Halloween is the season for little ghosts and goblins to take to the streets, asking for candy and scaring one another silly. Spooky stories are told around fires, scary movies appear in theaters and pumpkins are expertly carved into jack o lanterns.
Recently, creepy clowns seem to be doing some real terrorizing: In August of 2016, locals in Greenville, South Carolina, reported a clown who was allegedly trying to lure children into the woods, then in September, a teen reported a knife wielding clown in Summitville, Tennessee. Local and state officials in many areas urged people to report suspicious clown sightings. And in South Florida, some stores pulled clown costumes from their shelves and Broward County police advised people not to dress up as the masked grinners, according to the Miami Herald.
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In 2017, the clowning continued. A movie based on the classic Steven King story It was remade and released in the United States on Sept. 8. In the movie, a demon that takes the form of a clown lures children into the sewer with a red balloon. In Lititz, Pennsylvania, police responded to reports of over 20 red balloons tied to sewer grates, according to CBS News. People dressing as clowns remains a popular way to scare. Children in North Dakota, for example, were targeted in May by a knife wielding clown with a boa constrictor and in September, Australia saw an increase of clown sightings before Halloween.
Amid the silly and scary antics, Halloween is much more than just costumes and candy, in fact, the holiday has a rich and interesting history.
Samhain:
Halloween, also known as All Hallows Eve, can be traced back about 2,000 years to a pre Christian Celtic festival held around Nov. 1 called Samhain, which means summer's end in Gaelic, according to the Indo European Etymological Dictionaries.
Because ancient records are sparse and fragmentary, the exact nature of Samhain is not fully understood, but it was an annual communal meeting at the end of the harvest year, a time to gather resources for the winter months and bring animals back from the pastures. Samhain is also thought to have been a time of communing with the dead, according to folklorist John Santino.
There was a belief that it was a day when spirits of the dead would cross over into the other world, Santino told Live Science. Such moments of transition in the year have always been thought to be special and supernatural, he added.
Halloween provides a safe way to play with the concept of death, Santino said. People dress up as the living dead and fake gravestones adorn front lawns activities that wouldn't be tolerated at other times of the year, he said.
But according to Nicholas Rogers, a history professor at York University in Toronto and author of Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night, there is no hard evidence that Samhain was specifically devoted to the dead or to ancestor worship.
According to the ancient sagas, Samhain was the time when tribal peoples paid tribute to their conquerors and when the sidh might reveal the magnificent palaces of the gods of the underworld, Rogers wrote. Samhain was less about death or evil than about the changing of seasons and preparing for the dormancy of nature as summer turned to winter, he said.
Though a direct connection between Halloween and Samhain has never been proven, many scholars believe that because All Saints' Day and Samhain, are so close together on the calendar that they influenced each other and later combined into the celebration now called Halloween.
Costumes and trick or treating
The tradition of dressing in costumes and trick or treating may go back to the practice of mumming and guising, in which people would disguise themselves and go door to door, Santino said. Early costumes were usually disguises, often woven out of straw, he said and sometimes people wore costumes to perform in plays or skits.
The practice may also be related to the medieval custom of souling in Britain and Ireland, when poor people would knock on doors on Hallowmas, asking for food in exchange for prayers for the dead.
Trick or treating didn't start in the United States until World War II, but American kids were known to go out on Thanksgiving and ask for food a practice known as Thanksgiving begging, Santino said.
Mass solicitation rituals are pretty common and are usually associated with winter holidays, Santino said. While one tradition didn't necessarily cause the others, they were similar and parallel, he said.
Tricks and games:
These days, the trick part of the phrase trick or treat is mostly an empty threat, but pranks have long been a part of the holiday.
By the late 1800s, the tradition of playing tricks on Halloween was well established. In the United States and Canada, the pranks included tipping over outhouses, opening farmers gates and egging houses. But by the 1920s and 30s, the celebrations more closely resembled an unruly block party, and the acts of vandalism got more serious.
Some people believe that because pranking was starting to get dangerous and out of hand, parents and town leaders began to encourage dressing up and trick or treating as a safe alternative to doing pranks, Santino said.
However, Halloween was as much a time for festivities and games as it was for playing tricks or asking for treats. Apples are associated with Halloween, both as a treat and in the game of bobbing for apples, a game that since the colonial era in America was used for fortune telling. Legend has it that the first person to pluck an apple from the water filled bucket without using his or her hands would be the first to marry, according to the book Halloween and Commemorations of the Dead by Roseanne Montillo.
Apples were also part of another form of marriage prophecy. According to legend, on Halloween, young women would peel an apple into one continuous strip and throw it over her shoulder. The apple skin would supposedly land in the shape of the first letter of her future husband's name.
Another Halloween ritual involved looking in a mirror at midnight by candlelight, for a future husband's face was said to appear. Like many such childhood games, it was likely done in fun, though at least some people took it seriously.
Christian/Irish Influence:
Some evangelical Christians have expressed concern that Halloween is somehow satanic because of its roots in pagan ritual. However, ancient Celts did not worship anything resembling the Christian devil and had no concept of it. In fact, the Samhain festival had long since vanished by the time the Catholic Church began persecuting witches in its search for satanic cabals. And, of course, black cats do not need to have any association with witchcraft to be considered evil simply crossing their path is considered bad luck any time of year.
As for modern Halloween, Santino, writing in American Folklore: An Encyclopedia, noted that Halloween beliefs and customs were brought to North America with the earliest Irish immigrants, then by the great waves of Irish immigrants fleeing the famines of the first half of the nineteenth century. Known in the North American continent since colonial days, by the middle of the twentieth century Halloween had become largely a children's holiday. Since that time, the holiday's popularity increased dramatically as adults, communities and institutions have embraced the event.
Through the ages, various supernatural entities including fairies and witches came to be associated with Halloween and more than a century ago in Ireland, the event was said to be a time when spirits of the dead could return to their old haunting grounds. Dressing up as ghosts or witches became fashionable, though as the holiday became more widespread and more commercialized, the selection of disguises for kids and adults greatly expanded beyond monsters to include everything from superheroes to princesses to politicians.
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