20 Scary-Good Halloween Trivia, History and Fun Facts

If you’re the sort of person who starts planning next year’s Halloween festivities on November 1st, it can be agonizing to wait for the season (which begins just after Labor Day, we’d argue) to come around again. However you mark the days, it’s now high time to revel in all things spine-tingling, sweet and everything in between — and we’ve pulled together Halloween trivia tidbits to distribute wherever and whenever you like.

Hallowe’en began 2,000 years ago as the Celtic festival of Samhain (“Summer’s End”). With celebrations beginning at sunset on October 31 and continuing until the day waned on November 1, Samhain marked the end of the harvest season and a time when the spirits of the dead were closest to those of the living. (Those pagan traditions began to merge with Christian rites in the eighth century, when Pope Gregory declared November 1 All Saints Day and the evening before it became known as All Hallows Eve.)

In Ireland, Scotland and parts of England, those wishing to deter malevolent forces would carve faces into turnips — a ‘neep lantern’ — and place a candle inside. That tradition became much less laborious for the carvers who came to the New World, where the softer pumpkins proved to be much readier vessels for their protective flames.

Speaking of papal pronouncements with wide-ranging repercussions for Halloween and its symbols, Pope Gregory IX’s “Vox in Rama” (published in 1233 to warn of the evils of witchcraft) claimed that witches consorted with a black cat that was the devil in disguise. Though many other traditions hold that black cats are good omens — they were worshiped as gods in ancient Egypt, are thought to guarantee safe passage for sailors and associated with luck, prosperity and good fortune in France, Japan and England — they have also faced superstitious persecutors throughout history, and they are often the least-adopted felines in animal shelters. Foolishness aside, black cats are demonstrably magical companions.

The first known image of a witch on a broomstick appeared in the margins of Martin Le Franc’s Le Champion des Dames, a poem about virtuous women that depicted female Waldesians, members of a Christian movement that Catholics abhorred. A symbol of deviation from traditional female domesticity, the broom-as-vehicle became shorthand for paganism and wickedness among those who would persecute “witches.” The first person who confessed under torture to riding a broom was a man named Guillaume Edelin, a French priest; he later repented, but remained in prison for the rest of his life.