Wednesday, October 1, 2025

History of Halloween 🎃









Every year millions of people celebrate Halloween , party's, parades, costumes, candy pumpkins and more . But have you ever wondered were this celebration came from?

Today, Americans spend over $11 billion per year on Halloween, making it the country’s second largest holiday after Christmas 


Our modern Halloween traditions are  a combination of many different elements crafted together over the years , but it's primary origins can be traced back to the Celtic Pagan harvest festival called Samhain..


Early Halloween celebrations ware very  limited in the colony's because of the strict Protestant belief systems of the time. Halloween was more commonly recognized in Maryland and the southern colonies.





The first celebrations included “play parties,” which were public events held to celebrate the harvest. Neighbors would share stories of the dead, tell each other’s fortunes, dance and sing



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Samhain.




Samhain (sow-in is an ancient Celtic festival marking the end of  the harvest season  and the beginning of winter, it's also the time of the year when the Vail between the living and the dead becomes weaker and spirits and monsters can roam free among the living.


This festival can be traced back at least two thousand years, thought the way its celebrated has changed a bit over time.


To ward off evil spirits, the Celts would built large bonfires, put on masks and costumes (often animal skins and wooden carved masks), to scare off or blend in with the spirit's. They would also offer food to appease the spirits. 




👹💀😈This was the the original trick or treating

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Early Colonial Halloween celebrations  often included telling ghost stories and family gatherings and even pranks.

Near the mid 1800s, the yearly fall festivities were becoming more common in America, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country just yet.


Original jack'o lantern..


In the second half of the 19th century Irish immigration helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nation wide 

Irish immigrants brought traditional Celtic customs to America including the jack'o lantern , originally carved  turnips or gourd's, but thanks to the abundance of  pumpkin found  in America it later became the vegetables of choice and is now one of the most recognizable Halloween symbol's.

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................🎃 Original Jack'o Lantern 🎃...........

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As part of the christianization of Europe in the 8th century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as All Saints' Day (also known as All Hallows' Day) to honor all Christian saints. The evening before, October 31, became known as All Hallows' Eve, or the eve of All Saints' Day. 

It also been called Devil's night, Hell night or mischief night but everyone knows it as Simply Halloween now..

By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular but community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide Halloween parties as the featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many schools and communities, vandalism began to plague some celebrations in many communities during this time.


in 1879, about 200 boys in Kentucky stopped a train by laying a fake stuffed 'body' across the railroad tracks. In 1900, medical students at the University of Michigan stole a headless corpse from the anatomy lab and propped it up against the building’s front doors.


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In 1933, so many people were outraged when hundreds of teenage boys flipped over cars, sawed-off telephone poles and engaged in other acts of vandalism across the country. People began to refer to that year’s holiday as “Black Halloween,” similarly to the way they referred to the stock market crash four years earlier as “Black Tuesday.”





Some cities considered banning Halloween altogether. Although others responded by  organizing Halloween activities for young people so that they wouldn't turn to vandalism. They started to organize trick-or-treating, parties, costume parades and haunted house attractions to keep them busy.






Hanging old fur and strips of raw meat or liver on walls, where one feels his way through the dark  were instructed in a 1937 party pamphlet on how to create a “trail of terror.” “Weird moans and howls come from dark corners, damp sponges and hair nets hung from the ceiling to brush your  face as you pass by… Doorways are blockaded so that guests must crawl through a long dark tunnel.”


Haunted house attractions began to grow in popularity, one of the most we'll know is the 1969 haunted mansion at Disney land. Still very popular today.





Haunted or spooky public attractions already had some precedent in Europe. Starting in the 1800s, Marie Tussaud’s wax museum in London featured a “Chamber of Horrors” with decapitated figures from the French Revolution. In 1915, a British amusement ride manufacturer created an early haunted house, complete with dim lights, shaking floors and demonic screams.


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1915 Halloween celebrations.




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By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at the young. Due to the high numbers of young children during the 1950s baby boom, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or home, where they could be more easily accommodate


Despite vandalism a depression and a world war..between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating was a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the Halloween celebration. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played on them by providing the neighborhood children with treats.

Halloween's pagan origins and association with ghost's, monsters, witchcraft and other spooky stuff has always been loosely tolerated by the more self proclaimed religious people especially during the 1980s "satanic panic"   claiming the holiday celebrates evil and glorified witchcraft and the occult. Church group's and know  it alls once again trid to ban the holiday and started pushing hell nights ( leading kids through a church version of a haunted house showing your afterlife burning in hell for celebrating "evil")

Large scale arson and destruction in the 1980s also had a very negative effect on the holiday.





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A few more common and less destructive   pranks and mischief during the early 1900-1930s included cow tipping, moving farm equipment, uprooting vegetables or even moving wagon's to a different location or putting them on top of roofs.


Another common prank is TPing a house, throwing roles of toilet paper all over the house and trees,though this is now considered littering and trespassing and may get you arrested if cought.

 


Souling is an ancient Irish and English tradition of going door to door and praying in exchange for food or sweet's, it's the early origins of trick or treating, Norway also has a version of this that takes place during Christmas instead of autumn called Julebukk it takes place on the days between Christmas and New Year's Day, Norwegians dress up in trolls witch's gnomes ect and go door-to-door to sing and perform for friends, neighbors, and family in exchange for food and drinks. It's a christmas-themed version of trick-or-treating..



Halloween is also when it was believed that ghosts came back to the earthly world, people thought that they would encounter ghosts if they left their homes. To avoid being recognized by these ghosts, people would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so that the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits

They would also leave food outside by the door to keep ghosts from entering their homes (very early trick or treating).




Halloween Matchmaking - Fortune telling games 🔮🐈‍⬛


There are several old traditions and superstitious practice's done on Halloween that were mainly meant as a form of divination to help young women find their future husbands and reassuring them that they would some day be married. (It was also a party game for fun )



During the 1700's in Ireland, a matchmaking cook might hide a ring in the mashed potatoes on Halloween night, hoping to bring true love to the diner who found it.





In Scotland, fortune-tellers recommended that an eligible young woman name a hazelnut for each of her suitors and then toss the nuts into the fireplace. The nut that burned to ashes rather than popping or exploding would be her match. (In some versions, the opposite was true: The nut that burned away symbolized a love that would not last.)

Another tale claims that if a young woman ate a sugary treat made of walnuts, hazelnuts and nutmeg before bed on Halloween night she would dream about her future husband.


Young women would also tosse apple-peels over their shoulders, hoping that the peels would fall on the floor in the shape of their future husbands’ initials; tried to learn about their futures by peering at egg yolks floating in a bowl of water and stood in front of mirrors in darkened rooms, holding candles and looking over their shoulders for their husbands’ faces.


Other rituals were more competitive. At some Halloween parties, the first guest to find a burr on a chestnut-hunt would be the first to marry. At others, the first successful apple-bobber would be the first settle down.


She could also light a small candle and star into a mirror to see if the face of her future husband would appear over her shoulder 











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🎃🐈‍⬛🧛‍♀️🐺🌕🧟‍♂️👻🕷️🍁🕸️🦇🎃




👻Happy 🦇Halloween 🎃












Werewolf in Michigan.

 




In 2024 a Michigan man described his encounter with a Dogman that had "a doe in its clutches" but did not harm the deer, which was "screaming bloody murder". 

The creature's attention was soon drawn to the witness, not the deer, and the witness did not perceive the Dogman as a mystical or angelic being, simply an apex predator, but one that did not act aggressively in that situation. 


The Michigan Dogman is a famous cryptid that has been seen in the region for decades. 

First witnessed in 1887 in Wexford County, Michigan.

It was described as a seven-foot tall, blue-eyed, or amber-eyed bipedal canine-like animal with the torso of a man (Werewolf) and a fearsome howl that sounds similar to  a human scream.

 According to legends, the Michigan Dogman appears in a ten-year cycle  and that it can be deterred by clapping loudly.

Sightings have been reported in several locations throughout Michigan, but primarily in the northwestern quadrant of the Lower Peninsula.

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In 1938 in Paris, Michigan, Robert Fortney was attacked by five wild dogs and said that one of the five walked on two legs. 

Reports of similar creatures also came from Allegan County in the 1950s, and in Manistee and Cross Village in 1967.


Linda S. Godfrey, in her book The Beast of Bray Road, compares the Manistee sightings to a similar creature sighted in Wisconsin known as the Beast of Bray Road. A famous werewolf sitting in the early 1990's cops were even given silver bullets in Walworth Country .





Serbian Vampire Petar Blagojevic 🧛‍♂️








Petar Blagojevic.
1662 -1725

The Vampire of Kisiljevo Village 🦇




In 1725, a Serbian peasant named Petar Blagojevic from the village of Kisiljevo  died. 
Soon after a series of unexplained deaths occurred.

A short time after his funeral, several villagers died suddenly under mysterious circumstances
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He became known as The Vampire of Kisiljevo and was also one of the first documented cases of vampire hysteria in 18th-century Europe. 

After his death, a series of mysterious deaths in the village led to the exhumation of his body, which villagers found to be unnaturally preserved, with blood on his teeth and mouth. This led to fears that Blagojevic had returned from the dead as a vampire, resulting in his body being staked and burned. 

The case was reported by Austrian authorities and published in a Viennese newspaper, contributing to the global circulation of the word "vampire" and helped further the belief of vampires.
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People suddenly dieing soon after Petar raised suspicion in the village leading to them  exhuming his body only to find it still very well-preserved, with signs of fresh blood on his teeth and mouth. 


Now convinced he was in fact a vampire, the villagers drove a wooden  stake through his heart and  burned his remains. 




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Petar Blagojevic is one of the first well-documented instances of vampire hysteria. 

Officials from the then-Habsburg monarchy, who administered the area, documented the events. 

The report on this event was one of the first documented testimonies about vampire beliefs in Eastern Europe. It was published by Wienerisches Diarium, a Viennese newspaper, today known as Die Wiener Zeitung. Along with the report of the very similar Arnold Paole case of 1726–1732, it was widely translated in West and Northern Europe, heavily contributing to the vampire craze of the eighteenth century in Germany, France and England. 







The village of Kisiljevo is now a modern tourist destination for people interested in supernatural/ vampire lore and history.


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According to a Belgrade newspaper Glas javnosti, which cites local official Bogičić, the villagers are unable to identify Blagojević's grave and don't know whether the local family with the same surname are in fact  related to Petar.

 One person recalled stories of a  female vampire by the name of Ruža Vlajna, who was believed to haunt the village in more recent times, in the lifetime of her grandfather. She would make her presence felt by hitting pots hanging from roofs and was seen walking on the surface of the Danube, but it is unknown whether she was ever staked or not.





In De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis (1725), Michaël Ranft attempted to explain folk beliefs in vampires.

 He writes that, in the event of the death of every villager, some other person or people most likely a person related to the first dead who saw or touched the corpse, would eventually die either of some disease related to exposure to the corpse or of a frenetic delirium caused by the panic of merely seeing the corpse. 

These dying people would say that the dead man had appeared to them and tortured them in many ways. The other people in the village would exhume the corpse to see what it had been doing. He gives the following explanation when talking about the case of Petar Blagojević.

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This brave man perished by a sudden or violent death. This death, whatever it is, can provoke in the survivors the visions they had after his death. Sudden death gives rise to inquietude in the familiar circle. Inquietude has sorrow as a companion. Sorrow brings melancholy. Melancholy engenders restless nights and tormenting dreams. These dreams enfeeble body and spirit until illness overcomes and, eventually, death.

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Other accounts on this case.

After Blagojević  died in 1725, and his death was followed by a spate of other sudden deaths (after very short maladies, reportedly of about 24 hours each). Within eight days, nine people perished. On their death-beds, the victims allegedly claimed to have been beaten by Blagojević at night. Blagojević's wife had even stated that he had visited her and asked her for his opanci (shoes); she then moved to another village for her safety  In another version, it's said that Blagojević came back to his house demanding food from his son and, when the son refused, Blagojević brutally murdered him, probably via biting and drinking his blood.
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