Halloween 2026

Halloween is celebrated each year on October 31. Halloween 2026 takes place on Saturday, October 31.

Halloween’s origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 3,000 years ago in Central and Western Europe, celebrated their new year on November 1.

That date marked the end of warm weather and the harvest and heralded the beginning of the dark, cold winter—a time of year that was often associated with human death. The Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31, they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead could return to earth.

Beyond causing mischief and damaging crops, Celts thought these returning spirits could also make it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to predict the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and stability during a long, dark winter.

To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires where people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically made of animal heads and skins, and told each other’s fortunes.

When the celebration was over, they re-lit their home's hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

By A.D. 43, the Roman Empire had conquered most Celtic territory. During the 400 years it ruled the Celtic lands, two Roman festivals were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.

The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans commemorated the passing of the dead. The second honored Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. Pomona’s symbol is the apple, and the incorporation of her celebration into Samhain likely explains the Halloween tradition of bobbing for apples.

On May 13, 609, Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome to all Christian martyrs, establishing the Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day in the Western church. Pope Gregory III later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1.

By the ninth century, the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, gradually blending with and supplanted older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church made November 2 into All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. Many believe the church created the holiday to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, church-approved observance.

All Souls’ Day was celebrated much like Samhain, with big bonfires, parades and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils. The All Saints’ Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called All-Hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.

The Halloween tradition of trick-or-treating probably dates back to the early All Souls’ Day parades in England. During the festivities, poor citizens would beg for food, and families would give them pastries called “soul cakes” in return for their promise to pray for the family’s dead relatives.

The distribution of soul cakes was encouraged by the church as a way to replace the ancient practice of leaving food and wine for roaming spirits. The practice, which was referred to as “going a-souling,” was eventually taken up by children who would visit the houses in their neighborhood and be given ale, food and money.

The tradition of dressing in costume for Halloween has both European and Celtic roots. Hundreds of years ago, winter was an uncertain and frightening season. Food supplies often ran low and, for many people afraid of long, dark nights, the short days brought constant worry and possible signs of seasonal affective disorder.

On Halloween, when people believed ghosts returned to the earthly world, they feared encountering spirits if they went outside. To avoid being recognized, they wore masks after dark so ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits.

To keep ghosts away from their homes, people also placed bowls of food outside to appease the spirits and prevent them from coming in.

The celebration of Halloween was extremely limited in colonial New England because of rigid Protestant beliefs. Halloween was more commonly recognized in Maryland and the southern colonies.

As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups and Native Americans meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. 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.

Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds. By the middle of the 19th century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country.

In the second half of the 19th century, America was flooded with new immigrants. These new immigrants, especially the millions of Irish fleeing the Irish Potato Famine, helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally.

Borrowing from European traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today’s “trick-or-treat” tradition. Young women believed that on Halloween they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings or mirrors.

In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers than about ghosts, pranks and witchcraft. At the turn of the century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, seasonal foods—including apples, nuts, corn and pumpkins—and festive costumes.

Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take anything “frightening” or “grotesque” out of Halloween celebrations. Because of these efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the 20th century.

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.

On October 31, 1933, during a night known as "Black Halloween," violence broke out in many Depression-weary towns and cities across America. Young men in particular, frustrated by years of economic ruin, took to overturning cars, smashing windows, sawing down utility poles, opening fire hydrants and mocking police. In the wake of such mayhem, some cities considered canceling Halloween events altogether.

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

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 small treats.

Thus, a new American tradition was born, and it has continued to grow. Today, Americans spend more than $11 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country’s second largest commercial holiday after Christmas.

Speaking of commercial success, scary Halloween movies have a long history of being box office hits. Classic Halloween movies include horror classics such as 1931's "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" and 1941's "The Wolf Man," all of which have inspired generations of costumes. Later film favorites include the “Halloween” franchise, based on the 1978 original film directed by John Carpenter and starring Donald Pleasance, Jamie Lee Curtis and Tony Moran.

"Halloween" inspired other iconic “slasher" films like “Scream,” “Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Friday the 13.” More family-friendly Halloween movies and TV shows include “Hocus Pocus,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Beetlejuice” and “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.”

Halloween has always been a holiday filled with mystery, magic and superstition. It began as a Celtic end-of-summer festival during which people felt especially close to deceased relatives and friends. For these friendly spirits, they set places at the dinner table, left treats on doorsteps and along the side of the road and lit candles to help loved ones find their way back to the spirit world.

Today’s Halloween ghosts are often depicted as more fearsome and malevolent, and our customs and superstitions have grown darker too. We avoid crossing paths with black cats, afraid that they might bring us bad luck. This idea has its roots in the Middle Ages, when many thought witches transformed themselves into black cats to escape detection.

We try not to walk under ladders for the same reason. This superstition may date to the ancient Egyptians, who believed triangles were sacred (or it may simply come from the fact that walking under a leaning ladder is always dangerous). Around Halloween, we’re especially wary of breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks or spilling salt.

But what about the Halloween traditions and beliefs that today’s trick-or-treaters have long forgotten? Many of these bygone rituals focused on the future rather than the past—and the living rather than the dead.

In particular, many centered on helping young women identify their future husbands and reassuring them that they would someday—perhaps by next Halloween—be married. In 18th-century Ireland, a matchmaking cook might hide a ring in her mashed potatoes on Halloween night, hoping to bring true love to whoever 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, the story went, represented the girl’s future husband. (In some versions, the opposite was true—the nut that burned away symbolized a love that would not last.)

Another tale held that if a young woman ate a sweet mixture of walnuts, hazelnuts and nutmeg before bed on Halloween night, she would dream of her future husband.

Young women also tossed apple peels over their shoulders, hoping the peels would land in the shape of their future husbands’ initials; tried to read their futures by gazing at egg yolks floating in bowls of water; and stood before 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 during a chestnut hunt would be the first to marry. At others, the first successful apple-bobber would be the next down the aisle.

Of course, whether asking for romantic advice or trying to avoid seven years of bad luck, each of these Halloween superstitions depends on the goodwill of the same “spirits” whose presence the early Celts felt so keenly.