Spooky Corner

The Halloween moon, 2026

Where Halloween comes from

Halloween began in Ireland. Stephen Winick, a folklorist at the Library of Congress, writes that “Halloween originated with the Celtic festival known as Samhain in Ireland,” though he adds that it is not as clear today as it once seemed that Samhain marked the beginning of the Celtic year. In medieval Irish, samain was the first of November and the festival held on it, and in Christian use All Saints’ Day, All Hallows. The evening before November 1 became All Hallows’ Eve: Halloween.

The medieval Irish tales treat Samain as one of the hinges of the year. The Wooing of Emer explains it as “the end of summer,” for “two divisions were formerly on the year, viz., summer from Beltaine (the first of May), and winter from Samuin to Beltaine,” and its hero Cú Chulainn and his crew reach the house of the King of the Isles “on Samuin night.” In The Second Battle of Mag Tuired, the Dagda keeps a meeting “near the All Hallows of the battle” (imon Samain in the Irish) with a woman he finds washing in the river Unshin, with “nine loosened tresses on her head”: the Morrígan.

Carved lanterns came much later. In 19th- and early 20th-century Ireland, people carved faces into turnips, and the National Museum of Ireland keeps a plaster cast of a “ghost turnip” from County Donegal.

• Stephen Winick, “Welcome to Folklife Today, and…Happy Halloween!”, Library of Congress (2013)
• samain, eDIL: Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language (Royal Irish Academy)
• The Wooing of Emer, tr. Kuno Meyer, CELT (University College Cork)
• Cath Maige Tuired: The Second Battle of Mag Tuired, tr. Elizabeth A. Gray, CELT
• Cath Maige Tuired, Irish text, CELT
• Jennifer Nalewicki, “When People Carved Turnips Instead of Pumpkins for Halloween”, Smithsonian Magazine (2021)

Halloween customs of the past

Telling fortunes in Scotland

Robert Burns’s poem “Halloween” (1785) describes country people in the west of Scotland gathering “to burn their nits, an’ pou their stocks” on the night when, in his note, witches and devils are abroad and the fairies hold “a grand anniversary.” Burns added notes explaining the charms, most of them for finding out whom you would marry:

• Kale stalks. Hand in hand, with eyes shut, you pulled up the first kale plant you met. Big or little, straight or crooked, it showed the size and shape of your future husband or wife; earth on the root meant a fortune, and the taste of the stem’s heart told their temper.
• Nuts in the fire. A nut was named for each sweetheart and laid in the fire. If they burned quietly together, the courtship would go well; if they jumped apart, it wouldn’t.
• The apple at the glass. Alone with a candle, you ate an apple in front of a looking-glass, and the face of your husband or wife to be appeared, as if peeping over your shoulder.
• Three dishes. One held clean water, one dirty water, and one nothing. Blindfolded, you dipped your left hand: clean water foretold a first marriage for your future spouse, dirty water a widow or widower, and the empty dish no marriage at all.

“Trick or treat” began in Canada

The earliest printed versions of the phrase come from Canada. The Sault Star of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, wrote of gangs calling “tricks or treats” in 1917; Owen Sound had “treat or a trick” in 1921; the Edmonton Bulletin called “Treat up – or tricks” the familiar Halloween ultimatum in 1924; and “trick or treat” as we say it now was reported from Alberta in 1927. Children going from door to door at Halloween is recorded in Vancouver from the late 1890s.

Before trick-or-treating, Thanksgiving masking

In the United States, trick-or-treating at Halloween only took hold in the 1930s. Before that, children in masks and costumes went door to door asking for treats on Thanksgiving, a custom that newspapers in the 1800s already called long-established and widespread. Library of Congress folklorist Stephen Winick notes that the popular story tracing trick-or-treating to medieval “souling” (going door to door for soul cakes) is unproven: no record shows the people who started it had souling in mind.

• Robert Burns, “Halloween” (1785), with the author’s notes, in Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, Project Gutenberg
• “trick or treat”, Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (University of British Columbia)
• Stephen Winick, “Masking and Mumming for the Holidays, Thanksgiving Style!”, Library of Congress (2020)