Where Does Halloween Come From?

What was Samhain?

Samhain was a festival of the Irish calendar held on the night of October 31, marking the turn from summer to winter.^[3] It was one of four seasonal markers in farming and herding life, alongside Imbolc on February 1, Beltaine on May 1 and Lughnasadh on August 1.^[3] The National Records of Scotland glosses the name as "summer's end" and says it was thought that the boundary between the living and the world of spirits and the dead dissolved at that time.^[5]

The historian Lisa Bitel of USC Dornsife says very little is known about what people actually did at Samhain: the main evidence is legends written down by churchmen around 800 AD, about 400 years after the Irish began turning Christian.^[3] Those tales treat Samhain as a night of magic, when the otherworld, called the "sí" in Irish, opened its doors to mortals.^[3]

Is Halloween really descended from Samhain?

The Library of Congress research guide calls Samhain a pre-Christian Celtic festival of the dead and says Halloween had its beginnings there.^[1] In a 2013 post, Stephen Winick of the Library's American Folklife Center called the link "pretty certain" but warned that the idea of Samhain as the Celtic New Year only arose in the late nineteenth century; other Irish sources suggest the year began at Beltaine, or May Day.^[2]

Bitel, a historian of Ireland and its medieval literature, disagrees bluntly: "Samhain is Irish. Halloween isn't."^[3] She notes that the medieval stories did not connect Samhain with death and horror, and that the straight line from Samhain to Halloween was drawn by 19th-century folklorists such as John Rhys of Oxford and James Frazer of Cambridge.^[3] In her view, the only real remnant of Samhain in Halloween is the date.^[3]

How did All Hallows' Eve become Halloween?

According to Bitel, Pope Gregory IV decreed in 834 that November 1 would be the day for celebrating all Christian saints; in English this became All Hallows Day, and the night before it All Hallows Eve.^[3] In traditional Catholic culture the three days form one festival, Hallowmas, which takes in Halloween, All Saints' Day on November 1 and All Souls' Day on November 2.^[2]

Why the date was chosen is also debated.^[1][3] The Library of Congress guide says the Christian feasts were meant to stand in for Samhain and eventually replace it, but that Christian and pre-Christian beliefs mingled instead.^[1] Bitel argues that Gregory knew nothing of Irish seasonal holidays and was probably trying to tidy up a feast that people kept on different days.^[3]

Turnip lanterns and guising in Ireland and Scotland

Clodagh Doyle of the National Museum of Ireland says records in the folklore archives at University College Dublin show that the Irish made Halloween lanterns in the 19th century, usually from a turnip and sometimes from a large potato.^[4] The museum's branch in County Mayo, the Museum of Country Life, keeps a plaster cast of a carved "ghost turnip" from Fintown in County Donegal.^[4] A schoolteacher donated the original in 1943 because nobody made such lanterns anymore; it was about 40 years old and close to falling apart.^[4] Halloween was also known in Ireland as "ghost night" or "spirit night"; Doyle says it was believed the family's dead might come home, so people set out a place or food for them.^[4]

Bitel offers a different view of the lanterns: she calls jack-o'-lanterns "neither ancient nor Irish", points to an 18th-century tale of a Jack who tricked the devil, and suggests that carving turnips probably began in England around All Saints' Day and Guy Fawkes Day on November 5.^[3]

In Scotland, the best-known custom that survives is guising: going out in disguise.^[5] The National Records of Scotland explains that people disguised themselves so that returning or evil spirits would not recognise them.^[5] Unlike trick-or-treaters, guisers must perform, telling a joke or singing a song, before receiving nuts, apples or, these days, sweets.^[5] Bitel traces guisers to medieval Scotland, where people in disguise begged for "soul cakes" on All Souls' Day.^[3] In the early 1900s, Scottish newspaper reports suggest guising could go on for several weeks before it was fixed to one night.^[5]

How did Halloween come to North America?

According to Bitel, Halloween customs first appeared in the United States in the mid-19th century, when Irish, English and other immigrants brought their holidays with them.^[3] Irish immigration to the United States rose dramatically with the Great Famine, which began in 1845 when a blight destroyed the potato, the Irish staple food.^[6] In their new home, pumpkins were far more plentiful than turnips, so a pumpkin with a candle inside became the familiar Halloween lantern.^[6][3]

Doyle cautions that a direct link to any particular emigrant is unlikely ever to be found.^[4] The holiday took a new turn in the 1920s and 1930s with the rise of radio, film and mass entertainment.^[6] Like Christmas and Easter, Bitel notes, it also became a feast of consumerism, as companies mass-produced costumes, paper decorations and packaged candy.^[3]

Where did trick-or-treating come from?

According to the City of Edmonton Archives, parading in the streets, begging for treats and wearing costumes were all part of earlier celebrations such as All Saints' Day, Guy Fawkes Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas.^[7] In Vancouver, a newspaper described disguised young people visiting homes on Halloween in 1898, without using the phrase "trick or treat".^[8]

Sources disagree about when the phrase itself first appeared.^[7][8] The City of Edmonton Archives says the earliest recorded use is a 1927 newspaper report from Blackie, Alberta.^[7] The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, revised in 2025, finds earlier forms of the chant, "tricks or treats" and "treat or trick", in Ontario newspapers of 1917, and dates the exact wording "trick or treat" to Alberta in 1927.^[8]

Edmonton's archives date trick-or-treating as it is known today to the late 1920s, and say that after the Second World War homes became the main target and the "trick" was usually an idle threat.^[7]