Intro
The pumpkins on the Tree were not mere pumpkins. Each had a face sliced in it. Each face was different. Every eye was a stranger eye. Every nose was a weirder nose. Every mouth smiled hideously in some new way.
[Image description: Cover illustration by Joseph Mugnaini for Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree (Knopf, 1972), depicting the Halloween tree, its branches filled with jack-o-lanterns. To the left is a dark, stylized moon in a pale sky; to the right the main characters from the book are bent against the wind. (Source: @vortex_library on Twitter)]
There must have been a thousand pumpkins on this tree, hung high and on every branch. A thousand smiles. A thousand grimaces. And twice-times-a-thousand glares and winks and blinks and leerings of fresh-cut eyes.
And as the boys watched, a new thing happened.
The pumpkins began to come alive.
One by one, starting at the bottom of the Tree and the nearest pumpkins, candles took fire within the raw interiors. This one and then that and this and then still another, and on up and around, three pumpkins here, seven pumpkins still higher, a dozen clustered beyond, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand pumpkins lit their candles, which is to say brightened up their faces, showed fire in their square or round or curiously slanted eyes. Flame guttered in their toothed mouths. Sparks leaped out their ripe-cut ears. And from somewhere two voices, three or maybe four voices whispered and chanted a kind of singsong or old sea shanty of the sky and time and the earth turning over into sleep. The rainspouts blew spiderdust:
“It’s big, it’s broad...”
A voice smoked from the rooftop chimney:
“It’s broad, it’s bright...
It fills the sky of All Hallows’ Night...”
From open windows somewhere, cobwebs drifted:
“The strangest sight you’ve ever seen.
The Monster Tree on Halloween.”
[Image Description: The full moon behind a scrim of branches. The light of the moon is orange. Photo by Neven Krcmarek via Unsplash]
Happy Halloween, ghoul gang! I am sitting here in my office with a single candle lit to record the first Small Town Spooky Halloween special. It’s the spookiest, eeriest, most terrifying time of year (barring tax return season, obviously). When I was a kid, I loved Halloween. There was nothing better than a night spent slathering myself with some off-brand face paint before draping my awkward prepubescent body in the finest of garishly-dyed nylon fabrics, then heading out into the frost-tinged air with my pillow case to collect what I was due. Growing up as a child in southwestern Ontario gave me this weird, annual sense of entitlement to other people's candy.
My parents were about it, too. They told us stories of before we were born, when they'd dress up to freak out the neighbourhood kids. One year my mother answered the door dressed as a pale, sunken-eyed widow. "Be careful," she'd say when a group of raucous teens would knock, demanding treats and threatening tricks, loud enough to be overhead. "My husband is buried in our front yard." She'd point gloomily to the foam gravestone set underneath the twisted, spindly tree overhanging our lawn. "He doesn't like teenagers much."
The kids would laugh as they swiped their candy, then head back down the drive—only to scream and break into frantic running as my dad emerged, pale-faced and moaning, from where he’d been patiently, silently lying beneath the strategically-placed pile of leaves in front of the foam grave marker.
It's only fitting that my dad passed close to Halloween. I associate the season and holiday with him, and I have so many fun memories of pumpkin carving and fall walks collecting leaves. Then, of course, there were the times he'd scare the living hell out of me and my friends—by creeping down the hallway while we were in my room using a Ouija board and popping out, screaming, at the most opportune moment—or taking the time to borrow a hockey mask from the neighbours and, on the night my friends and I made the mistake of watching scary movies by the large, dark, picture window at the front of our house, army-crawl like some Jason Vorhees wannabe across the front lawn and jump up to knock on the window just as we were starting to feel uneasy.
For me, Halloween represents all the mystery that is lost in the mundane world—it challenges the things we think we know about how our lives work, forces us to confront alternative theories of why we’re here and what happens after we’re gone, and makes room for the possibility that something unexplainable might be lurking just on the other side. As Debbie Reynolds once said in her iconic role as Agatha Cromwell in the Disney Channel Original Movie Halloweentown, “Magic is really very simple, all you’ve got to do is want something and then let yourself have it.”
So let yourself get as creepy, as spooky, and freaky as you like, pull on your best ghoulish garb, fling open your windows to let the light of the full moon wash over you—and let’s ghost into it.
[Image Description: A pair of hands holds a small animal skull between two pumpkins and many lit candles. Photo via pexelstocks]
What Is Halloween?
Halloween is a North American holiday with its own particular trappings. Some people decorate their homes (and front lawns) with symbols of the season: hay bales, cornstalks, wreaths of autumn leaves. But some do it with macabre symbols—skeletons, ghosts, knives, cobwebs, blood and body parts—or else spooky figures, like witches and ghouls. Others watch horror films like the 1978 classic named for the holiday. Little kids and adults alike get garbed in spooky, silly, weird and wild clothing and go out dressed as their favourite pop culture icon or freaky figure from folklore. Armed with pillow cases and grabby hands, youngsters sweep the streets of suburbia, knocking on doors and pitching their voices as they ring the door or knock and demand their treats, lest there be tricks. On doorsteps, porches and in windows, bright orange squashes carved with ghoulish faces or fancy filigree flicker with the light of candles placed gently inside. I've always been fascinated by the origins of Halloween—it's such a strange holiday, with this patchwork history that's hard to get a clear picture of. I mean, sure I love carving a pumpkin and gorging on Halloween candy as much as the next person, but what does it all mean? And why the costumes, and the funny little sing-song kids practice every year in anticipation of having their pillow cases filled?
Name
The origins of Halloween are far from clear, but the holiday as it’s now known and celebrated in North America is a mish-mash of cultural traditions derived from folklore and largely imported by white European settlers, and influenced by the long reach of Christianity. To start with, the name “Halloween” comes from the Christian feast day “All Hallows Eve”, or “All Saints’ Eve” (Hallows is a historic word meaning holy person, thus referring to the saints). The night before All Saints’ or All Hallow’s is therefore the evening; and in Scots English, you can contract the word “evening” into “even” or, as in Halloween, “e’en”—that’s why you’ll sometimes see Halloween spelled with an apostrophe between the two e’s (which is, incidentally, how I was taught to spell it as a kid).
[Image Description: A carving of the apostles from the Notre Dame de Paris cathedral, located on the left side in the Last Judgment tableau. Photo by Daniele D'Andreti via Unsplash]
Timing
In the western Christian tradition, November 1 is the Feast of All Saints. I was raised Catholic (still recovering) and I can tell you that in the Church there’s pretty much a feast or festival day for everything. For the more important calendrical days, there will sometimes be vigils, midnight masses, special prayers, that sort of thing. All Hallows’ Day being fairly significant, given the tribute to all saints “known and unknown”, there is a vigil (or mass) the night before. Roman Catholics also observe All Souls’ Day on November 2, which is basically a day where they pray for those who have died and deserve to go to Heaven, and also those who died and went to Hell but probably shouldn’t be subject to a pass-fail system of judgment. People may go to mass or visit shrines or graveyards, and light candles, leave flowers, and pray for lost loved ones.
All Hallows’ is celebrated by western Christians in November, but some eastern churches, like the Eastern Orthodox, Catholic and Byzantine Luthern churches, celebrate it at a specific time following Easter, which can be as late as the spring or early summer. In fact, historical records show that in the mid-eight century CE, the Roman Catholic Church officially decreed All Hallows’ Feast Day as November 1 under Pope Gregory III. But why? Scholars theorize that this move was made in order to align the feast day with the traditional Celtic festival of Samhain (Sow-in or Sow-een).
Christian missionaries are the reason we know a little bit about the practices and customs of Celts today, since they recorded their encounters with these pagan people beginning in the 5th century CE. The Celts were the people living primarily in what are now known as Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England—as well as the Isle of Man, Cornwall and the Brittany area of Northern France. The Celts were a number of loosely affiliated groups with their own customs and languages, who originated in central Europe around 1200 BCE. They take their name from Greek Mythology; it was said that the father of all Celtic people was Celtus, son of Celtina by the legendary hero Hercules. They had contact with the Romans, who invaded their lands under Julius Caesar, in the 5th century BCE, and were afterwards dispersed through Spain and Portugal; they sacked Rome themselves in 390 BCE and spread over Greece and the Balkans and parts of Asia Minor. In the first century BCE they were again conquered by Rome and by Germanic tribes, though much of the popular media depictions we see today concern the 43 CE invasion of Britain by the Roman Empire, where Rome established Londinium, which was later razed and burned to the ground by Celts under the leadership of the Iceni tribe’s queen Boudicca; or else the fifth century CE arrival of Anglo-Saxons in Britain and the advent of Christianity.
[Image Description: One of the mysterious "Janus" figures of Northern Ireland. Located in Caldragh Cemetery on Boa Island, these stone figures have faces carved on the front and back and are thus called "Janus" in reference to the two-faced Roman god, though they may not intentionally depict him. Photo by K. Mitch Hodge via Unsplash]
Samhain was the “New Year’s” celebration for Celts who were marking the close of the harvesting season and the end of the farming year. Everything had to be prepared for the coming winter—crops harvested, fields tilled, livestock put away indoors, wood piled to keep warm over the winter, and everything they’d grown through the season properly stored to last until spring. The shift from light to dark influenced the associations with the holiday. There was a sense of acknowledging mortality, the bridge between life and death as the growing things decayed and went dormant until the warmer season returned with the sun. And what better way to ward off impending darkness than to build a massive bonfire and drink for three days straight?
There are many Celtic myths associated with Samhain—tales of heroes descending into the fairy world through mysterious caves, races of half-giants demanding sacrifice, and evil magical beings wreaking destruction and havoc. The Celts believed that sidhe or fairies could cross more easily into the mortal realm at this time to mess with humans. In another notable myth, the warrior and god of life Daghdha approaches the Morrigan on the eve of Samhain. The Morrigan was another three-fold goddess of the Celts, whose domain was sexuality, fertility, death and violence. This particular evening, the Morrigan was by the river Unius, washing the armour of the warriors who were doomed to die in the second battle of Magh Tuiredh (moy-TURAH), an epic war spanning centuries, pitting the first mortal inhabitants of Ireland against a race of gods call the Tuatha De Danann (too-ah day dannon). Daghdha and the Morrigan meet in a, let’s say, passionate embrace, all whilst Morrigan straddles the river and continues her washing.
The coupling of two gods representing both life and death, and the physicality of occupying both sides of the river, fits the theme of duality consistent with the season, and the idea of New Year’s being a time of transitions. From light to dark, from birth to death, passing from one state to another, rebirth of a cycle. We see this in the Gregorian calendar (which was named for Pope Gregory the XIII, not the III, though that would have been a cool tie-in). January, the year in which we celebrate New Year’s, is named for the two-faced Roman god Janus, who looks back at the year that’s passed as well as ahead, into the future, presiding over passages and beginnings and endings.
Customs
In Mexico, the last day of October and beginning of November is also a time of festival, as well as remembrance and honoring the dead. Again, we see a blending of indigenous customs overlaid with Christian beliefs. November 1 is the Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, and a national holiday in Mexico, observed with masses, family gatherings, costumes, sweet treats, parades and offerings and prayers for family members who have died. Many Día de los Muertos customs have some parallels to the early All Hallows’ and All Souls’ day rites, but it is heavily influenced by Aztec, Mayan and Toltec indigenous cultural traditions. Perhaps in a later Small Town Spooky episode I’ll get into the specifics of it, but suffice it to say that it is incorrect to refer to Día de los Muertos as “Mexican Halloween” and that sugar skulls (calaveras) are an iconic cultural touchstone and not a Halloween costume.
[Image Description: Three skeleton puppets sitting on a bench, dressed in traditional Mexican garb and flower crowns, faces painted to resemble calaveras or sugar skulls. Photo by Valeria Almaraz via Unsplash]
Now, I grew up with All Hallows’ being a pretty somber affair. The mass is said, and there are a lot of intercessional prayers—essentially petitions to God ala “please, let this person not suffer anymore, even though they probably totes deserve it” type of thing—for souls stuck in purgatory because they had too many parking tickets when they died or didn’t hold the door for old ladies. That doesn’t hold up against the general mayhem and revelry we see in modern, secular North American traditions around Halloween. People dress up, usually in something meant to scare or titillate, and go out on the town to party and carouse (if you’re a grown up). Children also dress up, and go door to door, knocking on strangers’ doors and demanding candy with that mischief-inflected chant: “trick or treat”.
Many of these customs can be traced back to the initial Christianization of Samhain in the United Kingdom. In the 11th c. CE, two centuries after Pope G3 moved All Hallows’ to the first of November, the church adopted the custom established by a French monastery of commemorating the dead on November 2. This created an explicit link between this holiday and the dead. Across Europe, bells were rung in observance of those souls in the afterlife; crypts were opened, decorated with flowers, and offerings of milk and water were left to those recently departed on their graves. In England, gatherings at local village churches included drinking wine, large bonfires and the passing around of seasonal cakes. At this time beggars came asking for alms and were given community donations. Turning their minds to the coming year, priests would encourage the young people of their congregation to couple up, and allow parishoners to blow off some steam by “masquing” or “mumming”, donning costumes and upending the normal social order—men would dress as women, stable boys as bishops, and so on—and parade around the village greens harassing spectators until they begged off with a donation such as a drink or a sweet treat.
Halloween costumes today can be just as subversive as the “topsy-turvy” mummers of the Middle Age European Christians. There is a long historical connection between the North American drag scene and Halloween—the one night a year where it was “more acceptable” for a cisgendered man to dress as in clothing considered feminine. Many drag queens tell stories about their first time in drag being at Halloween, “just for a joke”. The idea that Halloween
allows people to experiment and transgress boundaries of identity is not a new one; however, questions of privilege and cultural appropriation in costumes—that is, trying on the identity of someone who is part of a culture who has been traditionally marginalize, “just for fun”—are finally beginning to gain more public traction. The problem with costumes that play into racial or ethnic stereotypes is that they dehumanize the people whose culture and attributes they are attempting to represent, contributing to a legacy of harmful beliefs foundational to white supremacy that make it easier for white people to believe that anyone outside their group is lesser-than, and not worthy of being treated like a person.
[Image Description: Two PSA posters from the Culture, Not a Costume campaign. The one on the right says "We're a culture, not a costume" and "You wear the costume for one night, I wear the stigma for life." It depicts a person standing in the foreground, wearing a black shirt and frowning. In the background in a person with light skin who has painted their skin darker and given themselves a facial mole, wearing a bandana and a tank top and a necklace that says "Viva Mexico". They are holding their stomach as if pregnant and smoking a cigarette. The one on the left says "We're a culture, not a costume" and "You think it's harmless, but you're not the target." In the foreground, a person wearing jeans, a tan sweater and a necklace is frowning with their arms crossed. In the background, a person holding a red Solo cup is also holding a plastic tomahawk-style hand axe, and wearing a fringed tan skirt, a headress with brightly colored featheres, and has smeared red paint in a horizontal line on their cheeks. They are holding their hand to their mouth and their feet are splayed as if dancing and whooping.]
Through the immigration of Irish and Scottish settlers to western colonies, traditions that
would come to be connected to Halloween were infused in both Canadian and American society. Prior to 1840, Halloween in North America didn’t really exist. Then the Great Famine, caused by a confluence of potato blight and the genocidal inaction of the British government, struck Ireland and Irish migrants who had the means made their way to America. Here they practiced their long cultural traditions around Hallowmass (meaning the time between All Hallows’ Eve and All Souls’ Day), including “souling”—going door to door offering prayers for the dead in exchange for food, which included bread or small cakes such as were called ‘soul cakes or money—and ‘guising’—dressing in costume to confuse evil spirits or entertain passers-by for a sweet or a tip (in other words, a treat). Soulers were known to go house to house carrying a hollowed-out turnip, lit from within by a candle, meant to symbolize a trapped soul languishing in purgatory.
The adaptation of Halloween into a nationally-recognized holiday didn’t come until the early 1900s. The first appearance of the term “Halloween” as applied to October 31 comes from a Canadian newspaper in 1927. Essentially, public officials had taken note of the roving gangs of young men looking to make trouble during this time of year. As this article from the November 1950 issue of John Hopkins’ University American Imago by Louis and Selma Fraiberg notes: “[...] Hallowe’en as practiced by children in this country [...] is a night of strange happenings and evil doings. Witches, skeletons, ghosts [...] are abroad with pumpkin lanterns, baskets and bells. With them are usually an assortment of [...] clows, freaks, bears, tigers [...]. They ring the bells of each lighted house, singing out the lugubrious chant, “Help the po-o-o-r!” Or more ominously, “A trick or treat!” It is the duty of each house-holder to feign horror and speedily fill the outstretched baskets and hands with apples, nuts, candies, cookies or money. While the just are not rewarded [...] the wicked are punished by the spirits who lurk everywhere.” They “may receive a generous heap of garbage at his door or in his hallway”, “a pin stuck in his doorbell to induce a head-splitting continuous ring”, or experience “the soaping and defacing of [their] windows”. “On Hallowe’en doorknobs, signs, portable ornaments, porch furniture, garbage cans, automobile accessories, may be stolen by the avenging spirits who are abroad. Some of these items may find their way into the bonfires which burn here and there.”
While there was an element of mischief associated with boys at Halloween, the dreaded gender binary offered up more whimsical, party-appropriate divertissements for girls. Roasting chestnuts each with different crush’s names inscribed on them to see which one burned the longest, scrying over a mirror in a dark room, lit only by the flame of flickering candle, to try and envision the face of their future husband, and using the peel from an apple tossed over one shoulder to see if it would suggest a letter—the first in her future husband’s name—were just some of the thrilling things girls were allowed to get up to while their brothers were out presumably carrying pitchforks and demanding candy in exchange for not flipping over the neighbour’s car.
The final icon of Halloween I’ll cover here are jack-o-lanterns—pumpkins hollowed out, with their faces carved into ghoulish visages or fantastical scapes, with a candle placed inside to light the carver’s design. At the top of the episode, I read a passage from Ray Bradbury’s book The Halloween Tree, which is one of my seasonal favourites. In this short novella, a group of kids goes out trick or treating on Halloween night. They come across a spooky, gothic-looking house with a tree on the front lawn, the boughs of which are bursting with jack-o-lanterns that seemed to have sprouted from its branches. I also mentioned the tradition of souling where soulers going door to door offering prayers carried hollowed out turnip-lanterns lit with candles. These flickering gourds are some of the most recognizable Halloweeen fixtures.
Their name “Jack-O-Lantern” comes from the Irish story of Jack, sometimes called ‘Stingy’ Jack, a blacksmith who outwitted the Devil many times in life and, upon his death, was not allowed into Hell. The story of Jack’s connection to Halloween as told in Witches, Pumpkins and Grinning Ghosts by Edna Barth, first published in 1972, goes something like this:
One Halloween night, Stingy Jack invited the Devil to sit a spell and drink with him. The Devil agreed, but only so long as Jack paid for the drinks.
“But you can take any form or shape, man, beast, or otherwise!” Jack scoffed. “Why not change yourself into a sixpence? I’ll pay for the drink, and then you’ll change back, and the barman will be none the wiser.”
The Devil agreed, and immediately took the form of a sixpence coin. But instead of paying for a drink, Stingy Jack put the coin-shaped Devil in his pocket—along with a silver cross that stopped the Devil from changing his shape back.
“Let me alone for a year,” Jack told the Devil, “and I’ll set you free.” The Devil agreed.
In the year that Jack was free, he meant to reform—go back to Church, be sweet to his wife, give alms to the poor. But he kept right on acting a scoundrel and a schemer, until the following Halloween, when he was walking down a lonely road in the middle of the night. Unsurprisingly, the Devil found him, with the aim to take Jack’s soul with him back to Hell.
In various versions of the story, Jack has either, by the time he encounters the Devil a second time, been granted three wishes by an angel which allow him to put the Devil off a little longer, or he outwits the Devil again by asking him to grant Jack one final meal on Earth. In what I can only imagine was a move born out of exasperation, the Devil casts around for something to give Jack and lands on a nearby apple tree. As the Devil picks an apple from the tree, Jack carves a crucifix into the trunk, trapping the Devil in its boughs for another ten years.
Finally, a life of hard drinking and being a jerk, probably, Jack dies. Denied entry to Heaven (obviously), he sought out his old nemesis—only to be shunned by the Devil himself, who had had more than enough of Jack’s nonsense in life. The Devil sends Jack off with a final parting gift—an ember to light his way as he wanders for the rest of his unearthly existence. Jack’s ignominious end is summarized in the final verses of the 1851 poem “The Romance of Jack O’ Lantern”: Then since Jack is unfit for heaven/And hell won’t give him room/His ghost is forced to walk the earth/Until the day of doom/A lantern in his hand he bears/the way by night to show/And, from its flame, he’s got the name/Of Jack o’ Lantern now.
Outro/Acknowledgements
The layers of complexity around Halloween and its modern customs are far more than I can cover in just one episode of the podcast, and they’re worth investigating if it’s something that interests you. I didn’t even get into the association of witches with Halloween, but since I was doing “origins” I didn’t want to sidebar too hard into that. I’d love to do an episode about witches sometime in the future, in the context of local stories and legends about them, though.
If you’re interested in learning more about Halloween origins, I really recommend Nicholas Rogers’ book Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night. His book is excellent, and he talks a lot about one aspect that I find really fascinating, which is the class divide with Halloween. On one hand it’s got these aspects to it that are rooted in subversion—you know, mingling of more well-off members of a community with the poorer people dressing in costumes and taking on the guises of figures they’re furthest from, like lords or members of the clergy—and the pranks and trickery along with that, the exploration of the dark corners of the forest, bonfires in the night, that kind of thing. And then along with that you have the sanitisation of the holiday, the ways in which it’s been codified, commercialized and co-opted.
There are depictions of what “civilized”—read: white, middle class—people did on Halloween, especially when it was first being talked about in North American in the late 1800s early 1900s—and you get these sort of gendered activities for girls where they’re trying to predict who their future husbands will be, and people sitting around wearing cute costumes and bobbing for apples or playing other parlour games that are “acceptable”. So there’s an undertone of classicism, bigotry and honestly racism as well, because if impoverished Irish immigrants were the ones out in the forest drinking homemade hooch and burning things and the British settlers who considered themselves “original” colonial families were in their big houses sitting around drinking tea, it really enables the latter to look down their noses at the former.
And I mean, you still get that today, when you consider how kids and parents look at who can afford what costume, and which house is giving out full-sized candy bars. When I lived in Wetaskiwin, which is a tiny town in Alberta near Maskwacis, a Cree First Nations reservation, the white neighbours had something to say every year about First Nations kids being driven into the (largely white) suburbs with their costumes. And I think it’s incredible that this tradition that has its roots in recognizing fundamental human experience—the changing of the seasons, the confrontation of our own mortality, the subversion of social classes—can be painted by this imperialistic, capitalistic brush that puts the focus back on how we’re divided, rather than how we’re the same.
Anyway, as a treat (or perhaps a trick) for this first Halloween episode of Small Town Spooky, I wanted to write an original, short story that dealt with Halloween themes about what happens when Juniper, an unemployed Millennial with a social media addiction and a thing for mommy blogs, experiences the terrifying consequences that come with going viral.
You can read the story "Halloween of Note" here; but first, a quick announcement.
First, I’d like to thank everyone who participated in Small Town Spooky’s first poll, and it looks like the “Ghost-infested dormitory” in BC will be on the roster of upcoming episode topics. I also wanted to let you know that I’ll be going to a bi-weekly schedule; the weekly thing is just a bit too much for me at the moment (especially because I’m doing this all for free) and I’m still trying to figure out the right pacing. So I will be back with a new episode of Small Town Spooky on Sunday, November 14th. Until then, thanks to all you ghouls and goblins for listening and hope to spook you soon.
Music Credits
Special thanks to the providers of the music for this episode.
It’s Not Hard to Get Lost by Bryan Mathys (title theme); Smoldering by Kai Engel; Autumn Sunset by Jason Shaw; Clusticus the Mistaken by Doctor Turtle all licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Nocturne by Kai Engel is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial International 4.0; Tranquility by Kevin MacLeod is under an Attribution 3.0 International License.
Jig of Slurs. Dublin Reel - Merry Blacksmith. The Mountain Road by Sláinte are under a US Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
All sound effects licensed under Creative Commons 0, courtesy of Freesounds.org.
Sources/Further Reading
Barth, Edna. Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween Symbols. United States, Clarion Books, 2000.
Bradbury, Ray. The Halloween Tree. United States, Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
Dixon-Kennedy, Mike. Celtic Myth & Legend: An A-Z of People and Places. United Kingdom, Blandford, 1996.
Ellis, Hercules. The Rhyme Book. Ireland, Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans., 1851.
Fraiberg, Louis, and Selma Fraiberg. “Hallowe’en: Ritual and Myth In A Children’s Holiday.” American Imago, vol. 7, no. 3, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950, pp. 289–328.
Johnson, Ben. “Roman England, the Roman in Britain 43 - 410 AD.” Historic UK, 2017.
Kiffel-Alcheh, Jamie. “Can Kids Wear That? What to Know about Culturally Insensitive Costumes.” NationalGeographic.com, 14 Oct. 2021.
"Halloween, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2021.
Lang, Cady. “What Is Samhain? What to Know about the Ancient Pagan Festival That Came before Halloween.” Time, Time, 30 Oct. 2018,
Neundorf, Paden. “Opinion: It’s Not Hard to Avoid Cultural Appropriation This Halloween.” The Varsity, 24 Oct. 2021.
Penn Editorial Board. “‘Our Culture Is Not Your Costume’: Using Another’s Culture as Your Costume Is Problematic.” The Penn, October 25, 2021.
Rogers, Nicholas. Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night. Oxford University Press, 2002.
Santino, Jack. “Halloween in America: Contemporary Customs and Performances.” Western Folklore, vol. 42, no. 1, Western States Folklore Society, 1983, pp. 1–20.
Forbes, Bruce David. “Halloween.” America’s Favorite Holidays: Candid Histories, 1st ed., University of California Press, 2015, pp. 115–52.
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