Who Put the Howl in Halloween?

By Carl Austin

Image courtesy flickr

As I write this blog there’s only one week left before Halloween.  I can still remember going door to door to collect candy when I was a kid growing up in Philly.  Living in a section of the city dominated by rowhouses meant having a door to knock on every ten feet.  Talk about being a kid in a candy store.  Within a few years I learned to trick or treat like a pro while ditching the traditional paper bag for a pillowcase that made it easier to hall away more sweet swag.  It’s amazing I still have all my teeth.

For most Americans, the holiday has a spooky connotation where ghosts and goblins haunt a night filled with skeletons, witches, black cats and Jack-O-Lanterns.  Even adults get into the act by going to Halloween parties dressed as Dracula or their favorite superhero.  While the holiday has transformed over the centuries into a night of fantasy, many Trick or Treat traditions that we hold dear have a far more ancient origin than you’d think.

While most people consider All Hallows Eve to be a Christian tradition, the underpinnings of the holiday predate Christianity by at least a thousand years.  The Encyclopedia Americana points out that Halloween is “clearly a relic of pagan times.”  Indeed, it’s believed that the holiday got its start with the Druids who celebrated the Vigil of Saman every year on November 1.  Saman (which sounds suspiciously like Satan) is the Druid lord of the dead.  In parts of Ireland to this day Oidhch Shamhna is still celebrated on October 31.  The celebration includes the lighting of bonfires to ward off the ghosts and witches who are thought to wander among the living on this night. 

Image courtesy flickr

The modern custom of dressing up in costume to play at being someone or something we’re not can be traced back to the Druid belief that on the night of October 31, which they considered the last day of the year, a soul passes from one body to the next.  They believe that on this night, the lord of the dead gathers together the souls of the departed to decree what form they will inhabit next.  Tradition held that Saman of Samhain could be coaxed into giving the soul of a loved one a better break in the afterlife by presenting him with gifts. One of their practices even included a procession led by a man in a white robe and a horse head mask.  Druid priests held that black cats were sacred.  They also taught that witches rode brooms through the night skies only to hurl down curses on those who refused to honor the dead on the night of October 31.

Image courtesy flickr

Would Halloween be the same if the Jack-O-Lantern was still a carved turnip?  The reason I ask is because according to Irish tradition, that was the custom.  It wasn’t until the 1880’s after the Irish came to America that they exchanged the turnip for the pumpkin.  The Jack-O-Lantern itself originates from Irish folklore where a man named Jack treed the devil by talking him into climbing up, only to carve a cross into the trunk to prevent Satan from climbing down.  To trick Jack into removing the cross from the tree, the devil offered to exclude him from hell after he died.  Being a devilish deal, what happened when Jack died was that he couldn’t go to heaven or hell.  He was forced to wander the earth forever with the way being lit only by a single candle. The reason the tradition was to place the candle inside a carved turnip was to keep it from being blown out.

Trick or Treating has been going on since the 16^th century in Western Europe when people started going from house to house in costume.  The difference back then was that trick or treaters were required to sing a song or recite a poem in exchange for food.  If the householder gave the revelers a treat it was seen as a portent of good fortune.  Woe betide those who withheld the treat, for the bad luck it represented could be served up posthaste, since the disgruntled revelers were after all in disguise.  By the 15^th Century, the tradition on Allhallowtide was for the poor to go door-to-door to collect soul-cakes.  In return, these groups would say prayers for the donors.  By the 19^th Century in the British Isles, this gave way to the more familiar sight of bands of children roaming the neighborhood to knock on doors, sing songs and beg for sweets.

Other Tricks included playing pranks by imitating malignant spirits.  In Celtic-speaking regions this included wandering the countryside carrying grotesquely carved turnips that when lit became macabre lanterns.  It was said that brandishing these ghoulish Jack-O-Lanterns would help ward off evil spirits.  But in reality, it was some of the adults who toted these monstrosities around the countryside that were themselves inhabited by spirits of the 100-proof variety.  While mischief on Halloween isn’t uncommon, it’s the night of October 30 that today we deem as Mischief Night.  This is a night when you have to be on the lookout for young pranksters who may choose to festoon your trees with toilet paper or coat your windscreen with soap.  It isn’t unusual on the day before Halloween for grocers to refuse to sell eggs to young people for fear of the repercussions once the sun goes down.

Image courtesy GoodFreePhotos

Ghosts, Goblins and Ghouls have long been associated with Halloween.  While ghosts are disembodied spirits of the departed, goblins and ghouls are something far more sinister.  Goblins are mischievous sprites or elves whose sole preoccupation is to vex people by tricking or even kicking them.  Today we call them gremlins.  Ghouls are a much nastier brand of baddie.  Not only do they dig up corpses, they like to dine on them. Yuck!

Vampires, Werewolves and Zombies are an American addition to the Halloween traditiona, fed by a steady diet of Hollywood B-movies.  While vampires and werewolves are fictional characters, zombies are all too real to voodoo practitioners in Haiti where it is still believed that people can fall into trances to become the walking dead.  (No brain-eating required.)

How Halloween came to America again involved the Irish who brought the tradition with them across the Atlantic Ocean in the 19^th Century. Back then it was confined to immigrant communities until the early 20^th Century, when it was embraced from coast to coast.  It wasn’t until 1974 when New York held its first official Halloween Parade, which is the world’s largest with more than 60,000 costumed participants, 2 million spectators and a TV audience of more than 100 million.  While Halloween has become as American as baseball and apple pie, when you open your door to hand out candy to the neighborhood kids on October 31, remember to be kind to those little Druids or you may come to howl with dread come the morning after.

If you thought this blog was scary, wait until you catch next week’s called Mars Madness. Don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel and check out my spooky Patreon page.