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The Evolution of Halloween: from Sacred Fires to Trick-or-Treat · TheCampyTraveler

0:01
SPEAKER_00: Hey.
0:02
SPEAKER_00: Okay, come with me to an October 31st in 1903 St.
0:06
SPEAKER_00: Louis, Missouri.
0:07
SPEAKER_00: A little girl named Tootie is about to commit a murder.
0:11
SPEAKER_00: Okay, it's a pretend murder, but she is deadly serious about it.
0:15
SPEAKER_00: Down the street in the neighborhood, the kids have built a bonfire out of furniture, dragging it onto the road and set on fire.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: And the plan for the evening is simple.
0:26
SPEAKER_00: Run up to the grown-ups in your neighborhood, throw a handful of flour in their faces, and announce that you have killed them.
0:33
SPEAKER_00: Tootie wants in.
0:35
SPEAKER_00: She is the youngest and she has something to prove.
0:38
SPEAKER_00: And here's the part that really gets me.
0:40
SPEAKER_00: Nobody in this story thinks of anything about this is strange.
0:45
SPEAKER_00: Nobody calls the police.
0:47
SPEAKER_00: In fact, the parents are encouraging this.
0:50
SPEAKER_00: It's Halloween after all.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: And this is just what Halloween is.
0:55
SPEAKER_00: This is not a horror movie.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: Actually, it's the 1944 MGM musical, the same movie where Judy Garland sings about a trolley.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: And this is what inspired today's episode.
1:07
SPEAKER_00: Fast forward to Halloween 2026, a small, heavily chaperone child dressed as a very small bumblebee, will climb your front porch steps, hold out a plastic pumpkin, and say, trick-or-treat.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: You'll hand over a fun-size Snickers.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: After a subtle cue from her chaperone, usually proud parents who are video recording this milestone event, she'll say thank you, and everyone will go home alive.
1:34
SPEAKER_00: So what happened?
1:36
SPEAKER_00: How does a night built around a flaming cultic ritual, dead neighbors, and a few centuries earlier, young women staring into mirrors at midnight, hoping to glimpse their future husband, turn into the most polite, neighborly, candy-fueled evening of the year?
1:55
SPEAKER_00: The answer is a handful of stories like that of the town drunk who tricked the devil, a poor man knocking on doors, hoping to exchange prayers for cake, and a headless horseman who may have been a pumpkin all along.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: A Minnesota town with a serious outhouse problem, and a boy in a pumpkin patch who just really, really believes.
2:17
SPEAKER_00: Some of these stories are historic, others not so much.
2:21
SPEAKER_00: Halloween wasn't simply invented when someone decided to put a sheet over their head and ask for candy.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: It's a holiday with layers, seasonal rituals, Christian observances, European folk traditions, immigration, mischief pranks, commercial reinvention, and finally the child-centered trick-or-treating most Americans recognize today.
2:43
SPEAKER_00: How did a night associated with spirits, souls, divination, and sometimes genuinely destructive mischief become a holiday built around costumes, candy, and plastic skeletons?
2:54
SPEAKER_00: This is Halloween, the way it actually happened, which is messier, funnier, and a lot stranger than the version printed on the candy bag.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: Don't worry, you won't need a passport or a costume or a willingness to eat candy corn to come along.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: Curiosity is all you need.
3:10
SPEAKER_00: Let's go.
3:15
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Campy Traveler Podcast.
3:18
SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Holly, the Campy Traveler, and I am so glad you are here.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: Okay, no, just a little bit of getting real, and I do tend to get off topic, but this is real.
3:30
SPEAKER_00: This podcast was supposed to have launched over a month ago.
3:33
SPEAKER_00: So some of what I have put together and prepared makes more sense in the context that is the building up to Halloween.
3:39
SPEAKER_00: But we had a rather serious personal family event happen that has made the launch of the podcast and everything pushed back.
3:47
SPEAKER_00: But I was so excited about this that I still wanted to do it.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: As I mentioned before, the Meet Me in St.
3:53
SPEAKER_00: Louis scene is actually the inspiration for this podcast episode.
3:58
SPEAKER_00: Because when I saw it, I thought there is no way that was ever real.
4:01
SPEAKER_00: And I quickly did a little bit of research and realized that, yeah, Halloween in the 1900s really was celebrated that way, but which was crazy to me.
4:09
SPEAKER_00: So then I went even deeper down the rabbit hole and found similarly hilarious stories that all have come together to create Halloween today.
4:19
SPEAKER_00: All you really need to understand about me, though, is that I am curious.
4:25
SPEAKER_00: And this podcast is dedicated to that curiosity.
4:28
SPEAKER_00: And what I was curious about most recently was Halloween.
4:33
SPEAKER_00: If you've ever wondered about the stories hiding behind old buildings, winding streets, forgotten ruins, or people that came before us, we can totally be friends.
4:42
SPEAKER_00: That's exactly the kind of question I ask and the tea that I am itching to spill.
4:47
SPEAKER_00: I want to take you with me.
4:49
SPEAKER_00: Now, a quick disclaimer because I don't want you showing up to expecting the wrong thing.
4:53
SPEAKER_00: This isn't a travel podcast in the way that you're picturing one.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: It's more of a culture, society, and dark history, the spooky chili kind of things, but with the added bonus of I will tell you where to go to actually put your hands on these things, or if you don't want to leave your house, other books or stories or documentaries where you can learn more about these things.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: So if you do want to stand in these places, you'll be a little bit haunted by it because you know what actually happened there.
5:19
SPEAKER_00: Each episode will explore curious people, remarkable places, and the wonderful moments that remind us that our world is way more connected and way stranger than it seems on the surface, and always share the real places you can visit.
5:34
SPEAKER_00: So whether you're commuting, folding laundry, enduring leg day at the gym, or just need 45 minutes where your brain gets to leave the room, I hope this gives you the chance to slow down, wonder a little bit more, and follow curiosity wherever it leads.
5:48
SPEAKER_00: And this time it's leading us all the way to Ireland.
5:54
SPEAKER_00: Before we start, because this nerdy mama can't resist a metaphor, I've got a quick one to frame the history of the way we're going to explore this episode.
6:02
SPEAKER_00: Think of Halloween as an old house that was built with great bones, uh, yeah, pun intended, hundreds of years ago and has lasted through generations, passing from one family to another.
6:15
SPEAKER_00: The first builders built this house for their own needs.
6:18
SPEAKER_00: The next family liked most everything about it, but they would change a wall or move a window, and then somebody added a porch, and then somebody paints the kitchen a different color.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: And the latest owners installed motion-activated skeletons to terrify the delivery drivers.
6:35
SPEAKER_00: The house still sits on that original foundation, but nothing about it looks or works the way that the initial builders did.
6:43
SPEAKER_00: Halloween is like that.
6:44
SPEAKER_00: Nearly every custom we have keeps the shape of earlier cultures and traditions created, but the reason and the understanding of the why we do what we do gets swapped out for something new, the needs of the new generation and the belief system of the new cultures.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: Someone knocks at the door and someone gives them food.
7:03
SPEAKER_00: That outline is centuries old.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: Why it has changed, why it happened has changed completely more than one time.
7:12
SPEAKER_00: There's only one house metaphor.
7:14
SPEAKER_00: That's the one and only metaphor you're getting from here on.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: I'm just going to tell the Halloween stories.
7:18
SPEAKER_00: Nine of them, more or less in order from the oldest beginnings to modern day.
7:27
SPEAKER_00: So let's start with the very bottom of the story, the very oldest layer anyone can point to in Ireland, a night when harvest ends, winter begins, and people believe the doors between the worlds stand open.
7:41
SPEAKER_00: A night known as Sam Hain.
7:43
SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna apologize here again because these Irish places and names are about to be butchered.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: I really am doing my best, I promise.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: Any other night of the year, this would be a boring story if you're not unfamiliar with Sam Hain.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: So this whole story is a little bit different because it takes place on Sam Hain, and I'll talk about Sam Hain more in just a second.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so this story unfolds in the court of King Alili and Queen Mayb, and they're feasting in their royal palace that is built near the fairy mound called Krachan.
8:22
SPEAKER_00: Krakjan, C-R-U-A-C-H-A-N.
8:27
SPEAKER_00: Now, these fairy hills are common, but usually you wouldn't build your palace next to them because people did not mess with the fairy folk, but for some reason Alil did.
8:37
SPEAKER_00: And it's Sam Hain, so this makes the location even worse.
8:40
SPEAKER_00: The night where Irish year tips from summer to winter, and outside the hall, two prisoners have been hanged.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: So around this feast, King Allel dares someone to go out on Sam Hain and tie a twig around the foot of one of these unfortunate dead men.
8:59
SPEAKER_00: One by one, the bravest men boastfully go outside and come running right back in because the darkness just actually kind of attacks them and they're scared there is something in the dark that's going to get them.
9:11
SPEAKER_00: So one by one, they fail at this task until we get to our champion who is called Nera.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: He says he'll take the dare, he puts on his good armor and walks out the door and finds the two bodies hanging on the gallows.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: He loops a twig around the ankle of one of them and it springs off.
9:29
SPEAKER_00: He ties it again, it springs off.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: So three times this twig falls off until finally the corpse talks to Nera and says, if you tie it like this and use a peg to tack it on, the twig will stay and you'll win the bet.
9:44
SPEAKER_00: Nera doesn't really question this because again it's Sam Hain and the doors between the worlds of the dead and the living are open.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: So of course this corpse is talking to him.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: Where it gets a little bit weirder is that after he's taken this practical advice, the corpse goes on to continue to speak to him, and Nera hasn't just run right back inside.
10:02
SPEAKER_00: Nera listens to this dead man as the dead man says, You know, I was really thirsty when they hanged me.
10:09
SPEAKER_00: So could you please take me to get something to drink?
10:14
SPEAKER_00: And Nera does this.
10:15
SPEAKER_00: For some reason, he takes the corpse down, lets him hang on his neck, and they travel piggyback to try and find something for this man to drink.
10:22
SPEAKER_00: They come to the first house that's surrounded by a lake of fire.
10:25
SPEAKER_00: The corpse says, No, we can't go in there.
10:27
SPEAKER_00: The second house is surrounded by a lake of water, and the corpse says, No, we can't go in there.
10:31
SPEAKER_00: Comes to the third house where everyone seems to be asleep and they go inside.
10:35
SPEAKER_00: The man who is dead then drinks deeply from the washing water, sprays it all over the family who is sleeping in their beds, killing them all.
10:44
SPEAKER_00: Now, that was really underhanded of this guide, but it also tells you a little something about Sam Hain.
10:50
SPEAKER_00: The family who had left out their washing water was already not paying attention to Irish folklore that talks about the dangers of leaking out your washing water, probably because they know full well of the deadly consequences, but also they weren't doing the hearth and home rituals associated with Sam Hain that would protect them and keep the evil spirits out.
11:09
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna leave the story here.
11:10
SPEAKER_00: If you want to look up the adventure of Nera, it's an interesting read and it's fun.
11:15
SPEAKER_00: There's more twists and turns to it, but for purposes of talking about Sam Hain and Halloween, that's kind of where we go.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: So the most important part of the story is that it shows what storytellers believed about Sam Hain, that the border between the worlds has come unlatched.
11:33
SPEAKER_00: If you went outside, you went at your own risk, and the belief was not limited to leaving one's home.
11:40
SPEAKER_00: The three houses visited by Nera and the corpse had done different things, and two houses had protected themselves, and the last one had not.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: So there was a full belief in the need of protection.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: Now I have to put on my academic card again here for just a second, because we're heading into territory where the internet gets really loud and the actual facts and evidence get really quiet.
12:02
SPEAKER_00: The adventure of Mira about Sam Hain, taking place on Sam Hain, wasn't written down until centuries later.
12:09
SPEAKER_00: Yes, it's a thousand years old, but the actual celebrations of Sam Hain by the people who invented Sam Hain were still hundreds of years before that.
12:18
SPEAKER_00: So it's not a great source to tell us exactly what Sam Hain was.
12:22
SPEAKER_00: And that is why.
12:23
SPEAKER_00: This is a cautionary tale here.
12:25
SPEAKER_00: The actual academic knowledge of what Sam Hain is and isn't, we don't really know for sure.
12:31
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of people like to say Sam Hain was basically Halloween old-fashioned style, and it's not.
12:37
SPEAKER_00: What we do know is that it was at the summer's end.
12:41
SPEAKER_00: It marked the start of the dark half of the year.
12:44
SPEAKER_00: And in a world of herders and farmers, that was really serious.
12:47
SPEAKER_00: You brought your cattle in from the summer pasture, decided which animals you could afford to feed through the winter and which you could not, and there were gatherings and feasts and fires, probably to trade the harvest and the animals.
13:02
SPEAKER_00: What we don't know is the story you've heard on every cable special, that the Celts celebrated Sam Hain as their new year, or a festival of the dead, or that ghosts walked the earth, and that everyone dressed in frightening costumes to fool the dead, or that this is how Halloween began.
13:20
SPEAKER_00: The historian Ronald Hutton, who literally wrote the book on Britain's ritual year, went through the medieval sources and found no evidence that Sam Hain was a feast of the dead or proof that it opened the year.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: What the sources do say is that it was a time of supernatural forces were generally to be guarded against or placated, which is spookier, I think.
13:43
SPEAKER_00: Guard and placate, I think, says spookier.
13:46
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
13:47
SPEAKER_00: Here's the honest version of Halloween's oldest layer.
13:50
SPEAKER_00: It was a real festival, a real fear of darkness, and old superstition that on this night the doors between the world stood open, and a lot of storytellers, layered her, filled in the blanks with ghosts and celebrations.
14:06
SPEAKER_00: And that's okay.
14:06
SPEAKER_00: The ghost-shaped blanks are part of the story too.
14:09
SPEAKER_00: Sam Hain gave the season its fear of the dark.
14:14
SPEAKER_00: Then centuries later, medieval churches gave the fear a job.
14:18
SPEAKER_00: If the dead were waiting, the living had a duty to help them, and the best way to do it was to feed the stranger at the door.
14:26
SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly where our next story begins.
14:29
SPEAKER_00: Flash forward with me a couple of centuries and picture an English village in early November, sometime in the later Middle Ages.
14:37
SPEAKER_00: And just to keep things interesting, let's say that your mother died six months ago, and you're worried about her ever since.
14:44
SPEAKER_00: There's a knock at the door, and someone poor stands there, maybe a child, maybe a widow, maybe an old man, and asks for a soul cake, which is a spiced bun.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: In return, they promise to pray for your dead.
15:00
SPEAKER_00: In the belief of the time, the prayer is worth something.
15:04
SPEAKER_00: The prayers from the poor were thought to be especially effective.
15:09
SPEAKER_00: For you, it was a spiritual transaction.
15:11
SPEAKER_00: For them, it was dinner.
15:13
SPEAKER_00: To see why this is happening, we need the calendar.
15:15
SPEAKER_00: The word Halloween is a contraction of All Hallows Eve.
15:19
SPEAKER_00: Hallow is an old word for holy, and Een is evening.
15:23
SPEAKER_00: So Halloween literally means holy evening, the night before All Saints' Day, which is November 1st, a day of feasting and honoring all the saints.
15:33
SPEAKER_00: Sometime in the 700s, a chapel for all saints was dedicated in St.
15:38
SPEAKER_00: Peter's, tied to that date.
15:40
SPEAKER_00: Hutton points out that by the year 800, churches in England and Germany were already keeping All Saints' Day on November 1st.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: So Rome may have been ratifying the Northern European habit rather than inventing one.
15:55
SPEAKER_00: In 1835, Pope Gregory IV and the Emperor St.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: Louis made it official across all of Northwestern Europe.
16:04
SPEAKER_00: Now you'll often hear the church simply slap a saint on a pagan party.
16:08
SPEAKER_00: The truth is messier.
16:10
SPEAKER_00: No one can prove a direct line from San Hain to all saints.
16:14
SPEAKER_00: The calendar gave older and newer customs a place to coexist, and historians still argue about how much.
16:22
SPEAKER_00: The sole cake beggar became such a familiar figure that by the 1590s, Shakespeare could have a character in the two gentlemen of Verona whine like a beggar at Hollomans.
16:35
SPEAKER_00: The audience knew exactly what they meant.
16:37
SPEAKER_00: Here's my favorite twist in the whole episode.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: England turned Protestant, and Protestant theology says no purgatory.
16:44
SPEAKER_00: So let me back up a little bit.
16:47
SPEAKER_00: The reason you wanted the poor and the needy to pray for your dead mother was because it shortened her time in purgatory, which is a Catholic belief, which is why we go back to the Pope and the ratifying of the Catholic holiday, All Souls Day, in the 800s-ish.
17:05
SPEAKER_00: So when England turned Protestant, there is no purgatory in that belief system.
17:09
SPEAKER_00: So you can't pray anyone out, which is again a shifting of the beliefs, which affects the evolution of Halloween.
17:17
SPEAKER_00: The entire logic around a soul cake had collapsed, but the people kept doing it anyway.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: In parts of England, so ling, which was going door to door for these cakes, lingered for centuries after the doctrine behind it was gone.
17:31
SPEAKER_00: Folks still asked for cake and sang a little rhyme at the door.
17:35
SPEAKER_00: The theology went out, the cake stayed, and I can't disagree with that.
17:38
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I want cake, and if I can get it by singing door to door, I'd probably have done it.
17:43
SPEAKER_00: Meantime, in Scotland and Ireland, something else was taking shape, guising from the word disguise.
17:50
SPEAKER_00: By the 19th century, groups of young people were going door to door at Halloween in masks, blackened faces, or borrowed clothes.
17:58
SPEAKER_00: Just a quick sidetrack here for the contacts which my nerdy soul loves, borrowed clothes were a big deal because in the days before fast fashion, clothing was hard won at best, and it was made to last.
18:11
SPEAKER_00: So you knew whose coat it was because it had probably been in that family for a long time.
18:16
SPEAKER_00: So if your neighbor or somebody from three farms or overwore your coat, it really was a good disguise.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: And this is the detail I love.
18:25
SPEAKER_00: You can't, okay, so you're wearing somebody else's clothes, you're wearing a mask, and you're standing on somebody's doorstep, and you can't just stand there with your hand out.
18:32
SPEAKER_00: You have to perform.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: You have to sing a song, recite a poem, and tell a joke.
18:37
SPEAKER_00: Entertainment was the price of a treat.
18:40
SPEAKER_00: So entertainment took the place of prayers.
18:44
SPEAKER_00: Folklorists love to say the disguises were meant to confuse wandering spirits, and that is possible.
18:50
SPEAKER_00: It's also hard to prove.
18:52
SPEAKER_00: A kid in a bed sheet in the 19th century Glasgow was probably just a kid in a bed sheet who wanted cake.
18:59
SPEAKER_00: But look at what's now on the table.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: Someone knocks, there's a little performance, you hand over food, the outline for trick-or-treating is very visible, centuries before anyone says the words.
19:10
SPEAKER_00: And what changed is the reason, prayers for the dead, songs for a nut, eventually nothing but a costume and a thank you.
19:16
SPEAKER_00: Same shape, new reason.
19:19
SPEAKER_00: By now the calendar has given the night its name, Halloween, and the door has been given a ritual, but the night still has no face.
19:27
SPEAKER_00: What it needs next is a character, a light in the window, a story about why people feared the dark, other than just Hans Sam Hain and the darkness that was filled with spirits.
19:37
SPEAKER_00: Keep that in your pocket because we're about to read its best example.
19:40
SPEAKER_00: And he's carrying a turnip.
19:42
SPEAKER_00: This is probably my favorite one.
19:43
SPEAKER_00: I've heard this one, this one was one I was aware of before the Meet Me in St.
19:47
SPEAKER_00: Louis thing, and I thought Halloween came from here alone.
19:51
SPEAKER_00: But there's again lots of other places Halloween came from.
19:54
SPEAKER_00: Okay, story number three: Stingy Jack and the turnip that crossed an ocean.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: I'll not be offended if you take the opportunity to freshen your drink and grab a quick snack because this folklore right here is best told the way it has been for centuries, in a pub with a glass in your hand, by someone who has told this story far too many times.
20:15
SPEAKER_00: So why mess with a classic?
20:17
SPEAKER_00: Go get your drink.
20:18
SPEAKER_00: There was once a man named Jack in Ireland.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: Some say he was a blacksmith, others say not so much, that he was just a layabout.
20:26
SPEAKER_00: But what everyone agrees on is that Jack was a drinker, a cheat, and a liar.
20:32
SPEAKER_00: Not just an ordinary liar.
20:34
SPEAKER_00: Jack's penchant for fibbing was of such a natural talent that the neighbors called him stingy Jack because he wouldn't part with a penny if you set his coat on fire.
20:45
SPEAKER_00: And he used these lies to get out of parting with that penny.
20:49
SPEAKER_00: One night, the devil came for Jack.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: Time's up, Jack, the devil said, and Jack, being Jack, said, Well, fair enough.
20:58
SPEAKER_00: One last drink first.
20:59
SPEAKER_00: The devil agreed.
21:01
SPEAKER_00: Then Jack said, as he's patting down his coat pockets, I'm short.
21:05
SPEAKER_00: Could you turn yourself into a coin so I can pay?
21:08
SPEAKER_00: And the devil, who is vain about his talents, did exactly that.
21:12
SPEAKER_00: He turned himself into a shiny sixpence, which Jack scooped up and put into his pocket, which just happened to have a silver cross in it as well.
21:23
SPEAKER_00: And the devil, everyone knows, cannot change shape next to a cross.
21:28
SPEAKER_00: So he was stuck.
21:29
SPEAKER_00: Jack let him out on one condition leave me alone for a year, which seems like a bargain.
21:36
SPEAKER_00: The devil, bargain well struck, humiliated, agreed so that he could change back.
21:42
SPEAKER_00: A year later, the devil comes back and says, Jack, time to go.
21:47
SPEAKER_00: Jack, seeing a lovely apple tree, says, Okay, a deal's a deal.
21:52
SPEAKER_00: But before we go, look at that lovely apple tree over there.
21:55
SPEAKER_00: Would you pick me just one last apple?
21:58
SPEAKER_00: And the devil, who has apparently learned Nothing.
22:02
SPEAKER_00: Climbs the and it's also a lot more merciful than you expect the devil to be.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: He climbs up the apple tree.
22:08
SPEAKER_00: Jack pulls out his knife and carves a cross into the trunk of the tree.
22:12
SPEAKER_00: Now the devil is stuck up the tree while a drunk man laughs at him from the ground.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: This time Jack makes the devil promise him, Never come take my soul.
22:22
SPEAKER_00: Never, not ever.
22:25
SPEAKER_00: You'd think that would be the happy ending for Jack.
22:28
SPEAKER_00: Because the devil did agree.
22:30
SPEAKER_00: But when Jack dies, as even Jack must, he wanders to the gates of heaven, and Saint Peter takes one look at the life that Jack lived and says, No, sir, you cannot live here.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: Fair.
22:43
SPEAKER_00: Jack knows he probably really didn't qualify for crossing through the pearly gates.
22:47
SPEAKER_00: He trudges down to hell.
22:49
SPEAKER_00: And the devil, a creature of his word, says, I promised, I cannot take you.
22:56
SPEAKER_00: Jack says, Where am I supposed to go?
22:58
SPEAKER_00: And the devil, who was completely done with Jack at this point and kind of feeling petty, hurls a single burning coal from the fires of hell and says, Go back the way you came.
23:10
SPEAKER_00: It is dark and cold, and Jack has only this coal to light his way, which is hot.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: In his pocket, he happens to have a turnip, which Jack was known to be eating all the time.
23:21
SPEAKER_00: Imagine how smelly Jack left to be.
23:23
SPEAKER_00: Stingy and stinky Jack.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, so he has this turnip, and instead of carrying the coal in his hand, he hollows out the turnip and puts the coal in it to light his way, making himself a little lantern.
23:34
SPEAKER_00: And to this day, Jack is still out there with his little lantern going through the dark countryside of Ireland, scaring people.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: People called him Jack of the Lantern or Jack-o'-Lantern.
23:49
SPEAKER_00: Once it crossed the ocean with immigrants, the fruit or vegetable of choice became pumpkins in the New World, not Jack, not it became pumpkins, not turnips.
24:02
SPEAKER_00: So what do we do with a story like that?
24:05
SPEAKER_00: It has three jobs, and each one changes the holiday.
24:09
SPEAKER_00: First, it explains something eerie.
24:11
SPEAKER_00: The phrase jack-o'-lantern is older than any carved vegetable by the 1600s.
24:17
SPEAKER_00: It meant a man with a lantern, like a night watchman, and also the flickering lights that drift over bogs at night.
24:24
SPEAKER_00: We'd call them will-o' the wisps.
24:27
SPEAKER_00: So Jack also has that connection to be a will-of-the-wisp.
24:30
SPEAKER_00: If you're crossing an Irish bog in 1750 with a few pints in you, and you saw a little light moving where no person could be, you didn't need a chemistry lecture, you had Jack, the clever trickster who bargained his way out of damnation.
24:46
SPEAKER_00: Ireland gave him a lantern.
24:49
SPEAKER_00: Second, it gives the turnip a job.
24:51
SPEAKER_00: In Ireland and Scotland, people carved faces into turnips, sometimes potatoes and beets, and lit them with a candle or an ember.
24:59
SPEAKER_00: Later explanations say the grinning faces were meant to scare off wandering spirits, Jack included.
25:06
SPEAKER_00: I want to be careful.
25:07
SPEAKER_00: We have good evidence for the turnip lanterns in the 19th century and thinner evidence about what it originally meant.
25:15
SPEAKER_00: But the pairing of the story and the object is powerful.
25:18
SPEAKER_00: The legend gave the lantern a reason, and the reason is how a custom survives.
25:24
SPEAKER_00: Also, have you ever tried to carve a turnip?
25:26
SPEAKER_00: It's a cardio workout.
25:28
SPEAKER_00: In 1840, Ireland's Great Famine sent well over a million people across the ocean.
25:35
SPEAKER_00: Scots went to, and they landed in a country with a native crop that was enormous, soft, bright, orange, just begging to be carved.
25:44
SPEAKER_00: The pumpkin was already an American autumn symbol, and the harvest crop celebrated the 1850 poem The Pumpkin, long before it was an emblem of Halloween.
25:55
SPEAKER_00: Some researchers trace the first printed use of jack-o'-lantern for a carved vegetable to America in the 1830s, and American kids would already be carving pumpkins and slipping candles inside to scare people at night.
26:10
SPEAKER_00: As a prank.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: So in one orange vegetable, you now have an Irish ghost lantern, a harvest cropped, and a practical joke.
26:19
SPEAKER_00: And look at what happened to the meeting.
26:21
SPEAKER_00: The lantern once hung in a window to keep restless souls away became the lantern we carved to show neighbors we have a personality.
26:29
SPEAKER_00: Jack went from a warning to a mascot, new season, new shape.
26:34
SPEAKER_00: So by the time pumpkins take over from the turnip, Halloween has a name, a ritual at a door, and a glowing face in the window, all of it built around keeping out the dead or helping out the dead.
26:47
SPEAKER_00: The next change takes place indoors, where nobody is guarding against ghosts anymore, and everybody is trying to find out who they'll marry.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: And this one is so fun because it reminds me of the holiday classic that my family watches every year, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
27:03
SPEAKER_00: That Halloween party that they have has some historical accuracies.
27:09
SPEAKER_00: They used to tell ghost stories and all of that fun, often usually set around Christmas, but that's a whole other aside.
27:14
SPEAKER_00: So we'll keep this set at Halloween.
27:17
SPEAKER_00: If you assumed Halloween was about death and terror, it's it's not always.
28:32
SPEAKER_00: If one cracks and jumps away, well, that's a different story.
28:37
SPEAKER_00: And at midnight, alone, you sit and eat an apple in front of the mirror, and your future spouse's face is supposed to appear over your shoulder.
28:48
SPEAKER_00: There are more.
28:49
SPEAKER_00: You toss a long apple peel over your shoulder and read the initial it makes on the floor.
28:55
SPEAKER_00: So think of peeling an apple in one long, continuous peel all the way down.
28:59
SPEAKER_00: So the peel is that lovely springy coil, throw it over your shoulder and it's gonna make some squigglies.
29:06
SPEAKER_00: And with cursive, kids today would be messed up because it's not gonna do manuscript initials, but you throw it over your shoulder and in the cursive squirrys, you're gonna find the initials of your future husband.
29:17
SPEAKER_00: Now, did everybody who bobbed from Apple, and oftentimes, sorry, I didn't tie this in.
29:23
SPEAKER_00: This is where bobbing for apples came from.
29:25
SPEAKER_00: You wanted that apple not just to eat it, but to eat it in front of the mirror to see your spouse or to peel it and find the initials.
29:32
SPEAKER_00: So not everybody who bobbed for apples believed it would reveal their destiny, but it's still party fun.
29:39
SPEAKER_00: Folks did believe, and that belief ran on a spectrum.
29:42
SPEAKER_00: One person takes the ritual seriously, another does it because grandma did or because of peer pressure.
29:49
SPEAKER_00: And there's someone across the room that is socially acceptable to get close to them because of these fun party tricks and games that they're doing.
29:57
SPEAKER_00: It's quite an enormous shift.
29:59
SPEAKER_00: It goes from supernatural and scary and to be guarded against.
30:03
SPEAKER_00: Now it's something that you play with.
30:05
SPEAKER_00: It's a game, it's fun.
30:07
SPEAKER_00: And once it's a game, you go to the 1909, a Massachusetts paper company, Denison, published the first book of its boogie books, its party planning guides full of crepe paper costumes, decoration, and games.
30:22
SPEAKER_00: It's arguably the first time Halloween got a marketing department.
30:27
SPEAKER_00: Same shape, new reason.
30:29
SPEAKER_00: Fear traded for flirtation and then a catalog.
30:33
SPEAKER_00: Now Halloween is a parlor game.
30:36
SPEAKER_00: Still supernatural, but no one takes it quite as seriously.
30:40
SPEAKER_00: The next story comes from a writer who never once mentioned Halloween, but still gave us the Halloween ghost classic.
30:48
SPEAKER_00: The Puritans who settled into Massachusetts did so with lots of festivals.
30:53
SPEAKER_00: So this is where Washington Irving and the legend of Sleepy Hollow came from.
30:59
SPEAKER_00: It's not a real Halloween story, not the way it appears.
31:02
SPEAKER_00: It was published decades before Halloween became widely recognized, but that's one of the reasons that Halloween exists.
31:10
SPEAKER_00: The horseman became so tangled up with the hot holiday adaptations carried him out of Sleepy Hollow across the United States.
31:18
SPEAKER_00: After the potato famine, Irish immigrants poured into American cities and towns with Scottish immigrants alongside them, and Halloween came in their luggage.
31:27
SPEAKER_00: In the 19th century, it started showing up in American newspapers, parties, and invitations.
31:32
SPEAKER_00: And it was increasingly a source of mischief, and I do mean mischief.
31:36
SPEAKER_00: Gates were lifted off their hinges and left in neighbors' fields, wagons were hauled onto the roof of the barn, cabbages were hurled at doors, outhouses were tipped over, which in this period was practically a competitive sport and really icky.
31:52
SPEAKER_00: In Anoka, Minnesota, residents reportedly guarded their houses until the wee hours of the morning on Halloween night.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: And town cows had a habit of being freed, so they would just let the livestock loose.
32:06
SPEAKER_00: So this really was mischief on the highest level.
32:11
SPEAKER_00: The historian Nicholas Rogers says that it's a kind of ritual license.
32:16
SPEAKER_00: Halloween was a night when the usual rules were suspended, and the young were allowed to turn the world upside down for a few hours, which is what we see in Meet Me in St.
32:26
SPEAKER_00: Louis movie.
32:26
SPEAKER_00: It was chaos, and the kids were allowed to do it because every other night of the year they had to behave much more strictly with their standards.
32:36
SPEAKER_00: The destruction was expected, and it was in a strange way part of their tradition.
32:42
SPEAKER_00: And so you can feel this tension building because the kids, once they were freed from all their strictness and social structures and set loose, kind of like the purge on Halloween, it became a real Lord of the Fly situation and the stakes kept getting higher.
32:58
SPEAKER_00: You can feel the tensions building.
33:00
SPEAKER_00: Communities do have a limit, and pranks that start as flower and tipped over outhouses, turn into broken windows and real property damage.
33:08
SPEAKER_00: And worse, by the 20th century, adults in towns across America were asking the question that would reshape the holiday: how do we keep the spirit of this night and stop the damage?
33:19
SPEAKER_00: That is where we get from chaos to more organized fun.
33:27
SPEAKER_00: The answer is to give the kids something better to do, and one small Minnesota town was about to try it.
33:34
SPEAKER_00: Anoka, Minnesota, in 1920.
33:36
SPEAKER_00: Every Halloween, the young people tear through the streets and the adults spend the night guarding their property.
33:41
SPEAKER_00: So Anoka tries something that is a first for its time and is unusual.
33:47
SPEAKER_00: It throws a kids' party, a citywide celebration with a parade, a bonfire, music, contests, and candy at the end.
33:55
SPEAKER_00: It wasn't the only town to try something like it, but it was among the first and it worked out so well that it became an annual event.
34:04
SPEAKER_00: Anoka calls itself the Halloween capital of the world, and a hundred years later, it still calls itself the Halloween capital of the world.
34:11
SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, the phrase that would define the holiday, trick-or-treat, was being born in a different place.
34:17
SPEAKER_00: In 1927, a newspaper in Alberta, Canada printed what is the earliest known use.
34:24
SPEAKER_00: It described young tormentors at the front and back doors demanding the paper called edible plunder and housekeepers cheerfully paying up and sending the robbers away rejoicing.
34:37
SPEAKER_00: Read that again.
34:38
SPEAKER_00: The first written trick-or-treaters weren't cute.
34:41
SPEAKER_00: They were extorting.
34:42
SPEAKER_00: The word trick was a real threat.
34:45
SPEAKER_00: You give me a treat, or I will give you a trick, and based on what was happening at the day, families were more than happy to give a little treat in order to avoid the tricks.
34:55
SPEAKER_00: In the depression, things got serious.
34:57
SPEAKER_00: Halloween vandalism across the United States was so bad it was nicknamed Black Halloween.
35:02
SPEAKER_00: Towns doubled down on organized events and parties, and the trick-or-treat bargain began to look pretty smart.
35:09
SPEAKER_00: You gave the kids candy, they won't wreck your gate.
35:12
SPEAKER_00: Voluntarily.
35:13
SPEAKER_00: It may be the world's most successful protection racket paid in Tootsie Rolls.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: Then came World War II and sugar rationing put a damper on the whole business.
35:23
SPEAKER_00: But once the war ended, everything lined up.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: The baby boom filled new suburbs with children, streets had houses close together, sidewalks, porch lights.
35:33
SPEAKER_00: Candy companies were making individually wrapped treats and were perfect for handing out.
35:39
SPEAKER_00: Costume makers were mass-producing outfits, and in the late 1940s, in Philadelphia, a small trick-or-treat UNICEF campaign began, giving the practice a charitable shine.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: By the 1950s, the word trick and trick-or-treat was actually fading from memory because these children that were raised trick-or-treating, just getting treats, never had had the chance to actually act out on the trick portion of it.
36:03
SPEAKER_00: And their parents didn't want to clue them into what they did when they were little because they didn't want their kids to go out and become delinquent.
36:13
SPEAKER_00: Historians describe Halloween becoming a children's holiday.
36:16
SPEAKER_00: Think about the shift.
36:18
SPEAKER_00: For centuries, it had been a night for adults.
36:20
SPEAKER_00: The poor with cake and prayers, farm, kitchen, divination, young men with grudges, and a wagon now belonged to kids, organized by the adults.
36:30
SPEAKER_00: The dread was gone, the danger, for the most part, was gone, and what was left was the outline of old customs, a visitor at a door, a performance, a treat, a costume, and almost all of the old meaning was replaced by a thank you.
36:44
SPEAKER_00: Candy in costume weren't the only way to live beside the dead every autumn.
36:50
SPEAKER_00: The next story is about a tradition that never turned its dead into a costume.
36:54
SPEAKER_00: Before we finish, I want to stop and gently, because this is one that people wander into accidentally.
37:03
SPEAKER_00: Dia de la Muertas, Day of the Dead, is not Mexican Halloween, and it's not the same as the Catholic holiday that I described earlier.
37:15
SPEAKER_00: It is a holiday and it is a religious one, but the Day of the Dead, the way it is today, is neither of those things.
37:23
SPEAKER_00: Its roots run through indigenous Mesoamerican traditions of honoring the dead and the Catholic overlay that now is in the culture, which are far older than the arrival of Europeans.
37:35
SPEAKER_00: After the Spanish conquest, those traditions mixed with Catholic observances, including All Souls Day and All Souls as a result, is its own thing with its own regional variations and is observed around November 1st and 2nd.
37:52
SPEAKER_00: In many places, the first day is for children who have died and the second for adults.
37:57
SPEAKER_00: Families build afuendas, altars covered with marigold, candles, photographs, favorite foods, and personal belongings of the people they're remembering.
38:06
SPEAKER_00: They visit cemeteries, clean and decorate graves, and sit with the dead.
38:10
SPEAKER_00: The emotional register is different.
38:12
SPEAKER_00: It's not about scaring away the dead or turning them into entertainment.
38:17
SPEAKER_00: It's about keeping them in the family.
38:19
SPEAKER_00: What that contrast says something about our whole story.
38:24
SPEAKER_00: In Anglo-American tradition, the dead went from family members needing prayers to ghosts you tell stories about to costumes you wear to a party.
38:33
SPEAKER_00: In other traditions, from Mexico to the giant glowing kites over cemeteries in Guatemala, the dead stay relatives.
38:41
SPEAKER_00: They're different answers to the same ancient question.
38:45
SPEAKER_00: What do we owe the dead and what do we do with the fear of becoming one?
38:50
SPEAKER_00: In recent decades, American Halloween has borrowed heavily from Dia de los Muertos imagery, sugar skulls, marigolds, painted faces.
39:00
SPEAKER_00: That can come from admiration and it's worth doing with care.
39:03
SPEAKER_00: A skull on a Halloween decoration is a decoration.
39:06
SPEAKER_00: A skull on a Juenda is a family member's memory.
39:10
SPEAKER_00: Let's not blur the two.
39:12
SPEAKER_00: By the 1950s, the trick-or-treat bargain made Halloween safe and organized holiday for children.
39:19
SPEAKER_00: The next chapter wasn't built on porches, it came into the living room through the television set.
39:24
SPEAKER_00: By the middle of the 20th century, Halloween wasn't only a neighborhood ritual, it was a media event.
39:30
SPEAKER_00: And that's where we meet the Great Pumpkin.
39:33
SPEAKER_00: In 1966, the story became a TV special.
39:37
SPEAKER_00: Here's what I find extraordinary.
39:39
SPEAKER_00: The Great Pumpkin is not an old legend.
39:42
SPEAKER_00: He was invented in a comic strip.
39:44
SPEAKER_00: There is no folklore tradition behind it, no medieval prayer, no druid, and yet he's such a fix of the season that for millions of families, watching that special is as much a Halloween ritual as carving a pumpkin.
39:57
SPEAKER_00: A fictional creature invented by one cartoonist became folklore.
40:02
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know that the great pumpkin hits the same way that Santa does, but Santa's a whole other thing.
40:07
SPEAKER_00: But it's still becoming part of the folklore of American Halloween.
40:11
SPEAKER_00: Think about what's happening in the pumpkin patch.
40:13
SPEAKER_00: A boy sits in the dark with a light for a supernatural visitor who may never come.
40:18
SPEAKER_00: Everyone around him knows it's nonsense.
40:20
SPEAKER_00: He believes anyway.
40:21
SPEAKER_00: Think back to Stingy Jack.
40:23
SPEAKER_00: A man wanders in the dark with a light, with nowhere to go, looking for a place to rest.
40:28
SPEAKER_00: One of them is condemned, the other is hopeful, but both are out there in the night with a small light at the edge of what we can't explain, waiting to see what shows up.
40:38
SPEAKER_00: And this, my friends, is Halloween.
40:41
SPEAKER_00: The stories aren't finished.
40:42
SPEAKER_00: Horror films turn Halloween into the monster itself.
40:46
SPEAKER_00: Haunted attractions let us pay to be frightened in a controlled environment.
40:51
SPEAKER_00: Costume trends, social media, front yard skeletons, the size of two-story buildings, all of this is new material, and some of it will be gone in a decade.
41:01
SPEAKER_00: Some of it might last thousands of years.
41:04
SPEAKER_00: We won't know which will outlast our great grandchildren and have them arguing about where it came from.
41:10
SPEAKER_00: From a thirsty corpse and a pub dwelling trickster to a boy with a blanket and a pumpkin patch, every room in this holiday is changed because someone needed the night to do something new and different, to protect them, to entertain them, to help them flirt, to calm the neighborhood, or just let them believe in something.
41:30
SPEAKER_00: And that brings us back to the bumblebee on the porch.
41:34
SPEAKER_00: A child holds out a plastic pumpkin and says, trick-or-treat.
41:38
SPEAKER_00: And now you know what we are all standing in the middle of.
41:42
SPEAKER_00: The pumpkin is an Irish turnip that crossed the ocean carrying the ghost of a man who fooled the devil.
41:48
SPEAKER_00: The costume descends from Scottish geysers who sang for nuts and from 20th century pranters in a world with looser rules.
41:58
SPEAKER_00: The candy is the bargain, a town in Minnesota made with its teenagers a century ago.
42:03
SPEAKER_00: And the bumblebee is saying words first printed in Alberta in 1927.
42:09
SPEAKER_00: The ask at the door, which think about that, Trickatre is almost 100 years old, 99 years this year.
42:15
SPEAKER_00: The ask at the door, give me something and I'll go, started as a prayer for your dead mother in exchange for a spiced bun.
42:23
SPEAKER_00: None of it is a straight line.
42:25
SPEAKER_00: Almost none of it is the ancient in the way we say it is, Sam Hain.
42:30
SPEAKER_00: Halloween is what you get when Gaelic storytellers we can't fully see, and monks who keep calendars, and farm kids with hazelnuts, and a novelist with a pumpkin and an immigrant wave.
42:44
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, it all is jumbled together to be Halloween now.
42:47
SPEAKER_00: And then it asks every generation, let's add something new.
42:52
SPEAKER_00: And I think the question is under it all.
42:54
SPEAKER_00: When a tradition changes so much that its original meaning is unrecognizable, is it still the same tradition?
43:01
SPEAKER_00: I say yes.
43:03
SPEAKER_00: Because what stays isn't the ritual, it's the need.
43:06
SPEAKER_00: We need one night a year to be scared together, to rehearse fear where it's safe, to put on a different face, and to knock on a door to find out tonight if it opens.
43:17
SPEAKER_00: In a world where most of us don't know where our neighbors, it might be the only night, we ask strangers for something and they say yes.
43:25
SPEAKER_00: So the next time we carve a pumpkin and hand over a fun size anything, we're not just repeating something, we're adding a chapter.
43:32
SPEAKER_00: And if anyone asks about that 12-foot pumpkin on my front porch, it's always been there.
43:41
SPEAKER_00: Uh touch it, teasers.
43:43
SPEAKER_00: Before you go, if you want to put a hand on the history here, there are places where you can.
43:47
SPEAKER_00: You can stand inside the old Dutch church in Sleepy Hollow, New York, where Irving set his story, or you can walk the torchlit path up the hill of Ward in County Meth on Halloween night in Ireland.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: You can peer into the Cave of Cats, which is the legendary Otherworld Gateway in County Rosecombe, Mexico, or you can visit Anoka, Minnesota, the Halloween capital of the world.
44:13
SPEAKER_00: And if you want a turnip lantern from the old days, there's a terrifying one in the museum in County Mayo.
44:20
SPEAKER_00: Full details are in the show notes.
44:23
SPEAKER_00: Please take a second to rate and review or share, or even do all the things.
44:27
SPEAKER_00: It really helps this nerdy podcaster find her people.
44:30
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for being here.
44:32
SPEAKER_00: That's it for today's rabbit hole.
44:34
SPEAKER_00: And I'll see you next time when we'll explore the last part of Captain Kid's epic story.
44:39
SPEAKER_00: Sorry to make you wait a week, but life happened and put me behind schedule.
44:44
SPEAKER_00: I really don't like to release multi-parts that far apart.
44:48
SPEAKER_00: So at least you got one and two, and you'll forgive me the three happened a little bit later.
44:52
SPEAKER_00: If I get it together, and I will get it together, I'll release it sooner.
44:56
SPEAKER_00: My next episode after Captain Kid got me thinking about birds, but not in the Alfred Hitchcock way.
45:04
SPEAKER_00: Until then, slow down and stay curious.