Why Do We Wear Costumes on Halloween? What the Records Show

Why Do We Wear Costumes on Halloween? What the Records Show

Why do we wear costumes on Halloween? Because three older habits merged: winter mumming and guising, where masked visitors traded a performance for food or coins; a 1930s retail push that sold children ready-made characters; and the pull of anonymity, which a 1976 field study of 1,352 trick-or-treaters measured directly. The popular line that Celts dressed up to hide from spirits is a theory, not a recorded fact.

Choosing who gets to see you is not only a costume instinct. On SubhSandesh, 38.5% of creators password-protect a page before sharing it, and 48.3% of shared pages are opened on a phone, so even a digital greeting is usually a private, one-screen reveal. Below are the dated records, what psychologists have measured, five explanations compared, and the cases where a costume is the wrong call.

What is a Halloween costume, as opposed to a disguise?

A Halloween costume is clothing worn on or around 31 October to play someone or something else, usually a ghost, a monster, an animal or a fictional character. A disguise hides who you are, while a costume announces what you are playing, and Halloween outfits have swung between those two jobs for six centuries.

The old words keep that memory. The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue entry for gysar defines a guiser simply as "a mummer, masquerader", and the same dictionary dates the Older Scots verb for disguising oneself to before 1522. Halloween falls on Saturday 31 October 2026 and Sunday 31 October 2027, with All Saints' Day on 1 November.

Did the Celts wear costumes to hide from spirits?

No dated record we could trace says so. The idea that people at Samhain disguised themselves so wandering spirits would mistake them for one of their own is a folklore theory, built by later writers who read village customs back into a pre-Christian past. It may be partly right, but it should be labelled as a guess.

The written trail is more worldly. Scottish royal accounts from 1488 and 1491 record payments to gysaris who danced, once in Lanark and once "to the king", according to the dictionary entry above. Those were paid entertainers, and nothing in either line ties them to 31 October.

The church took a dimmer view. In 1627 the Presbytery of Lanark resolved to summon "the gysartes" and examine those "clothed in womens habit", the same entry records. Scotland's own guising story belongs on a page of its own; the point here is that disguise was a whole-winter habit, from Christmas to New Year, long before it settled on one night.

Souling fits the same pattern. Ruth Edna Kelley's 1919 history describes the poor of Staffordshire and Shropshire going about "singing for soul-cakes or money" and promising prayers for the dead, yet her account of the custom mentions no masks at all.

The history of Halloween costumes in 4 dated records

Each record below gives the date and place, what the source actually says, and what it shows about why people dress up.

1. 1418, London: the city bans Christmas masks

When and where: Christmas 1418, the City of London. What it says: a proclamation translated in Henry Riley's Memorials of London (1868), page 669 forbids anyone to walk out at night "in eny manere mommyng, pleyes, enterludes" or other disguisings with "feynyd berdis, peyntid visers", on pain of imprisonment. What it shows: masked house-visiting was common enough to police. The same order told householders to hang a lit lantern outside every night of the feast; our reading is that the city answered hidden faces with lit streets.

2. 1488 to 1627, Scotland: guisers paid, then disciplined

When and where: Lanark and the Scottish court. What it says: treasurers paid "dansaris and gysaris" in 1488 and 1491, and a presbytery summoned cross-dressed guisers in 1627. What it shows: disguise began as entertainment that earned a reward, and authorities read it as licence. Both motives, payment and permission, still sit underneath a modern trick-or-treat route.

3. 1919, United States: masks move indoors to parties

When and where: Ruth Edna Kelley's The Book of Hallowe'en (1919), an American history of the holiday. What it says: "Often they come masked, as ghosts or witches," she writes of Halloween parties, and she notes that hosts were reviving old customs, such as going "a-souling as the English used". What it shows: by 1919 American costume was adult party play, consciously borrowed from Britain and Ireland, not an unbroken pagan rite.

4. 1936, Washington, D.C.: costumes sold as a chance to be someone else

When and where: the Woodward & Lothrop department store, in an advertisement in The Washington Daily News of 21 October 1936. What it says: "Once a year at least you should satisfy that great urge to be someone else." The children's costumes, stocked in the fourth-floor toy store, included a pirate, a clown, a jockey, a wooden soldier, Red Riding Hood and Bo Peep. What it shows: by the mid-1930s the costume was a shop product, and the sales pitch was identity play rather than protection from the dead.

That 1936 range also carried national and ethnic caricatures that no store would stock now. The reason the custom changed is plain in the advert: retailers sold whatever character children wanted to become that year.

What psychology says a costume does

Two field studies, fifty years apart, measure what a costume changes. One looks at the person wearing it, and the other at the people who see it.

What a costume does to the wearer

In 1976 Ed Diener and three colleagues ran their experiment on Halloween night itself, at 27 Seattle homes. Their paper on deindividuation among trick-or-treaters told 1,352 trick-or-treaters to take one sweet, then left the room, with a bowl of pennies and nickels nearby.

Anonymity and company together changed the result most. Only 7.5% of children who came alone and were asked their name and address took extra, against 57.2% of children in anonymous groups. When one child was made responsible for an anonymous group, 80.0% transgressed, 64 of 80.

A newer idea, "enclothed cognition", claims clothes change thinking through their symbolic meaning. Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky reported in 2012 that a lab coat improved attention, but a preregistered 2019 replication by Devin Burns and colleagues could not reproduce the effect. So the best-supported mechanism is anonymity, not the outfit's magic.

What a costume does to everyone else

In 2025 a Milan team led by Francesco Pagnini tested a costume on bystanders. In their metro study of the "Batman effect", a woman who appeared pregnant boarded a train across 138 rides, sometimes with a second researcher in a Batman suit entering by another door.

Someone offered her a seat on 67.21% of observed rides when Batman was present, against 37.66% without him. Oddly, 44% of those who stood up said they had not seen Batman at all, which the authors read as an unexpected event lifting attention. A costume, in other words, also works on the audience.

Five explanations for Halloween costumes compared

The table compares the five common explanations by their earliest dated evidence, the kind of evidence, and how firmly it holds. The rows run from weakest to strongest.

The takeaway: the most repeated explanation has the thinnest evidence, and the best-documented reasons are performance, shopping and anonymity.

Sending a costume to one person instead of a crowd

A costume is chosen for a crowd of neighbours, but a Halloween greeting is chosen for one person. Pages built on SubhSandesh average 11.1 views each, which suggests a personal page gets reopened rather than glanced at once.

For a friend, sibling or partner, the interactive Halloween card with up to six photos takes about 5 minutes to make. They knock three times, carve a jack-o'-lantern and read your letter by flashlight, and it ends with a Boo License showing the costume you picked for them: ghost, witch, vampire, pumpkin, black cat, skeleton, mummy or bat.

If you want more room, the cinematic Halloween website with a 60-second voice note takes about 10 minutes, holds up to 12 photos, can stay locked until a time you set and has a reply box for one answer of up to 280 characters. For a non-Halloween occasion, the full template gallery lists every other page type.

When a costume, or this page, is the wrong choice

Some costumes do harm the history above explains. The 1936 advert sold ethnic caricatures as fun, and a costume built on a real culture or a real tragedy still reads that way to the people it depicts.

• Anonymous groups of children: the 57.2% figure is a reason for an adult to walk with them, not a reason for alarm.
• Grief: a death-themed costume can land badly in a house mourning someone, so ask first.

SubhSandesh is the wrong tool for parties, costume shopping or group invitations. Both Halloween templates are one-person greeting pages with an English interface, and a recipient without a phone or laptop browser is better served by a handwritten card.

Sources

• Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, "Gysar", Dictionary of the Scots Language (2004).
• Riley, H. T. (ed.), Memorials of London and London Life, Longmans (1868), p. 669.
• Kelley, R. E., The Book of Hallowe'en (1919), Project Gutenberg edition.
• Woodward & Lothrop advertisement, The Washington Daily News, 21 October 1936, p. 7, Library of Congress.
• Diener, E., Fraser, S. C., Beaman, A. L. and Kelem, R. T., "Effects of deindividuation variables on stealing among Halloween trick-or-treaters", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 33(2), February 1976.
• Pagnini, F. et al., "Unexpected events and prosocial behavior: the Batman effect", npj Mental Health Research, 3 November 2025.