Halloween is coming up this Sunday and folks are able to head out and trick or treat after missing a year due to the pandemic. Usually, Halloween is a time for goodies, treats and ghost stories but you may be surprised to hear where those traditions came from. Shayla Escudero has this frightful story.
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It is believed that on Halloween the veil between the living realm and the dead realm is at its thinnest. So, the dead can freely cross into our world, or we may find ourselves wandering into theirs.
Many of the traditions associated with Halloween go back to ancient times and can be traced to Ireland and Scotland.
People there would leave behind food for ghostly visitors or set up candles to honor them. The holiday was called Samhaim and was the night before the new year when the calendar was split up by harvest times. The holiday was meant as a comfort to a society that was dependent on crops and was about to enter a dark and frigid winter.
Folklorist and USC associate professor of anthropology Tok Thompson has researched Halloween at its roots.
TOK THOMPSON: In Ireland it’s not a Halloween party, without a bonfire in Ireland, even today. So the word bonfire, actually it comes from the word ‘bone fire.’ When you would slaughter your animals, you would have all these bones, and then you would burn them. And this, the result would be good fertilizer for your soil. So there’s this cycle, between life and death always going on.
This presence of ghosts and supernatural beings is very prevalent in the celebration of Samhain. In Ireland, it is also a time for fairies. However, they are nothing like Tinkerbell.
THOMPSON: So you know, the the fairy spirits, the spirits of the dead, they were kind of the caretakers of the dead. So in Ireland, the word is she — a lot of people have heard of the Banshee. This is a fairy woman. And a story, which is still very active story in Ireland, is that if you see the Banshee or hear her cry, she gives us funeral wail as if someone has died. What that means that someone is about to die in your family. So these these she spirits can can see into the your own death and your own future.
Irish Immigrants came to the United States and brought their folklore with them. As it became adopted into American culture, Tok Thompson says it became scary in different ways.
THOMPSON: It was known sort of as hell night. A lot of times teenagers thought they had like complete license to do whatever they wanted, the tricks was emphasized not so much the treats, but the tricks.
Various groups in the U. S. continue to come up with their own Halloween traditions. Whether you are getting down with the tricks or the treats, be careful out there.