By late October, we accept a number of things that would look peculiar at any other time of year.
Women fly on broomsticks. Black cats become ominous. Pumpkins acquire frightening faces. Skeletons take up residence on otherwise respectable lawns. Children demand candy from whoever answers the door.
Each of these traditions has its own backstory.
Halloween was assembled slowly, over centuries, from religion, folklore, domestic life, old-world customs and, unexpectedly, the beer business.
Ghosts have the oldest claim on this season
Part of Halloween’s ancestry reaches back to Samhain, an ancient Gaelic festival marking the transition from harvest season into winter.
The evening before All Saints’ Day became All Hallows’ Eve.
Say that often enough and eventually you get Halloween.
Ghosts arrived from more than one direction. Medieval Irish literature described Samhain as a dangerous, supernatural season, when fairies were said to raid royal strongholds and otherworldly beings crossed into the human world. Christian observances then gave the dead an actual date, All Souls’ Day, at almost the same time of year, when the Church moved it to early November in the 11th century.
So late October became an excellent season for anyone unwilling to remain quietly buried.
By the 1500s, people in parts of Ireland and Scotland were going from house to house in costume, sometimes singing or reciting verses in exchange for food. Around All Souls’ Day, poorer people also went “souling,” receiving food, including soul cakes, in return for prayers for the dead.
The witch’s story comes later. It starts without a face
The witch of folklore did not begin with a broom, a cauldron, a cat and a pointed hat. Those accessories accumulated over time, and most of them had perfectly ordinary day jobs before joining the supernatural.
By the 1400s, witches were already taking to the air in European art, some on brooms, others on staffs. Exactly why the broom became the enduring choice is unclear, but its association with women, domestic work and the signs used by ale sellers may have played a part.
The cauldron had an innocent beginning. Large iron pots were used for cooking, boiling water, preparing medicines and brewing ale, and for centuries much of that brewing was done by women.
Women who brewed ale for sale were known as alewives or brewsters. They worked with grain, herbs and large kettles. Cats helped keep mice away from stored grain. Ale sellers would often display an ale-stake, branch or brush-like bundle outside to signal that a batch was ready.
Historians don’t all agree on how directly the costume traces back to the alewife. But the overlap is hard to ignore: a woman, a kettle, a cat, a broom and a tall hat, all drawn from the very same world of work.
Legend has it that alewives wore tall hats so customers could spot them in crowded markets. Researchers have not established that those hats directly produced the witch’s pointed hat, but tall and conical headwear later became increasingly exaggerated in depictions of witches. By the 19th century, the black pointed hat had become a standard part of the witch’s appearance.
The black cat had similar problems. Over time, European folklore increasingly associated cats, particularly black cats, with magic and witchcraft.
The cat had gone from household helper to accomplice.
A woman. A large kettle. A cat. Something resembling a broom outside the door. A tall hat.
The familiar witch’s collection of props is beginning to take shape.
The cauldron, meanwhile, got a major publicity boost from Shakespeare.
In “Macbeth,” the witches gather around a bubbling pot and add ingredients unlikely to appear in any respectable cookbook. Once “eye of newt” entered the menu, the cauldron’s reputation as innocent cookware was probably finished.
The folklore also had a Marblehead address
Wilmot Redd, known to her neighbors as Mammy Redd, was a Marblehead fisherman’s wife and the town’s only victim of the 1692 Salem witch trials. She was hanged that September at Proctor’s Ledge in Salem, convicted largely on testimony about a curse she was said to have placed on a neighbor during a dispute over stolen linen.
Her actual grave was never found. In 1998, the town placed a memorial stone for her beside her husband’s grave at Old Burial Hill in Marblehead, where it still stands.
Irish and Scottish immigrants carried all of it, the ghosts, the costumes, the witch’s image, to North America in the 19th century, where Halloween gradually became less religious and more social.
The Jack-o’-lantern
This originated in Ireland and Britain, where people carved turnips and other root vegetables, hollowed them out and placed candles or glowing embers inside. When the tradition crossed the Atlantic, immigrants discovered that pumpkins were larger, softer and considerably easier to carve than a turnip, which has roughly the cooperative personality of a bowling ball.
Bobbing for apples
Bobbing for apples became a popular Halloween game in Ireland and Scotland, especially because apples were plentiful in autumn. By the 19th century, Halloween fortune-telling games often revolved around marriage. A young woman might peel an apple in one long strip and toss it over her shoulder, hoping it would fall in the shape of her future husband’s initial.
Halloween managed to combine ghosts with matrimonial planning.
Then came the mischief
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Halloween pranks could go well beyond ringing a doorbell and running away. Windows were soaped. Gates disappeared. Pranksters moved wagons to new spots overnight.
Trick or Treat
In the early 20th century, communities increasingly encouraged parties and more orderly door-to-door customs, partly to channel that mischief into something less destructive.
Trick-or-treating settled the matter: candy in exchange for leaving the pranks behind.
The phrase “trick or treat” appeared in print in Canada in the 1920s and gradually spread through the United States. After World War II, booming suburbs, mass media and the rise of individually wrapped candy helped make trick-or-treating an annual Halloween tradition.
A harvest festival contributed darkness and the supernatural. Christianity added the dead. Households supplied brooms and cauldrons. Women brewers contributed some suggestive imagery. Folklore recruited the cat. Immigrants traded turnips for pumpkins.
The holiday we know today is really a centuries-old collection of customs, beliefs and borrowed traditions.
A harvest festival, a church calendar, an innocent brewer and a kid with a bar of soap all had a hand in this. None of them ever met.
Margaret Bacon is the founder and senior editor of VeryCoolFacts.com, home of a free weekly newsletter, and Safe Harbor Media Group, an educational media platform built around verified, insight-driven storytelling. Her work explores history, science, culture and the enduring patterns of human behavior that shape how we think and act today. She has lived in Marblehead for 40 years.
