymity was a big part of the costumes,” she added. “The whole point of dressing up was to be completely in disguise.”

By the 1920s and 1930s, people were holding annual Halloween masquerades, aimed at both adults and children, at rented salons or family homes. Costume preparations sometimes began as early as August, according to Bannatyne. Falling right between summer and Christmas, the celebration also seemed to benefit from its timing in the calendar. “It was a way to come together before the turning of the season,” Deihl said. “Marketers played heavily on that as Halloween became more commercialized.”

Those same decades also saw the emergence of costumes influenced by pop culture, alongside the first major costume manufacturing companies. The J. Halpern Company (better known as Halco) of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, began licensing images of fictional characters like Popeye, Olive Oyl, Little Orphan Annie and Mickey Mouse around this time, according to Bannatyne.

“People also became fascinated with impersonating characters at the fringe of society,” she said, adding that pirates, gypsies and even homeless people became common outfit choices.

Continuing the tradition of old practices like souling and mumming, Halloween pranks became a common phenomenon in North America – sometimes to the point of vandalism and rioting. By the mid-1940s, the press had dubbed the night’s anarchy (or its broken fences and smashed windows, at least) the “Halloween problem” – and costumes may have “partly enabled that behavior,” Bannatyne said.

In an effort to discourage criminal damage, local and national officials attempted to recast the holiday – and dressing up for it – as an activity for younger children. The Chicago City Council even voted in 1942 to abolish Halloween and establish “Conservation Day” on October 31 instead.

“Throughout its history, Halloween has gone through changes of ownership,” said Anna-Mari Almila, a sociology research fellow at the London College of Fashion, over the phone. “Its original connection to death became more and more tenuous, which made space for altogether different kinds of (costumes).”

After World War II, as TV brought pop culture into family homes, American Halloween costumes increasingly took after superheroes, comic characters and entertainment figures. They also became increasingly store-bought: By the 1960s, Ben Cooper, a manufacturing company that helped turn Halloween into a pop phenomenon, owned 70 to 80 percent of the Halloween costume market, according to Slate.

Dropping the mask

It was around this time that adults started dressing up for Halloween again, according to Deihl. Like kids’ costumes, their approach was often more fun than frightening – and would eventually be just as inspired by “Star Wars” or Indiana Jones than by demons or ghouls.

“Generally speaking, the ’60s marked a shift in the way we dress up for Halloween,” Deihl added. “Grown-ups, in particular, started ditching masks and full-on coverage, opting to show their faces. Costumes became a way to play a lighter, special version of oneself: showing the world you ‘were’ Wonder Woman, or Luke Skywalker, or what have you.”

But there was still a place for scary outfits, encouraged by a slew of splatter-horror movies that started emerging in the 1970s and 80s, from John Carpenter’s “Halloween” to Wes Craven’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” These decades also saw gay communities across the States adopt the holiday as an occasion to wear outrageous outfits and hold parades, contributing to a boom in Halloween parties and the popularization of provocative costumes that “in recent decades,” Deihl, said, “have oftentimes leaned towards the overtly sexy and campy.”

“Halloween costumes have gone from disguises to full-on exhibitionist,” Almila said. “Today, it’s one big capitalist celebration completely detached from any vestige of Christianity or paganism, and more centered around expressing people’s fantasies – which also explains its success globally.”

“I think they’ve certainly become more reflective of the times we live in,” Deihl added. “But there are also far fewer people making their own Halloween outfits now, and a lot less personal creativity going into what you wear, compared to the early days.

“We’re all drawing from the same range of costumes available for purchase. And creating immense waste because of it. I think people would express themselves much more individually if they crafted their own costumes like they used to.”

A Brief History of the Haunted House

Chris Heller

The scariest haunted house of 2017 is a giant walk-through attraction located in the former Georgia Antique Center in the outskirts of Atlanta. Named Netherworld, it features 3D special effects, aerial performers and, of course, flesh-eating clowns. Netherworld frightens so effectively, so inescapably, that people with heart conditions are warned against buying tickets.

This is what a haunted house is supposed to do. They exist to scare people. The idea behind haunted houses is not new, of course— people have entertained themselves with spooky stories for centuries — but haunted houses are different because they are inseparable from the holiday that vaulted them to cultural prominence. The tradition could not exist without Halloween; Halloween would not be the same without it.

The origins of the haunted house date back to 19th-century London, when a series of illusions and attractions introduced the public to new forms of gruesome entertainment. In 1802, Marie Tussaud scandalized British audiences with an exhibition of wax sculptures of decapitated French figures, including King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Marat and Robespierre. Tussaud's likenesses were remarkably accurate, and with good reason — she created death masks of the French Revolution's many guillotine victims. When she set up a permanent London exhibition, she dubbed her grotesque collection the "Chamber of Horrors" — a name that has stuck to the wax museum to this day.

At the turn of the 20th century, as Rebekah McKendry describes in Fangoria magazine, the closest relatives to modern haunted houses began experimenting with macabre themes. In Paris, the Grand Guignol theater became notorious for its on-stage depictions of graphic dismemberment; the theater's director, Max Maurey, famously boasted that he judged each performance by the number of people who passed out, shocked, in the audience. In 1915, an English fairground in Liphook debuted one of the first "ghost houses," an early type of commercial horror attraction. The public appetite for horror was picking up.

Lisa Morton, author of Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween, tells Smithsonian.com that Halloween-themed haunted houses first emerged during the Great Depression as American parents schemed up ways to distract young tricksters, whose holiday pranks had escalated to property damage, vandalism and harassment of strangers. "They came in about the same time as trick-or-treat did," she says. "Cities looked for ways to buy these kids off, essentially."

Those first haunted houses were very primitive. Groups of families would decorate their basements and hold "house-to-house” parties. Kids could spook themselves by traveling from basement to basement and experiencing different scary scenes. This 1937 party pamphlet describes how parents could also design "trails of terror" to spook their children. The effects may seem familiar to anyone who has ever been disappointed by a sub-par scare:

    An outside entrance leads to a rendezvous with ghosts and witches in the cellar or attic. Hang old fur, strips of raw liver on walls, where one feels his way to dark steps....Weird moans and howls come from dark corners, damp sponges and hair nets hung from the ceiling touch his face....Doorways are blockaded so that guests must crawl through a long dark tunnel....At the end he hears a plaintive 'meow' and sees a black cardboard cat outlined in luminous paint..."

The haunted house didn't become a cultural icon, though, until Walt Disney decided to build one. Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion opened in 1969, nearly two decades after Disney first approved the beleaguered project. The attraction, which was designed in the style of the Evergreen House and the Winchester Mystery House, quickly became a success. In a single day shortly after its debut, more than 82,000 people passed through the Haunted Mansion. The attraction's centerpiece is the Grand Hall, a 90-foot-long ballroom sequence of dancing ghouls at a birthday party. Disney brought to scene to life through an exceptionally complex series of illusions known as Pepper's ghost, which use refracted light to project and shape ethereal images. "A lot of the professional haunters will point to one thing, and that's Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. It's the start of the haunted attraction industry," Morton says. The attraction was revolutionary, as she explains in Trick or Treat:

    What made the Haunted Mansion so successful and so influential, however, was not its similarity to haunted houses and "dark rides" (that is, tawdry carnival haunted houses) of the past, but its use of startling new technologies and effects. Ghosts were no longer simply sheets hung in a tree, but were instead actual shimmering translucent figures that moved, spoke and sang. A witch wasn't just a rubber-masked figure bent over a fake cauldron, but a completely realistic bodiless head floating in a crystal ball, conducting a complex séance.

Within a few years, the haunted house had spread across the country. The United States Junior Chamber, also known as Jaycees, became famous for raising money through its haunted houses. (The fundraising venture was successful enough to spawn its own how-to guide.) In California, Knott's Berry Farm began hosting its own Halloween night attractions, which soon transformed into a multi-week slate of events. Every year, a man named Bob Burns attracted national media attention for his detailed recreations of classic horror movies. Evangelical Christians even made their own anti-Halloween attractions; Jerry Falwell and Liberty University introduced one of the first "hell houses" in 1972.

As Hollywood began to embrace slasher movies like Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th, the haunted house industry reaped the benefits. The horror boom fueled a demand for scary attractions, not to mention cross-promotional advertisements. "If you went to a haunted house in the 1980s and 1990s, you would've seen a lot of Freddy Krueger, Jason, Pinhead. The haunted house industry really followed the movie industry at that time," Larry Kirchner, president of Haunted House Association, a trade group for haunted house operators, tells Smithsonian.com.

Professional haunted houses first emerged as a force in the same era, quickly outspending non-profit groups like the Jaycees. Then, tragedy struck: A fire at a haunted house in New Jersey trapped and killed eight teenagers. In the aftermath of their deaths, attractions were shut down, and politicians enacted stronger safety regulations. Volunteer organizations struggled to compete against new competition under tougher rules. Soon, many were forced out of business. It was a watershed moment for the industry, says Kirchner: "The Jaycees got pushed out because their haunted houses were fairly basic. It was based on the premise that people would volunteer, but when you have people opening big haunted houses with lots of advertising, that's hard," he says.

During the next two decades, the number of professional haunted houses erupted. Kirchner estimates that roughly 2,700 of them operated nationwide last year. A large haunted house attraction can reportedly earn $3 million during the Halloween season, and the industry is worth $300 million, according to an NBC report.

These days, haunted houses are no longer just about creepy characters and hyper-realistic horror. Instead, the industry has flocked to all sorts of new, extreme frights: zombie runs, escape games, and experiences seemingly designed to traumatize. How long will these successes last? Can the haunted house last another half-century? And if it does, what will it look like?

Kirchner doubts that the haunted house is here to stay. "If I was going to guess, I'd say no," he says. "Every business will eventually fail, so we just want to last as long as we possibly can."

A Halloween without haunted houses? Now that's a scary thought.

How Candy and Halloween Became Best Friends

Samira Kawash

Wherever you turn this October, candy beckons. Americans will spend an estimated $2 billion on candy during the Halloween season this year, and here's a fun fact from the California Milk Processors Board: "an average Jack-O-Lantern bucket carries about 250 pieces of candy amounting about 9,000 calories and about three pounds of sugar."

Phew. My molars are hurting just thinking about it. If treats are a temptation you hope to avoid, October is the cruelest month. And I can think of only one place in America where your Halloween composure is unlikely to be ruffled by endless quantities of cheap and glittering candies: the past.

Given the ubiquity of candy at this time of year, it is hard to imagine that 100 years ago, Halloween looked quite different from the candy debauch of today.

The biggest difference was trick-or-treating. This seemingly timeless custom is actually a quite recent American invention. The ritual of costumes, doorbell-ringing, and expectation of booty appeared for the first time in different locations throughout the country in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It wasn't until the late 1940s that trick-or-treating became widespread on a national scale. And even then, candy wasn't the obvious treat.

Kids ringing a stranger's doorbell in 1948 or 1952 received all sorts of tribute: Coins, nuts, fruit, cookies, cakes, and toys were as likely as candy. In the 1950s, Kool-Aid and Kellogg's promoted their decisively non-candy products as trick-or-treat options, while Brach's once ran ads for chocolate-covered peanuts during the last week of October that didn't mention Halloween at all.

It took a while for candy to become what it is today, the very essence of Halloween. Going back even farther to the early decades of the century, before trick-or-treating spread across the land, candy didn't have any special role to play in Halloween observance.

How Hocus Pocus Became an Enduring Halloween Hit

Josef Adalian

The 21st century has ushered in a slew of new October traditions: “spooky” Twitter handles, social-media battles over the merits of pumpkin-spice everything — and of course, endless TV showings of Hocus Pocus. Much like the Sanderson sisters themselves, the 1993 Disney comedy about a trio of resurrected Salem witches has had a shockingly successful afterlife. Freeform’s annual autumnal reruns of the movie reliably draw tens of millions of viewers each year. The film zooms toward the top of the DVD sales charts every October. And in the ultimate sign of pop-culture success, plans are now underway for a TV remake of Hocus Pocus in time for next year’s 25th anniversary. Millennial nostalgia — and perhaps some masterful marketing — has transformed a movie critics once dismissed as “an unholy mess” and a “chaotic jumble” into an unlikely Halloween classic.

It’s hard to overstate just how much the movie critics of the day loathed Hocus Pocus. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, whose thumbs up/thumbs down verdicts could make or break films back then, hated Hocus Pocus enough to include it in their annual worst-of-the-year show. “Watching the movie is like attending a party you weren’t invited to, and where you don’t know anybody, and they’re all in on a joke but won’t explain it to you,” Ebert wrote in his print review, singling out star Bette Midler for specific scorn. (She “tries to use noise as a substitute for acting,” he sneered.) Entertainment Weekly’s critic in 1993, Ty Burr, also seemed particularly bummed to see Midler slumming it in Disney comedy. “The sight of the Divine Miss M. mugging her way through a cheesy supernatural kiddie comedy is, to say the least, dispiriting,” he lamented.

One critic actually ended up predicting quite accurately the short-term trajectory for Hocus Pocus. The Washington Post’s Desson Howe, after slamming director Kenny Ortega for treating his cast “as if they were characters in a third-rate musical such as his recent Newsies,” scoffed that the film was little more than “another future videotape disguised as a movie. In the not-too-distant future look for Hocus Pocus in the rental-store bins.” Howe obviously meant his review as a diss, and he was pretty spot-on about the film’s short-term fate. It did tank with moviegoers that summer, dropping out of the top ten within three weeks and grossing a disappointing (even for 1993) $39 million in theaters. Hocus Pocus didn’t make much of an immediate splash in the home-video market, either. According to Billboard charts, it sold modestly when it was first released on videocassette back in January 1994, and then sort of faded away — at least in video stores.

But where Hocus Pocus never died — and, arguably, where it returned to life — was on television. Since the film was produced by Disney and had some built-in appeal for kids, it became a natural fit for the company’s Disney Channel cable network, which would regularly air the movie in October during the latter part of the 1990s. Then, when Disney assumed ownership of Fox Family Channel in 2002 and turned it into ABC Family, Hocus Pocus started showing up on 13 Nights of Halloween. A generation of millennials who had seen the movie when it was in theaters — or more likely, never saw until it hit TV — suddenly began associating Hocus Pocus with Halloween, viewing it with the same reverence ’70s and ’80s kids had for It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and the “Thriller” video.

About a decade ago, execs at ABC Family/Freeform noticed ratings for Hocus Pocus would pop compared other titles included on the 13 Nights of Halloween schedule. It’s no wonder the film airs so frequently during the two-week stunt: 11 times last year and 19 times this fall, thanks to a first-ever, full-day Hocus Pocus marathon on Halloween. “It does huge numbers for us, year after year after year,” says current Freeform president Tom Ascheim. He’s not exaggerating about the movie’s reach each year. Some individual showings of the film notched over 1.5 million viewers last year, with one telecast ranking as the second-most-watched film on all of basic cable during October 2016. More impressively, Freeform estimates a stunning 23.4 million viewers watched the movie on the channel last year. The TV exposure seems to have boosted DVD sales as well: By the end of the last decade, Disney had sold around a quarter-million units of the film, according to the revenue tracking website the Information. By the end of 2016, that number was approaching 3.5 million. (It helps that Disney has kept the movie off big subscription video-streaming sites such as Netflix and Hulu, making it available only for rental or purchase.)

Ascheim does not pretend to know exactly why Hocus Pocus has become so popular — “I wish I understood how to make a phenomenon,” he laughs — but he has some theories. “For [millennials], I think it’s nostalgia,” he says. “They get to wander back to that moment when Halloween was important in their lives.” And while the movie is mostly campy fun, the female-focused aspect of Hocus Pocus shouldn’t be overlooked when considering the reasons for its success. “There’s something about strong women who have power which resonates for lots of people, both men and women,” Ascheim says.

But perhaps the biggest driver of the Hocus Pocus resurgence is that, despite a few spooky moments, it’s a comedy and not a scarefest. Sure, hard-core horror movies also pull a crowd this time of year: AMC’s FearFest block of horror movies is a monster hit in its own right. But “funny pulls a wide audience,” Ascheim notes. “It’s easy [for viewers] to go back year after year with their family or their posse of friends … Some titles become traditions in people’s lives.” Freeform has seen a similar trend play out with its even more popular 25 Days of Christmas event, where sentimental fare takes a back seat to big audience draws like Will Ferrell’s modern classic Elf. “It’s not the sacred part of Christmas [that works], and it’s a similar phenomenon with Halloween,” Ascheim says.

While Freeform will put viewers’ love for Hocus Pocus to the test this Halloween by nearly doubling the number of airings — and by making it available to stream on the Freeform app and website — next year’s 25th anniversary should usher in an even bigger frenzy. News broke last month that Freeform sister network Disney Channel is developing a modern remake of the film for next fall, with a new cast and a new director. Assuming the project goes forward, Ascheim says he’s definitely interested in the new version airing on Freeform as well as Disney. “We’ve been talking to them about it,” he says. “We hope to make a big deal out of next year.”

A Brief Halloween History of Pets in Costumes

Jen A. Miller

This year for Halloween, I will be dressing up my cattle dog mix called Annie Oakley Tater Tot as Captain America. Last year, I put her in a bandana and cowboy hat and said she was her namesake. My first dog, who passed away last year, had been a queen, a mermaid, a dinosaur, and Superman. She didn’t much like being dressed in costumes, but the pictures were cute, and got all those likes on Facebook and Instagram.

This all feels a bit silly, but I’m far from the only person to put stuff on her dog for as long as she tolerates it. Of the $9 billion Americans are expected to spend on Halloween this year, $480 million of that is on our pets, according to the National Retail Foundation. That’s up from $5.8 billion total and $220 million on pets in 2010.

Unlike Christmas or Valentine’s Day or even Mother’s and Father’s Day, Halloween doesn’t have the stress of gift giving, so shopping for the holiday is a lot less about pressure and a lot more about joy.

“With Halloween, it’s less about the want and more about the fun,” confirms Ana Serafin Smith, director of media relations for the National Retail Federation (her miniature pinscher Apollo will be a skeleton this Halloween). “When it comes to pet costumes, people find it fun and funny to dress up their cat as a dog or dog as a hot dog or cat like a lion,” she says.

It’s easy to lay this trend at the feet of millennials. (Because we’re not having kids so we sub in dogs! Or we spend our money on stupid things! Or it’s another thing we’re responsible for, just like killing the real estate market or Hooters because we just don’t understand!) But dressing up dogs isn’t exactly new, says Jody Miller-Young, a dog fashion designer who wrote about the history of canine couture on her website Bark & Swagger. (Her four dogs will have multiple costume changes.)

“I thought that the beginning of dog fashion would have begun somewhere in the 20th century — maybe in the teens or ’20s,” she says. “But it goes back far more than that.”

Way back. During the excavation of the tomb of King Cuo of Zhongshan, who was king of China from 327 to 309 BC, archeologists found two large dogs buried in jeweled collars. The greyhound of Louis XI, king of France from 1423 to 1483, wore a red velvet collar with 20 pearls and 11 rubies, and Louis’s successor, Charles VIII, had robes made for his dog and marmot, according to Medieval Pets. Queen Victoria dressed her dog in a “scarlet jacket and blue trousers,” as she wrote in her diaries, right around the time that dog couture shops became a thing in Paris.

Here in the US, the first pet cemetery was founded in Westchester, New York, in 1896 and is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The first of the eight-part “Dogs Playing Poker” was painted in 1903. (And the artist Cassius Marcellus Coolidge painted “Laying Down the Law,” featuring a dog as a lawyer, in 1840.)

In the 1910s, Harry Whittier Frees took pictures of cats getting married, cats at a picnic, a dog watering flowers, and a dog sewing pants that were used in postcards, kids’ books, and magazines. From 1929 to 1931, MGM made “All Barkie” Dogville Comedies that featured dogs doing very human things like dancing and going to war (a studio itself that had a real lion in its logo).

How we’ve treated our pets has changed then. Where my grandfather’s childhood dog would have always lived outside (and even Snoopy lived in a dog house), today state and local governments are passing laws that make such a thing illegal in extreme temperatures.

Tish Derry, director of design and trend at Petco, says that pet costumes have “always been there as an undercurrent, over the last 10 years, it’s really been an astronomical rise in popularity and in spend.”

A lot more of us own dogs too. According to the American Pet Products Association, 68 percent of US households own a pet, which comes to about 85 million households. Of those 85 million households, 60.2 million own a dog. We spend a lot on our pets too: an estimated $72.13 billion in 2018, the highest number since the American Pet Products Association started tracking the statistic.

“We get health insurance for our dogs that in some cases is better than health insurance for ourselves,” says Kim Kavin, author of The Dog Merchants: Inside the Big Business of Breeders, Pet Stores, and Rescuers. “The logical outlet for this is when you take your kids out for trick or treating, you take the dog out too, and you want him to be part of the family and have a good costume.”

This growth in pet ownership dovetailed with the rise of social media — and social media kicked Halloween spending into high gear, says Serafin Smith of the National Retail Federation. “We started seeing an increase in Halloween spending about 10 years ago, and this was right around the time that social media started picking up,” says Smith. Instagram launched in 2010; now dogs like Marnie and Tuna have millions of followers.

“Everybody loves a cute dog or cat picture, but also you have the dog stars of Instagram pushing this massive trend to dress your dogs,” says Miller-Young.

Derry of Petco said that their designers are going for that Instagrammable moment. “Our design team is always focused on what’s going to get you the most likes,” she says, to the point she had a toy designer work on the line, who created more 3D costumes like pizza delivery person and a lumberjack.

Ada Nieves is a pet fashion designer and also spearheads New York City’s Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade, now in its 28th year. Last year, it attracted about 25,000 people. (This year it’s held at the East River Park Amphitheater because of last-minute insurance issues.) She says that pet costumes and clothes can make your dog look cute in photos, but it’s also another way of signaling to people that you care about your dog.

“When I see a person who takes time and effort to dress up their animals, even if it’s just for Halloween, is someone who pays attention to things that are more important, like spaying and neutering, health and nutrition,” she says. “Even if you spend $5, $10, it shows that you’re taking the effort and time and money to do something with your pet, so you’ll do other things that are important.”

The National Retail Federation predicts that the most popular costumes this year for cats and dogs will be pumpkin, hot dog, bumble bee, devil, cat, dog, lion, Star Wars characters, superhero, and ghost. So Annie Oakley Tater Tot as Captain America will be a bit on trend without being the most obvious dog costume of 2018. I imagine she doesn’t give a shit, though she’ll sit still for all the cookies I’ll give her to get a good photo to, of course, post online.

Though if you’re thinking of dressing up your chicken, beware: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that putting a costume on your chicken could spread a drug-resistant strain of salmonella that has infected 92 people in 29 states.

When Did This Time of Year Become “Spooky Season”?

Heather Schwedel

Quick question: What time of year is it right now? For me, “fall” would probably be the first thing to come to mind, but there are several other perfectly acceptable responses: autumn, October, Halloween, perhaps Q4, if you swing that way.

I would even begrudgingly take cuffing season. Just about any answer would by fine by me except for one: “spooky season.”

Until a few weeks ago, I didn’t know what spooky season was (and my life was arguably better for it). If I saw the combination of words spooky season, I would have been able to gather that it referred to Halloween, but I also would have thought it was the sort of unremarkable alliterative phrase a bunch of people might have arrived at independently, perhaps because they were decorating a bulletin board in an elementary school or needed an Instagram caption but considered themselves too special to say something normal like “Happy Halloween!”

But no, spooky season is a more specific expression and concept that has propagated across the internet in recent years. Perhaps you, more observant than I, have noticed it in your feeds. A typical usage might be something like what Jennifer Garner posted earlier this month on Instagram, a video of a ballet dancer wearing a full-body black leotard and a fake jack-o’-lantern on her head. It had the following caption: “It me. (It’s definitely not me but I appreciate a ballerina/spookyszn mashup.)”

“In the last year or two, it’s kind of become a phrase that I see all over the place that everybody uses,” said Miranda Enzor, a Halloween enthusiast who for the past six years has run a website called Spooky Little Halloween.

There isn’t broad consensus about when spooky season begins. “To me it really starts ramping up even as early as mid-July,” Enzor told me, alarmingly. “I kind of personally count the beginning of what I would term spooky season as July 23rd, which is the 100-day mark to Halloween. Once I hit that, I’m in Halloween season and there’s no turning back.”

Which brings us to: What is it exactly? In 2019, Architectural Digest described the so-called season as a sort of rebrand of Halloween that both extends the holiday and harks back to “the Halloweens of our childhoods”: a time when millennials can watch Hocus Pocus and decorate their homes with fake spiderwebs.

But it’s not just for millennials. Caitlynn Sant, a 21-year-old preschool teacher in Utah, runs a popular Halloween-themed Instagram page and explained spooky season to me like this: “I just think of fall and pumpkins. To me, I guess spooky season’s just the time when you can watch scary movies and do scary things.”

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It has been emphasized to me that spooky season is a time to indulge in the campier aspects of Halloween, and it’s not limited to just one day. Christmas has “the holiday season,” and this is just that but for Halloween. This is all fine, as far as I’m concerned. I just have trouble understanding why it’s different enough from good old Halloween to require its own annoying name. Does all of this pumpkin patch frolicking and haunted house visiting not fall under the banner of Halloween, or, if you must, since apparently it’s such a gas to invent new seasons (or szns), the “Halloween season”?

I know I should let this go: It’s silly, but it’s also harmless, so who cares? No one likes a Halloween grinch. Except, well, I’m fine with Halloween—it’s spooky season that’s the problem. How did Halloween, which has been celebrated for hundreds of years, suddenly morph into spooky season? Why is everyone but me, up to and including Jennifer Garner, now going around talking about “spooky season” with a straight face?

Researching the provenance of the term is a little difficult because, to return to the elementary-school bulletin-board factor, it’s a phrase that anyone could come up with on their own, and has. You can find uses of spooky season in newspapers going as far back as 1905, but they don’t mean spooky season the way it gets used today. Spooky season seems to have acquired its current, internet-driven meaning in the past five years or so. Amanda Brennan, a meme librarian and trend expert at the digital marketing agency XX Artists, told me via email, “It looks like ‘spooky season’ was being used by niche crowds in 2017 globally, saw some pickup in 2018, and hit peak search interest in 2019.” It’s continued to be a popular search term since, though it’s presumably been impeded at times by the pandemic.

No one really knows exactly where it came from, or what caused its rise in popularity. There are theories, of course. But if spooky season has a patient zero, I was not able to identify that person (or ghoul). It appears to be a grassroots, or graveyard-roots, phenomenon.

“It’s definitely gotten bigger and bigger,” Enzor said. “I think Instagram has been a huge catalyst for that.

“The word spooky kind of sums up what I love about Halloween,” she added. “I’m not so much on the horror, blood, and guts side. I just love the magical, cutesy, slightly creepy feel that the word spooky invokes for me.”

Indeed, Mike Wilton, who runs a Halloween news site called All Hallows Geek, guessed that a big part of it might just be the word spooky: “I think the word spooky and even the word spoopy, piggybacking off of that, has seemed to be used a bit more in the vernacular overall over the last few years, and I’m wondering if that’s where it came from.” He may be on to something: In 2018, the Washington Post published a piece about how “spooky culture” was powering the internet’s celebration of Halloween, which already happens to fall in what is considered the most meme-able of seasons.

(Also: spoopy?? Apparently it’s another building block in all of this I had been sleeping on: Merriam-Webster has called it a “new Halloween classic” and explained that “the word is used to describe something that typically would be spooky, like an image of a skeleton or ghost, but is actually rather comical.”)

Spookiness is a cultural trend as well as a language one: “As more alternative aesthetics come into the mainstream, ‘spooky’ and ‘witch’ as an aesthetic has definitely seen a rise in popularity, which is reflected in media like The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, The Craft, and Charmed reboots, etc.,” Brennan told me.

After carefully researching all of this, I’ve come to my own conclusion: As “Disney adult” as it sounds to my ears, people simply get a kick out of saying spooky season. And that’s what baffles me most of all. I can tell that spooky season adherents delight in using the phrase, and when they do, half the time they’re probably picturing it surrounded by cute tildes: ~spooky szn~. At best I can see how this is vaguely, uh, whimsical, but it seems unique as an internet joke in that I keep looking and failing to find what is so fun or funny about it; it’s like a joke where they left out the joke. Even mischievous online lingo that is now considered lame—“doggos” and “puppers” come to mind—was at one point in its life cycle sort of amusing. But spooky season? I just don’t get it, and I think maybe that’s because there’s no “it” to get.

Alas, it’s too late to stop its spread now. Capitalism has seized on spooky season. “I have seen it showing up in more marketing communications,” Wilton told me, remembering a recent press release he got from Baskin-Robbins touting their spooky season offerings. It fits in with a larger trend: “From a marketing standpoint, the corporate world’s trying to capitalize on Halloween longer and more if they can,” he said. In a quick search of my own inbox, I found that I’ve received 10 pitches from publicists containing the phrase spooky season this year, up from four in 2020 and two in 2019. If common decency can’t kill spooky season, maybe I can count on brands to run it into the ground. I have to say, picturing its death—can’t you just see it, a tombstone in a cemetery marked “Here lies spooky season”?—might be the thing that finally gets me in the holiday spirit.