When October’s chill creeps in and daylight shrinks, you can almost feel the world shifting gears. Something old stirs—a memory, maybe, or just a hint of magic in the air.
Long before anyone called it Halloween, people lit fires and clung to their beliefs to fend off the dark. Way back, the Celts marked Samhain, the end of harvest, the start of the long night.
This wasn’t just a date on the calendar. For them, it was a doorway. The boundary between the living and the dead blurred. Spirits wandered. People showed respect, left out offerings, and lit bonfires on the hills to welcome ancestors and scare off troublemakers from beyond. They didn’t just hope the ghosts would pass by. They made sure of it.
Then Christianity arrived. Instead of wiping out Samhain, it folded the old ways into new ones. All Saints’ Day landed on November 1st, and the night before picked up a new name: All Hallows’ Eve—Halloween.
The custom of “souling”—kids or the poor going door to door, trading prayers for the dead for little cakes—echoes in the way kids trick-or-treat now.
In medieval England and Ireland, people carved grotesque faces into turnips or beets, placing candles inside them to frighten away evil spirits or mischievous souls like “Stingy Jack”—a wandering ghost condemned to roam the earth with only a hollowed out turnip lamp to light his way.
