Babies in Barbenheimer costumes; “yummy mummy” mini Colin the Caterpillars; pumpkin-flavoured, glow-in-the-dark lube and an email from your accountant laboriously joking about spooktacular self-assessment: Halloween these days feels tediously, tackily modern, when actually we’ve probably been scaring ourselves silly at this time of year since pre-history. It’s not like there was much else to fill the lengthening winter nights back then, except getting killed by Vikings, starvation or plague.
With that kind of worldview, it’s no surprise old-time Halloween was creepier than the current version. The Celtic Samhain end-of-harvest traditions from which it evolved proved impossible to sanitise entirely into the tidier Christian celebration of All Saints’ and All Souls’. It was variously a time of communion with the dead, divination, misrule, excess and fire (the word “bonfire” derives from “bone fire” – so wholesome). One early account in Nicholas Rogers’s history of Halloween describes it, highly specifically, as the season when “malignant birds emerged from the caves of Crogham to prey upon mankind, led by one monstrous three-headed vulture whose foul breath withered the crops”.
Withered crops and creepy birds scream “party time” and that’s what Halloween became, if by “party” you mean “throwing a cabbage stalk at your neighbour’s door, then trying to knock them over with a cabbage”, “running round corn to summon the devil” or “burning nuts with your significant other to see which of you will die first”. Before it was defanged by the only force stronger than religion – capitalism – “Heathenrie, Devilrie and Drunknennesse” (as Philip Stubbes’s Anatomy of the Abuses put it in 1583) abounded and anything could happen.
What have we retained of that good stuff? Well, the Celtic custom of souling involved going door to door asking for food, and soulers carried hollowed-out turnips lit with a candle representing a soul in purgatory. Then there’s dressing up. Samhain was a season of livestock slaughter, so wearing skins around the ritual fire may have been part of it (although actual evidence is thin to nonexistent). It’s not a big step from there to disguising yourself to confuse the wandering souls of the dead and if you don’t have animal skins, you make do. “Young people sometimes dressed up in strange garments; the boys going as girls, the girls as old men or women with masks … perhaps a bit of flour bag or calico with slits for eyes, nose and mouth, the beard and brows drawn with boot polish” – as Rogers quotes a witness telling the Irish Folklore Commission in the 1940s. This homespun horror vibe crossed the Atlantic to the rural US with mass Irish emigration in the 19th century, and, finally, people started taking pictures of it.
There’s no visual record of the wildest Samhain excesses, but we’ve got some absolutely cursed images, so grab your fattest cabbage stalks, nuts and hempseed (coincidentally, what my mum’s hippy friends offered horrified trick-or-treaters in the 1980s), and let’s get started.
1. Vintage Halloween outfits
Nothing to see here, just some extremely normal Halloween revellers wearing extremely normal costumes. Far right, the weird fish guy from The Shape of Water (2017); front right, a sexy anime cat; front middle, just your basic dog-pinstripe-scarecrow-nightmare, and front left is preparing to scuttle through your nightmares for all eternity. The rest have gone classic Mumford & Sons. What ghost children in the far-right corner? Tsk, that’s merely a trick of the light.
2. Teenage boys, circa 1905
A long exposure time has drained any notion of fun or animation out of this shot, but that only enhances the cold, creepy vibe. There’s a TikTok series of skits called the Mean Gays and I can imagine these languid, bored, disapproving young men in 1905 making similarly catty comments: “Oh, you wore that bonnet again, Mildred? Slay.”
3. Rural schoolhouse Halloween, circa 1905
“Good morning, children. Today we’ll be choosing one of you to sacrifice on this paper altar I’ve crafted, while a monstrous, three-headed vulture breathes ruin on your fathers’ corn.” Have you ever seen a tetchier pumpkin? It looks like it has just told the whole class: “It’s your own time you’re wasting.”
4. Woman dressed as an elf, 1915
Dressing as an elf is quite on-brand for trad Halloween: one of the alternative Celtic names for Halloween was púca night, the púca being a sort of hairy, anarchic pixie. This outfit wouldn’t trouble Heidi Klum’s 2023 moodboard, but the wearer looks heartwarmingly delighted with it; just wait until the 1905 mean boys burst her bubble.
5. Halloween postcard, 1922
Romantic divination was big in early Halloween, probably because the All Saints’ Day liturgy referenced “wise virgins” waiting for bridegrooms. To identify your future beloved, try sowing hemp seed in a churchyard, throwing a ball of wool, chucking nuts on the fire, or if you’re Cornish and cavalierly indifferent to health and safety, “running molten lead through cold water”. This “peep in the mirror before midnight” seems awfully tame: put a snail on a plate of flour and get it to write your future husband’s initials, you coward.
6. Family in costume, 1930s
I tell you what is particularly terrifying here in this cheery family scene: the child, woman or unquiet spirit on the right has dressed as Bernard Manning in the very year – 1930 – that Bernard Manning was born. Coincidence? I think not.
7. Bewitching beauties prepare for Halloween, 1920s or 1930s
“It’s a beautiful day; let’s take a big papier-mache pumpkin head down to the beach,” said no one ever, and yet, here we are on Venice Beach as a group of swimsuited women gamely try to look as if they’re having sexy Halloween fun. On closer scrutiny, none of them has managed it: the pumpkin is obviously heavy as hell and the two on the far right are clearly plotting to murder the photographer. I would watch a Netflix miniseries of this, avidly.
8. Haunted pillowcases
There’s “no information available as to date or place” on this picture (reproduced in Ossian Brown’s 2005 book Haunted Air), presumably because it was transported here through a portal from hell. Imagine opening the door to this lot: you would actually die. Take my best horse, my largest cabbage, the deeds to the farm, just don’t hurt me. The chilling sight of wee Jimmie Krankie down the front makes me wonder why we ever bother with anything more elaborate than a pillowcase with holes in.
9. Revellers at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Halloween ball, 1949
Although this is an undeniably cool picture, it feels as if by this point the rot had set in on Halloween and it had become about “fun” and “creativity” rather than stark, cold terror and the imminence of death. The scariest thing about it is the probably-lead-based paint; the guy on the left has come as me pre-10am.
10. Comic strips come alive, 1966
The first licensed commercial costumes (Popeye, Mickey Mouse) hit the market in the 1920s, and after that most Halloween outfits became disappointingly tame. By the 1960s, the likes of Batman, Superman and Spider-Man dominated. Boo. Unless someone quickly creates a Three-Headed Foul-Breathed Vultureman franchise, I’m coming as a cabbage this year.
• This article was amended on 3 November 2023 to include a credit for Ossian Brown’s book Haunted Air with the anonymous photograph of the vintage Halloween costumes.
