Before Halloween, there was Samhain
Long before Halloween, people in Ireland were marking the arrival of winter with a festival called Samhain (pronounced SOW-in). It fell around November 1, when the harvest was ending, livestock were coming in and families had to prepare for the cold months ahead. Animals that couldn’t be fed through winter might be slaughtered and their meat preserved. What people had stored by this point would determine how comfortably the family survived until spring.
That said, there was more to Samhain than preparing for winter. The festival was also an important occasion to gather, feast and tell stories. In medieval Irish literature, kings held assemblies and warriors came together. In one story, The Adventure of Nera, a warrior ventures out on Samhain night and encounters the inhabitants of the Otherworld. In another, The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn, supernatural women enter the hero’s life around Samhain.
In Irish stories, the Otherworld was closely connected to the landscape itself. Ancient burial mounds and hills were associated with the sídhe, powerful beings often identified with the Tuatha Dé Danann, figures connected to particular places, crafts and aspects of life. Samhain was a time when encounters between humans and these beings frequently appeared in stories, sometimes involving journeys into their dwellings or attempts to learn about the future.
We know Samhain was important because it appeared throughout medieval Irish literature, but understanding what people believed before Christianity is harder. Much of what survives was written down by Christian scribes, often centuries after the traditions they described, and the people recording these stories did not necessarily understand the beings, places and rituals in the same way as the people who first believed in them. Figures once connected to the land or treated as powerful beings could be recast through a Christian understanding of spirits, demons and the supernatural. Later folklore added another layer, and eventually we arrived at the familiar story of Samhain: ancient Celts dressed as monsters, lit bonfires to frighten away evil spirits and hid from frightening beings roaming the night. But were these beings always understood as monsters? Were people trying to frighten them away? Were disguises meant to hide from them at all? We don’t really know. What we call ancient Samhain has reached us through centuries of people translating beliefs that were not necessarily their own. Somewhere in all that retelling, the meaning may have changed too.
A calendar for the dead
Christianity brought its own relationship with the dead. By the early Middle Ages, Christians had long commemorated martyrs and prayed for the dead, but the dates were not always the same from place to place. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III dedicated a chapel in Rome to all the saints on November 1, and in the ninth century Pope Gregory IV helped establish November 1 as the feast of All Saints more widely across the Carolingian world. November 2 came later. Around the end of the tenth century, Odilo, abbot of the monastery at Cluny, directed the monasteries under his authority to devote the day after All Saints to prayers for the souls of the dead. The observance spread, eventually becoming what we know as All Souls’ Day.
These weren’t simply new names for Samhain. All Saints honored saints and martyrs, while All Souls centered prayer for ordinary Christians who had died. But in Ireland and Britain, these Christian observances arrived in communities that already had their own seasonal customs, stories and relationships with the dead. Over centuries, those worlds existed beside one another and became increasingly difficult to pull apart. By the later Middle Ages, people in parts of Britain went souling, traveling from house to house asking for food in exchange for prayers for the dead. Bells rang for departed souls, candles were lit, food was given, and the opening days of November became part of a Christian ritual cycle concerned with death, remembrance and what happened after someone died.
And just as with Samhain, the clean origin story starts breaking down when we start looking closely. You’ll often hear that the Church deliberately moved All Saints to November 1 to replace or absorb Samhain, although compelling given Christianity’s long history of adapting local sacred places, we really don't have evidence. What we can see is Irish traditions persisted through centuries while Christian beliefs co-existed in the same seasonal timeframe. Halloween evolved because people had been living with both traditions for generations.
Trick or Treat
By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Halloween in Ireland and Scotland had become a night for games, disguises, fortune-telling and a fair amount of trouble. Young people went from house to house in disguise, performing songs, jokes or tricks in exchange for food or small gifts, a tradition known in Scotland as guising… others took the opportunity to cause mischief. Some folks woke up to find that gates had disappeared, carts were moved, doors were blocked and windows were rattled. Some pranks were playful and others crossed into vandalism.
When Irish and Scottish immigrants carried Halloween traditions to North America in the nineteenth century, the mischief came too. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Halloween pranks in the United States included removing gates from their hinges, overturning outhouses, moving wagons, throwing flour and damaging property. Newspapers complained about it, homeowners dreaded it and towns increasingly tried to figure out what to do with the vandalism.
In Hiawatha, Kansas, a woman named Elizabeth Krebs had grown tired of children destroying her flower gardens every Halloween. Krebs was an avid gardener and civic organizer, and by 1914, she’d decided to do something about the annual vandalism. Rather than simply demanding that children behave, she helped organize a town-wide Halloween celebration with a parade, costumes, music and prizes. The idea was to keep young people entertained long enough that they wouldn’t have time to cause trouble. It worked. The event became known as the Halloween Frolic, and similar celebrations began appearing in other American towns. What started as one woman’s attempt to protect her garden became part of a much larger effort to turn Halloween from a night of mischief into something adults could organize, supervise and control.
Long before the pumpkin became Halloween’s face, people in Ireland and parts of Britain carved turnips and other root vegetables into lanterns.
Halloween was already a night associated with supernatural encounters and people took precautions against harmful spirits but the surviving evidence doesn’t tell us that frightening spirits away was the original purpose of the carved turnip. What we do have are accounts of people carving eyes, noses and mouths into turnips, placing candles inside and leaving them along roads or in bushes to scare people walking home.
One story eventually became especially attached to the lantern: Stingy Jack. In versions of the Irish folktale, Jack tricked the Devil and secured a promise that the Devil would not take his soul. But when Jack died, Heaven wouldn’t take him either. The Devil gave him an ember to light his way as he wandered the earth and Jack carried it inside a hollowed turnip. He became “Jack of the Lantern,” or Jack-o’lantern.
When Irish and Scottish immigrants brought their Halloween traditions to North America in the nineteenth century, they entered a landscape where squash had been cultivated by Indigenous peoples. Pumpkins were deeply established in North American agriculture and had become associated with harvest and rural life among European Americans as well. Immigrants adapted. A pumpkin was larger, softer and much easier to hollow and carve than a turnip.
By the late nineteenth century, pumpkin jack-o’-lanterns were appearing regularly in American Halloween celebrations. The pumpkin has become so inseparable from Halloween that the older vegetable lantern disappeared from America’s Halloween.
Early trick-or-treaters weren’t coming home with bags full of bite-sized candy bars. Children received nuts, fruit, coins, cookies, cake and homemade treats alongside candy. As trick-or-treating spread across the United States during the twentieth century, candy manufacturers began to recognize what Halloween offered: millions of households buying sweets. Individually wrapped candy was convenient for households expecting dozens of trick-or-treaters, and manufacturers increasingly marketed it as the obvious thing to give them.
That said, cheap, abundant candy has a history much older than trick-or-treating. Sugar was once expensive in Europe. Its transformation into an everyday commodity was tied to European colonial expansion and plantation economies in the Caribbean and Americas, where sugar production relied heavily on enslaved labor. Over centuries, expanding production, industrial processing and global trade made sugar cheaper and easily accessible.
The industrialized sugar system became particularly visible during World War II. The United States began rationing sugar in 1942, limiting the sweets available for Halloween along with everyday household consumption. Sugar rationing continued until 1947 and as restrictions disappeared in the postwar years, trick-or-treating expanded and candy manufacturers increasingly promoted their products for Halloween. Candy still competed with the apple and the homemade cookie but another cultural shift soon made it possible for candy to topple the homemade treat.
During the 1960s and 1970s, stories spread about poisoned treats, razor blades hidden in apples and strangers tampering with Halloween food. However, evidence of widespread attacks was remarkably thin but the fear reinforced a growing preference for commercially packaged candy. Parents were encouraged to inspect treats, homemade food became increasingly suspect and a factory-sealed wrapper offered visible evidence that nobody had opened it. And the candy bar won.