History of Halloween: Who Made It, and What the Evidence Shows

History of Halloween: Who Made It, and What the Evidence Shows

No single person made Halloween. The history of Halloween is a stack of layers: a Christian feast, All Hallows' Eve, fixed on 31 October once a pope set All Saints' Day on 1 November in the 830s; Gaelic seasonal customs around Samhain, a link historians still dispute; and Irish and Scottish immigrants who carried guising and carved lanterns to North America in the mid-1800s.

The 20th century then commercialised it. A 1920 party catalogue sold Hallowe'en crepe-paper borders at 10 cents each, "trick or treat" reached print in Alberta in 1927, and trick-or-treating spread through the 1950s suburbs. Below: 14 dated, sourced milestones graded strong or disputed, then four common myths.

Who made Halloween? Four groups, not one inventor

Halloween is the eve of All Hallows' Day, the Christian feast of all saints on 1 November; the name contracts All Hallows' Even. Everything else on the night was added later, by different people.

Historian Lisa Bitel of the University of Southern California (2024) puts it bluntly: "Samhain is Irish. Halloween isn't." She credits the modern holiday more to the English, a ninth-century pope and American consumerism than to ancient Ireland.

So the honest answer has four authors. Medieval churchmen set the calendar, Gaelic and English communities kept the customs, 19th-century immigrants carried them west, and 20th-century businesses and towns standardised the night.

A dated timeline of Halloween: 14 milestones

Each entry gives the date, the change and its evidence. Dates before 1800 rest on few documents, so treat them as fragile.

1. c. 800 AD: Irish churchmen write down Samhain

Almost everything known about Samhain comes from legends written by churchmen around 800 AD, roughly 400 years after the Irish began turning Christian, Bitel notes. The tales show a night of feasts and an open otherworld, not a festival of death.

2. 834: Gregory IV fixes All Saints on 1 November

Pope Gregory IV decreed 1 November the feast of all saints in 834 (some sources give 835), so 31 October became All Hallows' Eve. Bitel argues he was tidying the calendar, not targeting an Irish festival he knew nothing about.

3. Late Middle Ages: souling and soul cakes

All Hallows' Eve became a popular church feast, followed on 2 November by All Souls' Day prayers for the dead. In medieval Scotland, Bitel writes, disguised "guisers" begged for soul cakes on All Souls, the custom most often named as trick-or-treat's ancestor.

4. 1500s: Protestant rulers ban the saints' feasts

In the 16th century the Protestant rulers of Britain and Ireland abolished saints' feast days. Ministers also tried to stamp out candle-lit processions and harvest bonfires, so the customs survived at home rather than in church.

5. 1700s: the jack-o'-lantern tale appears

One of the earliest references to the lantern is an 18th-century tale of a Jack who tricked the devil and was left to wander with a candle in a carved turnip. Bitel traces turnip-carving to English All Saints' and Guy Fawkes customs, not ancient Ireland.

6. Mid-1800s: famine-era immigrants carry the customs west

Halloween celebrations reached Canada with a "massive influx of Irish and Scottish immigrants in the mid-1800s", says The Canadian Encyclopedia (Historica Canada). That wave included families fleeing Ireland's Great Famine of the late 1840s; Bitel dates the US arrival to the same decades, with English and other immigrants too.

7. 1886: the first reported pumpkin jack-o'-lantern

The Kingston Daily News in Ontario carried the first public North American report of a jack-o'-lantern carved from a pumpkin in 1886. Pumpkins were bigger and easier to carve than turnips.

8. 1898: the first recorded Halloween disguises in North America

Children dressing in disguise on Halloween is first recorded in Vancouver in 1898, the Encyclopedia says. Guising, performing door to door for nuts, fruit or coins, had spread through the 19th century.

9. c. 1910: Halloween means pranks, Thanksgiving means begging

Around 1910, American children played Halloween tricks and adults held masquerade balls, but costumed door-to-door begging belonged to Thanksgiving. Folklorist Stephen Winick of the Library of Congress American Folklife Center (2020) shows this with photos of Thanksgiving maskers from about 1910.

10. 1920: party kits and a civic celebration

Dennison Manufacturing's 1920 Bogie Book came out in a new edition each year: crepe-paper borders at 10 cents each, festoons at 75 cents to $1.50 a dozen, and costumes shown as models to copy. The same year, by its own account, Anoka, Minnesota, held a civic celebration to divert youngsters from pranks such as soaped windows.

11. 1927: "trick or treat" appears in print

The Lethbridge Herald of 4 November 1927, quoted by The Canadian Encyclopedia, reported youths "demanding edible plunder by the word 'trick or treat'". Newspaper researchers have since reported Ontario uses from November 1917; we could not open those clippings or the Oxford English Dictionary entry, so treat 1917 as unverified.

12. 1930s to 1950s: trick-or-treating becomes the norm

Folklorist Tad Tuleja dates American trick-or-treating to the 1930s, and Winick notes that even 1940s articles on Halloween traditions do not mention it. It waned under Second World War sugar rationing, revived in the 1950s suburbs, and Trick or Treat for UNICEF began on a small scale in Philadelphia in 1947.

13. 1970s to 1980s: the poisoned-candy scare

In 1974 eight-year-old Timothy O'Bryan died of cyanide-laced Halloween candy in Pasadena, Texas; his own father had poisoned him for life insurance. Warnings spiked again after the 1982 Tylenol poisonings; the evidence is in the myths below.

14. 2000s to today: a global night

South Korea adopted Halloween from the 2000s as a youth celebration centred on Seoul's Itaewon district, where a crowd crush on 29 October 2022 killed 159 people, Minah Kim's 2025 peer-reviewed study in Religions records. In Canada the night was an estimated $1.8-billion industry by 2023.

Halloween history at a glance: five eras compared

The table groups the 14 milestones into five eras and grades the evidence. "Strong" means dated documents survive; "disputed" means historians disagree on what those documents show.

The pattern: the older the claim, the thinner the paper trail. Most retellings lead with the least documented layer.

How strong is the Samhain link?

The date is the one link nobody disputes: Samhain was the night of 31 October, and so is Halloween. Bitel goes further and writes that "the only real remnant of Samhain in Halloween is the date".

Others keep the Celtic root: The Canadian Encyclopedia still says Halloween "originated primarily as a Celtic celebration". Winick takes a middle line, agreeing with Tuleja that seeking a single old-world origin for trick-or-treating is "probably a fool's errand".

Our reading: continuity of date and season is strong, continuity of specific rituals is disputed. Even bonfires are shaky, since Bitel notes the medieval tales put them at Beltaine on 1 May, not at Samhain.

Halloween myths vs evidence

Four claims recur on popular history pages. Here is what the sources say.

Myth 1: Samhain was a festival of a Celtic god of the dead. The medieval tales "did not link Samhain with death and horror", Bitel writes; they treat it as a night of otherworld magic. In The Adventure of Nera, the hero walks through a portal and finds love, not hell.

Myth 2: druids sacrificed people at Samhain. Bitel traces those "whispers of human sacrifice" to 19th-century folklorists John Rhys of Oxford and James Frazer of Cambridge, who were hunting rural customs for pagan roots. Almost no record survives of what pre-Christian Irish people did on 31 October.

Myth 3: Halloween is Satanic. The charge is a Protestant argument, not a historical origin. Kim traces late-19th and early-20th-century American Protestant opposition, citing works as old as Alexander Hislop's 1858 The Two Babylons, and its replay in Korea after Itaewon.

Myth 4: strangers poison trick-or-treat candy. Sociologist Joel Best has tallied press reports since 1958 in an overview the University of Delaware holds, revised each autumn. He has been "unable to find a substantiated report of a child being killed or seriously injured by a contaminated treat picked up in the course of trick-or-treating".

Passing the story on to one person

Three customs from this timeline sit inside SubhSandesh's interactive Halloween card. The recipient knocks three times on a little haunted house, chooses trick or treat and catches falling sweets, then carves a jack-o'-lantern until the candle lights and the word you chose glows.

You add a letter they read by flashlight and up to six photos, and it ends with a 1080×1920 Boo License. Partner, bestie, family and kids modes exist; the kids tone has no blood, gore or jump scares.

Across all page types, 48.3% of shared pages are opened on a phone and each page averages 11.1 views; these are platform-wide figures, not Halloween data. For a voice note of up to 60 seconds and up to 12 photos, the cinematic Halloween page is the longer version.

When this page, or a greeting card, is the wrong tool

This is a timeline, not an archive. Only one of its six sources is peer-reviewed and the 1917 first use is unverified, so coursework should cite the documents: the 1927 Lethbridge Herald, Dennison's 1920 catalogue, Best's tallies.

The card is a one-person greeting, not a party invitation or classroom tool, and its interface is English only. On the platform 90.9% of started pages are published, across every page type; for a room of children, a printed timeline beats a link.

Sources

• Bitel, L. (29 Oct 2024). The Conversation.
• McIntosh, A. "Halloween in Canada." The Canadian Encyclopedia (25 Oct 2012, edited 22 Oct 2025).
• Winick, S. (Nov 2020). Folklife Today, Library of Congress.
• Dennison Manufacturing Co. (1920). Dennison's Bogie Book, Internet Archive.
• Kim, M. (8 Dec 2025). Religions 16: 1543.
• Best, J. "Halloween Sadism: The Evidence." UDSpace (2008, revised yearly).