A History With Teeth: How Halloween Kept Its Bite

Halloween, the spookiest and most chilling night of the year, has roots dating from over 2,000 years ago. From ancient Celtic pagan rituals to Irish immigrants trying to scare away restless spirits, the night of October 31st has been molded by millennia of history. 

Samhain, the ancient Celtic festival that originally inspired Halloween, designated the end of harvest and the beginning of winter. It was believed that the boundary between the dead and the living became blurred and indistinct at night, so they lit tall bonfires and dressed up in costumes with animal skins and heads to ward off ghosts. Romans have even blended their own festivals with Samhain: apple-bobbing comes from the apple that the goddess of trees and fruit, Pomona, carried. Eventually, the Church’s Pope Gregory III declared November 1st as All Saints’ Day, and the night before was named All Hallows Eve, then became Halloween. 

Modern Halloween also has the jack-o’-lantern, thanks to the Irish immigrants who brought over the tradition of carving scary faces into turnips to scare off spirits. These spirits include a wandering ghost named “Stingy Jack,” who was banished from both heaven and hell for his sinful life and fooling the Devil, and who carried a turnip with a burning coal inside. Trick-or-treating also became popular, stemming from the poor trading “soul cakes” for prayers for the dead. The NRF, or National Retail Federation, recorded up to $13.1 billion dollars in total Halloween sales in 2025, and is expecting to surpass that in 2026. Thousands of years later, Halloween still hasn’t lost any of its teeth, it just has a bit of a sweeter bite.