How Skeletons Became Associated with Halloween

Halloween brings out familiar symbols like witches, jack-o’-lanterns and black cats. But the season also beckons a more macabre figure lurking inside homes, classrooms and front lawns—the skeleton. 

How did a form of human remains become linked to Halloween? Ancient and more modern traditions alike have long included bones as symbols of mortality and the spirit world.

The season of Allhallowtide—which includes All Saints’ Eve, or Halloween, and All Saints’ Day (November 1)—coincides with the ancient Celtic celebration known as Samhain. “This was a time when the usually clear boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead blurred and overlapped,” says Katherine Walker, associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and an expert on 16th- and 17th-century culture, traditions and magic. “In particular, for the Celts, this time in autumn was a celebration of the life-giving properties of the harvest while acknowledging the dangers associated with the upcoming winter—hence the juxtaposition of life and death.”

During Samhain, it was thought that places of burial would open and offer entry to the realm of the dead, as well as give spirits the chance to intervene more directly in the affairs of the living, Walker says. “Mumming,” or costumed visiting, took place during Samhain gatherings, when individuals dressed up and visited neighbors to celebrate and ward off the spirits that had been let loose.

Around this time of year, ancient Celts burned the bones of animals to ward off evil spirits, in what was originally known as a “bone fire” (the origin of the term “bonfire”). They would then spread the ashes from the fires on their land to bless the crops for the next harvest.

“It’s likely that this heterodox mixture of practices around gathering, celebrating life and death, and the blurred boundaries between worlds during this time all contributed to the idea that dressing as the dead or as skeletons became associated with the holiday of Halloween,” Walker says. 

Skeletons were also seen as a symbol of the natural cycle of life and death during Samhain, says Erin Egnatz, a historian and history professor at the University of the People in Pasadena, California, and the creator of Hauntings Around America.

Samhain—and with it, skeletons—began to appear among Western traditions after the Roman Empire conquered the Celts during the first century A.D., says Daniel P. Compora, an English professor at the University of Toledo who specializes in folklore and popular culture. 

“Over the following generations, the symbolism of bones spread through Christian and folk traditions such as All Hallows’ Eve, as well as in other cultures and celebrations,” Egnatz says. “All used imagery of skeletons in some way to honor the dead and the correlation between life and death.”

Meanwhile, roughly 3,000 years ago, the Aztecs and other Nahua people living in what is now central Mexico practiced rituals honoring the dead. This inspired the modern Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead)—a blend of Mesoamerican tradition, European religion and Spanish culture. The holiday takes place each year from October 31 to November 2, and its most prominent symbols are calacas (skeletons) and calaveras (skulls).  

Catholics had celebrated All Saints’ Day since the eighth century, when Pope Gregory III chose November 1 for the festival. Medieval illuminated manuscripts associated with All Hallows’ Eve often depicted gruesome, macabre scenes featuring skeletons and skulls. While some served as moral exemplars, others aimed to scare people into living a pious life or remind them that their time on Earth is short. 

“It was around this time that Christian teachings began to explore in greater detail the idea of repentance and its effects on the afterlife, with bones representing a body's death and earthly decay,” Egnatz explains.

In fact, skeletons were a frequent visual motif in medieval culture. “Human bones remained a potent symbol of the transience of life and the fact that we all are destined for the grave,” Walker says. Throughout the medieval period, spaces were also dedicated to displaying human bones, including ossuaries and charnel houses. 

“This was a time of famine and widespread disease, meaning the realization or mortality was at the forefront of many minds,” Egnatz says. Most notably, following the plague known as the Black Death, there was a renewed surge of skeletal symbolism related to death in art and literary works known as memento mori, meaning “remember, you must die.” 

According to Walker, this association became solidified in Western culture with the idea of the Dance of Death (or Danse Macabre). “This was an idea, expressed in many poems and works of art, that Death comes for us all,” she explains. “Artwork depicted individuals from every social class—king, priest or peasant—being led by skeletons to the grave.” This form of memento mori appeared in countless sermons and devotional works and was also depicted graphically in woodcuts. The allegory took on a potent force in the 14th century during the height of the bubonic plague, she notes.

During the Age of Enlightenment, skeletons began to lose some of their religious and moral symbolism, becoming a form of entertainment, particularly in plays and horror literature, Egnatz says. “Skeletons were no longer just a symbol for somber remembrance or a reminder of mortality—they were used to create panic and fear in audiences,” she says. “By the 19th century, interest in Gothic entertainment created a fandom for thrilling yet terrifying tales that often included skeletons as central figures of horror.”

The Victorians were the bridge between the skeleton symbolism of the past and modern Halloween celebrations. “During the Victorian era, skeletons were often tied to the supernatural in addition to death itself,” Egnatz says. “Victorians loved ghost stories, séances and death imagery. Skeletons became the mascot, if you will, for these interests.”

In 1896, near the end of the Victorian era, French filmmaker Georges Méliès released Le Manoir du Diable (The House of the Devil)—often considered the first horror movie to hit the mainstream. “[The film] solidified skeletons in pop culture,” Egnatz says. “It drew interest from a society obsessed with death.”

By the early 20th century, Halloween was becoming more commercialized, leading to an uptick in celebrations, Egnatz says. Costumes quickly became commonplace, with the skeleton a popular choice.

Skeletons had another major pop culture moment in 1929 with the release of Walt Disney’s cartoon short The Skeleton Dance. “It gave audiences a new appreciation for skeletons, with the tone being playful, while still holding onto the spooky factor,” Egnatz says.

Around the same time, in the 1920s and 1930s, Mexican Day of the Dead imagery—skeletons and skulls in particular—began to gain popularity in the United States, Compora says. A few decades later, American actor Vincent Price, known for playing villains in horror movies, had an extensive art collection that included death-inspired Mexican works, he notes. “He is believed to have helped popularize the image of the skeleton during the 1950s and 1960s,” Compora says.

Following World War II, plastic skeletons were mass-produced as decorations and props, Egnatz says. “Part of the increase in skeleton décor has been globalization, which has made many plastic decorations very cheap,” says Katrina Gulliver, a historian who has written about the phenomenon of Spirit Halloween in retail. 

Some companies use modern supply chains to deliver costumes and decorations from factories overseas with very short turnaround times and offer them to consumers at low prices, she explains. “The posable skeleton, like the plastic jack-o’-lantern, became an easily available consumer good,” she notes.