The bloody Halloween origin story

We love Halloween, but how did it all start? Turns out its origins go back thousands of years to ancient Ireland and a holiday that involved human sacrifice.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Who doesn't love Halloween. But come on, where did it begin?
I'm Patty Steele. Before trigger treating, there were yikes, human sacrifices.
That's next on the backstory. We're back with the backstory.
Halloween is a really festive time of year. Costumes, treats, parties,

(00:21):
jack o lanterns. Here's the thing. These were all part
of traditions that were born from not so festive traditions
in ancient Ireland. And those traditions have a really dark,
frightening origin, involving torture and human sacrifice. We're going back
thousands of years to the misty countryside of Ireland. It

(00:43):
was a time when Irish folks or Celts, worshiped pagan
gods as well as nature and the land itself. It
was the end of the harvest season late October, and
that was when they celebrated a holiday called Swen. They
believed at that time of beings from the underworld could
emerge and ravage the landscape, killing the greenery and turning

(01:07):
it into the golden brown of autumn before winter arrived,
and there was only one way to stop them. Sacrifice
your food, your livestock, or even your life. There was
one place in particular they gathered to celebrate the harvest,
and most importantly, to pay tribute to their gods. It
was a settlement called Rockrohan, and it's known as the

(01:29):
birthplace of Halloween. A temple sat on a massive mound
in the middle of the settlement, surrounded by a graveyard
for the Celtic nobility. It was a very wealthy place,
but working class folks would travel there to take part
in the festivities as well. It was a huge part

(01:50):
of their culture. They would eat, play games, tip back
a few, sort of like today's Halloween parties, but it
was way more than that. They'd also use usen to
announce declarations of war and peace, and even arrange marriages.
Imagine what this looked like. Huge feasts, lots of drinking

(02:10):
of mead and wine, dancing around huge bonfires, crackling and
leaping into the night sky. At the center of all
of this, the Celts believed that this was the time
the spirits of their dead ancestors returned. But it wasn't
just the dead loved ones that arrived. Also apparitions, demons, fairies,
and monsters, some of which they felt were incredibly dangerous,

(02:35):
and that is where you see the beginnings of Halloween.
These beings arrival was through what were called the Cave
of the Cats, where the hell caves in northwestern Ireland,
which still exist nearby archaeological digs date back almost six
thousand years. To pacify these evil beings and protect their

(02:55):
crops and livestock, the Celts would offer them food, drink,
and part of their harvest. And to protect themselves, they'd
light ritual bonfires everywhere across the countryside, on hilltops and
in fields. They'd even carry small parts of the fire
home with them to keep the home lit and safe
from the demons. They'd carve frightening faces into root vegetables

(03:19):
like turnips and potatoes to intimidate the demons. They didn't
have access to pumpkins. Then they would make the veggies
look like the severed heads of enemies, and they placed
burning embers inside that hollowed out vegetables to animate the
carved face as well as to protect the embers, and
that was the first of the jackalanterns. Now. On top

(03:42):
of that, they would also wear disguises, including masks and
different animal skins to make themselves look like the demons,
so they wouldn't be dragged back down into the underworld,
and those were the first costumes. But it got more disturbing.
The priests, called druids, would sacrifice animals and humans to

(04:04):
placate gods of the underworld. In fact, if the harvest
was bad, they'd even sacrifice local kings, blaming them for
angering the gods. The deaths involved torture and dismemberment to
further placate those furious gods. This went on for centuries
until the Romans arrived in Ireland. They added their own

(04:25):
harvest festivities, including honoring their Goddess of Fruit and Trees,
whose symbol was the apple, which many say may explain
the tradition of bobbing for apples at Halloween. Now. Eventually
Christianity took cold for most people in Ireland. But here's
the thing. The party surrounding Sowen was pretty much ingrained

(04:47):
in the Celtic culture, so the harvest festivals, including the
gifts of food and the costumes, continued. The Church tried
to replace the pagan festival by dedicating November one as
All Saints Day or All Hallows, and the night before
it was called All Hallows Eve or Halloween, but the

(05:07):
church was never able to get rid of the celebrations
surrounding sooen it was too ingrained in the culture, so
the two holidays managed to coexist now. When the Irish
arrived in America, they hung on to tradition and continued
to celebrate and give small gifts of food. During their
harvest festivals. Children would dressing costumes and jack o' lanterns

(05:29):
were placed outside of homes to represent the souls of
the departed, and because pumpkins were plentiful in America, they
became the jack lanterns. We still carve and light our
jack lanterns, but as one Irish anthropologist says, the minute
the lights came on, a lot of the stories lost
their potency and people's imaginations weren't running quite as wild.

(05:53):
By the nineteen thirties, children began trick or treating, but
they were given cookies, fruit, nuts, and toys. It wasn't
untill all the way into the nineteen fifties that big
business saw big business in Halloween and promoted the idea
of handing out candy. Hershey's, Reese's, Mars, and Nesley were
just a few of the companies that began making affordable

(06:15):
candy on a huge scale in the twentieth century. They
packaged them to make them inexpensive and easy to hand out.
So Halloween in its present form is really a recent evolution,
but with its roots in prehistoric tradition going back thousands
of years. I'm Patty Steele. The Backstory is a production

(06:55):
of iHeartMedia and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser.
Our executive producer is Steve Goldstein of Amplify Media. We're
out with new episodes twice a week. Thanks for listening
to the Backstory, the pieces of history you didn't know
you needed to know.