Halloween's origins date back more than 2,000 years. On what we consider November 1, Europe's Celtic peoples celebrated their New Year's Day, called Samhain (SAH-win).
The night before Samhain—what we know as Halloween—spirits were thought to walk the Earth as they traveled to the afterlife. Fairies, demons, and other creatures were also said to be abroad.
In addition to sacrificing animals to the gods and gathering around bonfires, Celts often wore costumes—probably animal skins—to confuse spirits, perhaps to avoid being possessed, according to the American Folklife Center at the U.S. Library of Congress.
By wearing masks or blackening their faces, Celts are also thought to have impersonated dead ancestors.
Young men may have dressed as women and vice versa, marking a temporary breakdown of normal social divisions.
In an early form of trick-or-treating, Celts costumed as spirits are believed to have gone from house to house engaging in silly acts in exchange for food and drink—a practice inspired perhaps by an earlier custom of leaving food and drink outdoors as offerings to supernatural beings.
Samhain was later transformed as Christian leaders co-opted pagan holidays. In the seventh century Pope Boniface IV decreed November 1 All Saints' Day, or All Hallows' Day.
The night before Samhain continued to be observed with bonfires, costumes, and parades, though under a new name: All Hallows' Eve—later "Halloween."
Ancient Roman writers recorded that tribes in what is now Germany and France held riotous ceremonies where they donned the heads and skins of wild mammals as costumes to connect with animal spirits.
The custom of wearing animal hides at bonfire-lighted Celtic feast ceremonies survived until recent times.
Samhain night was also a celebration of the dead—the one time the spirits were believed to walk among the living.
Again, the earliest rituals aren't known in detail, but in recent centuries families put out food and even set extra table places for their ancestors at Samhain.
It was also a night when people dressed in costumes to create mischief and confusion, according to Bettina Arnold of the Center for Celtic Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
"The spirits of the dead were impersonated by young men dressed with masked, veiled or blackened faces, dressed in white or disguises of straw," Arnold wrote in an essay titled "Halloween Customs in the Celtic World."
These costumes were intended both to protect revelers from any malevolent spirits and to fool households they visited.
In Scotland and elsewhere, revelers masquerading as the dead would go around demanding food offerings—a forerunner to today's trick-or-treating.
Nilsen of St. Francis Xavier University added: "People put on costumes which frequently included blackened faces and so on, representing spooks, demons, or whatever."
According to the University of Wisconsin's Arnold, on Samhain the boundary between the living and the dead was obliterated—as was the boundary between the sexes. Male youths would dress up as girls and vice versa, she wrote.
In Wales, for example, groups of mischievous young men in Halloween drag were referred to as hags.
In parts of Ireland, a man in a white horse costume known as Lair Bhan—an ancient Celtic fertility symbol—led noisy processions at Samhain.
Author Katharine Clark wrote in An Irish Book of Shadows that Lair Bhan was represented using white sheets and a wooden head.
"Some heads could be quite elaborate, complete with snapping jaws controlled by the man upon whose shoulders the entire structure rested," Clark wrote.
Many Samhain costumes were incomplete without the appropriate accessories: lanterns made with hollowed-out turnips and candles.
Later transplanted to North America with Irish immigrants, the tradition would be replicated in the fatter form of the pumpkin, a fruit native to the New World.
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