The History of Halloween: From Samhain to Trick-or-Treat

The Short Answer

Halloween began as All Hallows’ Eve, the night before the Christian feast of All Saints on 1 November. In Ireland and Scotland that date already belonged to Samhain, an early medieval festival linked in Irish literature with assemblies and contact with the Otherworld. Folk customs such as soul cakes, divination games, guising and carved turnip lanterns grew around the night. Irish and Scottish emigrants carried them to North America, where trick-or-treating took shape in the 1920s to 1950s.

• Name: A Scots contraction of “All Hallows’ Even,” recorded from the 16th century
• Older festival: Samhain, the Irish feast on 1 November, starting the evening before
• Christian feast: All Saints’ Day fixed on 1 November in the 8th and 9th centuries; All Souls’ Day on 2 November from about 998
• Jack-o’-lanterns: Carved turnips and other roots in Ireland, Scotland and western England; pumpkins in America
• “Trick or treat”: First found in print in 1927, in Alberta, Canada
• Mass popularity: Trick-or-treating spread across the US after the Second World War

What Was Samhain? The Evidence From Early Ireland

Samhain (Old Irish samain, modern Irish pronunciation roughly “SOW-in”) was one of four seasonal festivals named in early Irish literature, alongside Imbolc, Beltaine and Lughnasa. It fell on 1 November. Because the Irish reckoned days from sunset, the festival began on the evening of 31 October. Its modern Irish name for that evening is Oíche Shamhna, “Samhain night.”

Almost everything known about Samhain comes from tales written down by Christian monks between roughly the 8th and 12th centuries. These texts describe Samhain as a time of royal assemblies and feasting, including the great gathering at Tara, and as a moment when the boundary with the Otherworld opened. In Echtra Nerai (The Adventures of Nera), the hero goes out on Samhain night, meets the dead, and enters a fairy mound, or síd. Several Ulster Cycle tales set battles, deaths and supernatural encounters at Samhain.

The literature therefore supports one old link: Samhain was a liminal time when Otherworld beings were active. It does not describe druids telling fortunes at bonfires, people wearing animal skins to hide from spirits, or sacrifices of crops and animals at Samhain. Those details appear in modern popular accounts without a medieval source behind them.

The meaning of the name

Samhain is often translated “summer’s end.” Linguists are less certain. Some connect the word to a root meaning “summer,” others to one meaning “assembly.” A related Gaulish word, samon-, appears on the Coligny calendar, a bronze calendar from 2nd-century Roman Gaul found in France in 1897. Scholars still debate whether that month began in autumn or early summer, so it cannot be taken as proof of a pan-Celtic autumn festival.

How the Church Fixed All Saints’ Day on November 1

The Christian side of Halloween has a clearer paper trail. In 609 or 610, Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome to the Virgin Mary and all martyrs on 13 May. In the 8th century, Pope Gregory III (731-741) dedicated a chapel in St Peter’s Basilica to all the saints, and the 1 November date is associated with this foundation. Around 835, under Pope Gregory IV and the Frankish emperor Louis the Pious, the 1 November feast was extended across the Frankish church.

A second feast followed. Around 998, Abbot Odilo of Cluny ordered his monasteries to pray for all the faithful departed on 2 November. This All Souls’ Day spread across Western Christianity over the next two centuries. Together, the two feasts became Hallowtide: All Hallows’ Eve on 31 October, All Saints on 1 November, and All Souls on 2 November.

Did the church choose the date to replace Samhain?

Many retellings say the church moved All Saints to 1 November to absorb Samhain. The historian Ronald Hutton argues the evidence points elsewhere. A feast of all saints on 1 November is attested in 8th-century Anglo-Saxon England and among the Franks, while early Irish church calendars, such as the Martyrology of Óengus (around 800), kept a commemoration of the saints in April. On this reading, the November date came from Rome and Germanic Europe, not from a decision about Ireland.

What is not disputed is that, in Ireland and Scotland, the Christian feast came to share a date with an older one. Over the following centuries the customs of the two blended in ways that are difficult to separate.

Soul Cakes, Souling and the Dead

Medieval Hallowtide was focused on the dead in a specific Christian sense. People believed prayers and Masses could shorten the time souls spent in purgatory. Church bells were rung on All Hallows’ night for the souls of the departed, and families paid for Masses for their dead.

The custom of going door to door for “soul cakes” is the clearest ancestor of trick-or-treating, but most of its documentation comes after the Reformation. The antiquary John Aubrey, writing in the 1680s, recorded that in Shropshire a heap of soul cakes was set out on All Souls’ Day for visitors. By the 19th century, folklorists recorded children and poor adults “souling” or “soul-caking” in Cheshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire and neighboring counties. They sang verses asking for cakes, apples, money or ale.

Some soul cakes were marked with a cross, and the original exchange carried the idea of a prayer for the household’s dead. The often-repeated rule that each cake freed one soul from purgatory is a modern embellishment with little documentary support. By the time most souling was recorded, it had become a seasonal begging custom more than a religious act.

Halloween in Scotland and Ireland: Divination, Guising and Turnip Lanterns

The word “Halloween” is Scottish. It is a contraction of “All Hallows’ Even” and appears in Scots writing from the 16th century. Scotland and Ireland, where Protestant reformers had less success in suppressing the night’s folk customs, became its strongholds.

Fortune-telling games

Robert Burns’s poem “Halloween” (1786) records customs he knew from Ayrshire. Young people pulled kale stalks blindfolded to learn the shape of a future spouse, burned pairs of nuts in the fire to test a couple’s future, and performed other rituals to glimpse a partner. Apple games, such as bobbing for apples or biting at an apple hung on a string, belong to the same family of courtship divination. In parts of England, 31 October was known as Snap-apple Night or Nutcrack Night, and in Cornwall the season was called Allantide.

Guising and bonfires

Disguised young people going from house to house, called guising in Scotland, was recorded in the 19th century. Guisers performed a song, a rhyme or a joke in exchange for food or coins. Bonfires were lit on Halloween in parts of Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man, where 31 October is still marked as Hop-tu-Naa. In Wales the night was Nos Galan Gaeaf, the eve of the first day of winter, and was associated with ghosts.

Turnip lanterns

Carved lanterns made from turnips, swedes or mangel-wurzels were used in Ireland, Scotland and western England. Guisers carried them in late 19th-century Scotland. In Somerset, children still carry carved “punkies” on Punkie Night, the last Thursday of October. These lanterns are documented in the 19th century. No evidence ties them to ancient ritual.

The Legend of Stingy Jack and the Jack-o’-Lantern

The best-known explanation of the jack-o’-lantern is an Irish folktale. A drinker or blacksmith named Jack tricks the Devil more than once, trapping him in a coin pocketed beside a silver cross, or up a tree ringed with crosses. Jack extracts a promise that the Devil will never take his soul. When Jack dies, heaven turns him away for his sins and hell refuses him because of the bargain. He is left to wander with a single ember, which he carries in a hollowed turnip.

The tale was recorded in many versions in the 19th century, and related stories elsewhere in Europe feature a smith named Will. The phrase itself is English. “Jack-o’-lantern” appears in the 17th century, first meaning a man with a lantern, such as a night watchman, and then the will-o’-the-wisp, the ghostly lights seen over marshes. Folklorists generally treat the Stingy Jack legend as an explanation for those marsh lights. It is not evidence that the carved lantern custom began with the story. The name was attached to carved lanterns later.

Halloween in America: From Harvest Parties to Trick-or-Treat

Puritan New England rejected Halloween along with most church holidays. Customs survived in colonies with more Anglican, Catholic or Scottish settlers, but the night was minor in early America. Carved pumpkin lanterns appear in American writing in the first half of the 19th century as general autumn amusements, not yet tied to 31 October. Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) used a pumpkin as the Headless Horseman’s missing head.

Large-scale emigration from Ireland during and after the Great Famine of 1845-1852, along with Scottish emigration, brought Halloween customs to American cities. By the 1870s and 1880s, middle-class magazines promoted Halloween parties built around the old divination games, ghost stories and decorated pumpkins. The pumpkin, which was native to the Americas and easy to carve, became the standard lantern.

The age of pranks

Alongside the parties came mischief. Late 19th- and early 20th-century newspapers reported overturned outhouses, gates removed from hinges, soaped windows and blocked streetcar tracks. In the 1920s and 1930s, as Nicholas Rogers documents, the damage grew serious enough that civic groups, schools and police organized parades, parties and costume contests to keep young people off the streets.

The birth of “trick or treat”

Treats were part of the answer. Householders who handed out food were less likely to be pranked. The earliest known printed use of “trick or treat” comes from a 1927 newspaper report from Blackie, Alberta. The phrase spread in the United States through the 1930s. Sugar rationing during the Second World War slowed the custom, but in the late 1940s and 1950s children’s magazines, radio, television and comics carried it into the growing suburbs. In 1950, UNICEF began its trick-or-treat collection campaign.

Early treats were often homemade cookies, fruit, nuts or coins. Manufactured, individually wrapped candy took over gradually and dominated by the 1970s, helped by fears about tampered treats.

How Victorian Scholars Reshaped the Story

The popular picture of Halloween as an ancient Celtic “festival of the dead” and “Celtic New Year” took shape in the late 19th century. The Welsh scholar John Rhŷs argued in the 1880s that Samhain marked the start of the Celtic year. James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (first edition 1890) presented Halloween bonfires as survivals of a pagan fire festival honoring the dead. These ideas were repeated in popular books and are now part of the standard account.

Ronald Hutton has argued that the early sources do not support these claims well. The medieval Irish texts do link Samhain with the Otherworld, but they do not call it a new year, a festival of the dead, or a festival shared by all Celtic peoples. The heavy association of Hallowtide with the dead probably owes more to the Christian All Souls’ Day than to Samhain. The old core is real. The grand pagan festival built around it is largely a modern reconstruction.

Common Misconceptions About Halloween’s Origins

• “Samhain was the Celtic god of the dead.” No early source names any such god. The idea goes back to 18th-century antiquarian speculation, usually traced to Charles Vallancey.
• “The Romans merged Feralia and Pomona into Halloween.” Feralia, the Roman festival of the dead, fell in February. No evidence links the fruit goddess Pomona to a 1 November festival or to apple bobbing.
• “Costumes began as disguises from Samhain spirits.” Disguise customs are documented in early modern and 19th-century Britain and Ireland. A direct line to pre-Christian practice has not been demonstrated.
• “Strangers poison Halloween candy.” Sociologists Joel Best and Gerald Horiuchi reviewed press reports from 1958 onward and found no confirmed case of a stranger killing a child with Halloween candy. The notorious 1974 Texas poisoning was committed by the child’s own father, Ronald Clark O’Bryan.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the history of Halloween?

Halloween is the eve of All Saints’ Day, a Christian feast fixed on 1 November in the 8th and 9th centuries. In Ireland and Scotland it overlapped with Samhain, an older festival linked to the Otherworld. Folk customs like soul cakes, fortune-telling and turnip lanterns developed in Britain and Ireland, and emigrants brought them to North America, where trick-or-treating emerged in the 1920s to 1950s.

What is the origin and significance of Samhain?

Samhain was an early Irish festival on 1 November, starting the evening before. Medieval Irish tales, written down by monks, present it as a time of royal assemblies, feasting, and openings into the Otherworld. Claims that it was the Celtic New Year or a festival of the dead come mainly from 19th-century scholars, and the early evidence for them is thin.

What are the different names for Halloween?

Halloween is short for All Hallows’ Eve or All Hallows’ Even. Regional names include Oíche Shamhna in Ireland, Nos Galan Gaeaf in Wales, Hop-tu-Naa on the Isle of Man, and Allantide in Cornwall. Parts of England once called the night Snap-apple Night or Nutcrack Night, after the apple and nut games played on it.

Why do we carve pumpkins at Halloween?

In Ireland, Scotland and western England, people carved lanterns from turnips and other root vegetables in the 19th century. In America, pumpkins were native, large and easy to hollow out, and carved pumpkin lanterns were already a harvest pastime. By the late 1800s they were firmly tied to Halloween and took the name jack-o’-lantern.

When did trick-or-treating start?

Going door to door for food at Hallowtide has older roots in English souling and Scottish guising. The phrase “trick or treat” first appears in print in 1927 in Alberta, Canada. The custom spread in the US in the 1930s, paused under wartime sugar rationing, and became a nationwide children’s ritual in the late 1940s and 1950s.

What does the Bible say about Halloween?

The Bible does not mention Halloween, which developed centuries after it was written. The name itself comes from the Christian feast of All Hallows, or All Saints. Christian attitudes vary. Many churches observe All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days, some Protestant churches mark 31 October as Reformation Day, and some groups avoid Halloween because of its associations with ghosts and witchcraft.