The Dark Origins of Halloween 🎃

Every October, we dress up, light pumpkins, and laugh in the dark — but behind the fun lies a night once lit by sacred fires and shadowed by fear. In this Halloween special, LilWeird traces the festival’s ancient roots in Samhain — when the veil thinned, the dead walked, and the living wore masks not for play, but for protection. A curious look at how ritual became revelry, how fear turned to fun, and how the ghosts of the past still linger in every candle’s flicker.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
There's something about October that feels different in the air,
The night seem heavier, even the shadows clean longer than usual,
as if the world itself is remembering. Every year we'd
call it Halloween, a night of costumes, candies, and clever disguises.
But before the laughter, before the mass became playful, there

(00:24):
was another story, a darker one, a story of fire
and fear, of offerings, disguises, and the belief that, for
one night every year, the dead woodoo of the living.
Welcome to Little Weird, where curiosity tiptoes through the dark.
M Jane and the night the world bears a mask.

(00:45):
It's the season of thin veils, flickering candles, and stories
that read when the lights go out. Now, I know
that most of you, my dear listeners, might be here
hoping for ghost stories. It's Halloween, after all, and most
people lean into the scary, the spooky and the shivers

(01:07):
that come with it. But I'm not most people. You see.
Whenever I try to read, write, or even record something
truly scary, strange things happen, and tonight I'd rather not
invite that kind of energy in If anyone out there
wants to talk about these stories, though you're absolutely welcome

(01:30):
to I've got a few spooky tastes of my own
to share someday, since well weird is basically my third name,
But no, I refuse to do it alone. What follows
is a journey into the shadows of Halloween spass. Parts
of it are documented, parts of it are inferred, and

(01:54):
parts of it remain mysteries. Where evidence ends remark our
footsteps carefully. So instead of summoning goes, let's summon the truth.
Tonight betrays the forgotten roots of Halloween. We will walk
through sewing. When the Celts lead sacred fires to honor

(02:16):
their dead, we will stand beside the Drewins, whose rituals
blurred the line between protection and sacrifice. We'll follow the
trail from those fires to the soft glow of a
modern chocoal lantern and ask what darkness did we inherit?
And what did this guy is as play? Because for

(02:38):
all our mother and joy, Halloween still sits at the
crossroads between harvest and decay, light and shadow, life and death.
So light your candle, keep your door unlocked, just long
enough for a story to sleep through, and let's begin.
On October thirty firs. We wear masks and play protect.

(03:00):
But more than two thousand years ago, some people dress
not to pretend, but to survive. Long before Halloween was
the night of play, it was the night of passage.
Or the Celts Solvin spelled us sa mhai n but
pronounced as Solvin marked the hinge of the year, the

(03:21):
end of harvest, the onset of darkness, a closing of
one cycle and the birth of another. To them, the
boundary between rurals was thin enough to tear. This was
when the other world opened and its denizens walked freely
among humankind. They spoke of the Ashi, the supernatural being

(03:43):
c called ferries. They would emerge because their earthen mounds
that she spelled us sidhe but pronounced as she with
literally yon white on sowing night. The people didn't worship
these entities. They piece them offerings of food and drink
customary not just for hospitality, but to beg for their

(04:07):
protection against the rigors of the coming winter, because if
you didn't appease them, they would quickly become more malevolent,
seeking revenge. During so wing. Their ruins were said their
rise to meet ours. But the Celts also feared another
hosset this luva, it's spelled as s l uagh but

(04:30):
pronounced as lua. The restless, that they were the source
of the wicked or the unburied, carried on the western wind,
searching for warm houses and living bodies to claim. It
was said that if you heard their approach in the dark,
you must lie flat and hold your breath less. They

(04:50):
mistake care sol for awakent room. So the living prepared.
Fires were doused to hide the smoke of their chimneys,
doors for barred, windows sealed, and boasts of food left
on thresholds, a piece offering whatever passed through the night.
Some painted their faces with ash or wore animal skins

(05:12):
to confuse wandering spirits. Others symbols into wood or set
stones around their homes as wards. These acts were not
called magic, then they were apotre pei krites, deeds meant
to turn away evil. At the center of each village,
the people gathered the light the sacred fire, the heart

(05:32):
of sowing, each household extinguish its heart, letting the old
year's flame die with the harvests. Then from the Greek
communal blaze, they carried home new embers, wrap in clay
or pit, relighting their fires in the spark of divine protection.
It was more than a ritual. It was a renewal,

(05:54):
a way of binding the community under one shared flame.
In those early fires, animals are sometimes sacrificed for food, yes,
but also as offerings to unseen powers. Their bones were
thrown into the blaze, crackling in the dark, their smoke
rising like ars. From these charred remains came the word

(06:16):
bone fire, the ancestor of what we now call bonfire.
Over centuries, the term shed its darker syllable, but not
its meaning. The bonfire was more than warm. It was defiance,
a luminous barrier between life and death, light and shadow.
People believe that as long as the flames roared, the

(06:37):
dead would stay on their side of the veil, and
the living would make it safely through the long cold life.
To the modern ear, these stories sound like superstition, but
to them it is psychology of spirit and survival, a
conversation with the dark that fed their world as surely
a stream fed their fields. But as the veil thinned,

(06:59):
fire became more than protection, it became sacrifice. Roman chroniclers
spoke of it first. They wrote of druids, priests of
oak and MEAs, gathering at the turning of the year
to perform rites that bound life to the cycle of death.
Ording the Judeus Caesar in his commentary the Bellio Calicho,

(07:21):
the Jurids built massive, weaker effigies, towering men of women, wood,
and within them they place animals and sometimes humans, the phireohs,
carrying the offerings to their gods of sky and earth.
Archaeologics centuries later uncovered what made yet their echoes. The
bog bodies, the bug bodies of Ireland and Northern Europe,

(07:46):
men with throatscot limbs, bound bodies preserved in the cold
pat Some scholars see these deaths as punishment, others as
offering rituals of renewal mean to feed the land and whi.
Others believed the sacrifices were met to wardo with the
fire could not destroy the s Lua, those devouring souls

(08:08):
who swept across the land on western wins. The smoke
from these fires, they said, kept the rests dead, alof
and able to descend upon living. The logic was simple,
although terrifying, to offer life so that life might continue
to burn flesh to shield the spirit. Over time, the
story shifted. Later writers claimed that druids worship a horn,

(08:32):
the hunter of the night, a spirit of wilderness and death,
look and shadow and crown with antlers. They said, CII
the other world, and demanded tribute when the year turned dark.
In one version of the legend, the druids carried torches
from village to village, chanting prayers to this horned one.

(08:52):
At each door they stopped, demanding and offering. The treat
was food or life. Refusal was met with the mark
of the dead, a hexagram drawn in blood upon the door.
It's a story in many historians now doubt more likely
a later Christian parable than a record of fact, But
it's power lingers because of what it represents, the bargain

(09:14):
between fear and survival. Whether the Jurids truly shed blood
in those fires or not. Every tale ends the same way,
with the people stunning before the dark, offering something or
anything to keep the void at pay. Because when the
air crews cold and the night stretches long, humans have
always done the same thing. We feed the fire and

(09:36):
whisper into the smoke a promise to whatever lis since
that we will see another dawn. By the time the
sacred virus deamed and the Druid's chance became memory, the
ritils of protection remained, only the forms changed. The living
no longer lead great weaker men, but they still lead candles.
They no longer poured blood into the earth, but they

(09:58):
still left food by the door. These gestures carried a
single message. We remember you, we fear you. Please pass
us by. The line between reverence and revelry is thin
and nower is more evident than in what Halloween became.
When Christianity is spread through the Celtic lands, it did

(10:20):
not erase the old beliefs, It absorbed them. It painted
new names over old gods. Old gods became saints, Old
fires became candles, The horned One became the devil, and
the Knight of the Dead became a vigil for the saints.
But mame something holy doesn't make it harmless. The people

(10:40):
still remember that the priests tried to bury. They still
lit their fires, they still wore their masks, and though
they preyed in Latin, the language of fear remained the same.
The mass stayed, only now they were made of joy.
By the late Middle Ages, the solemn rittles of all
hallows had turned into a festival of disguise. People dressed

(11:05):
as angels and devils, the blessed and the dumb, mirrying
the very souls they once feared to meet. It was
kind of rehearsal, a knight to mock death, safely to
love at what once terrified. When Irish and Scottish immigrants
crossed the Atlantic, they brought their autumn traditions with them.
But America, with its appetite, fury invention, took the old

(11:29):
bones of solving and rubbed them in something bright and salable.
The jah or lantern became a decoration, the soulcake became candy,
and the sacred fire became porch like. We turned a
night of remembrance into a night of performance. We commercialized
the shadows. We took a vigil for the dead and

(11:49):
make it a costume party. Yet something persist, even as
the mask got cheaper and the lights curled brighter. There's
still that that instinct that makes us look over our shoulder,
the same one that once drove our ancestors to light fires,
leave food by doors, and whisper prayers against the wind.

(12:14):
We wear masks now for fun. But perhaps what we're
really doing is remembering how to forget fear. Laughter has
become our protection, spell, mockery our exorcism. We turn death
into decker so we can face it without trembling. Maybe
that's why Halloween endoers, because even when we distribute of

(12:37):
its gods, it goes, and its rituals, it still speaks
the same language, the art of surviving the dark bay
making it beautiful. So when you see the mass and
the candles, the candy and the costumes, remember that they
were never meant to erase fear. They were meant to

(12:58):
hold it. That they meet long enough for us to laugh.
And so the circle turns again. The harvest is gone,
the nights grow longer, and the veil that tin uncertain
fabric between worlds truths close once more. We have walked
through centuries tonight, from the sacred fires of Soaveeine to
the porch lights of Halloween, from offerings soverear to offerings

(13:22):
of fun. But through it all, one truth remains. We
have never truly stopped talking to the dark. The Celts
called it respect, the Drurids called it balance, the Church
called it remembrance, and we call it entertainment, but the
impulse is the same. Every candley light, every mask we wear,
every knock at the door is an echo of a

(13:45):
conversation other than history itself, a promise whispered into the wind.
Take this offering and let us see another done. The
veil is never fully gone. It lingers in the quiet moments,
in the creek of a door when no one's there,
in the flicker of a light that shouldn't have moved
in the way October air feels heavier than it should.

(14:06):
It lingers because it belongs to us. W went into
our rituals, our laughter, our longing to believe there's more
beyond the visible. Maybe that's why you keep this night alive,
because part of us misses the mystery, because part of
us remembers what it meant to gather close to the fire,

(14:26):
to whisper names of the dead, to feel the cold
breath of the unknown, and know that we were still here.
Iren has always been one of my most awated times
of the year, not because of trick or treating, or
because it fell on school breaks, but because it just
felt right from dark, a little weird of mystery, but

(14:50):
still fun, with a touch of mischief. It's the sason
that fits my personality so well. When I was younger,
I'd always plan what costum I do, but spekay things
I do. But I never really got to join any
party or event. My family was traditional to believe spirits
room the years during this time, so it was safer

(15:11):
to stay home, and when I got older, I still did,
mostly because the city gets hectic with crowds rushing to
cemeteries or parties, and I prefer the quiet instant. Still
had ween always meant something special to me. I wait
for those Moandanga Bibai and Halloween specials. The eerie music,

(15:33):
the enactments, the stories that blurred real and unreal. It
was exciting and just the right kind of scary. At
one point I even became fascinated with witchcraft and paganism.
I knew about the sawing early on, though I wasn't
sure how to pronounce it. Then I remember reading about
it in the Exercise by William Peter Blatty. Yes there

(15:55):
was indeed a passage referencing the festival, and it was
this disturbingly vivid, even if it's fictional. Back then, I
didn't think of it so much, but when I learn
more about the darker origins of Halloween, and later I
also heard our pastor mentioned that even former occultists admitted
that there's really something dark about Halloween, something that isn't

(16:19):
just a superstition or story. I started to look at
it differently, not in fear, but in curiosity. But if
we need all the fun and mischief, there really was
something sacred, something we've long forgotten how to see. Still,
I've never encountered anything dark during this season, maybe because

(16:40):
here in the Philippines we have no winter, no dying harvests,
and our traditions mixed remembrance with family that fear. We
visit graves, light candles, coolprey. Our goods are greeted, not
warded off, and I think that's beautiful. I'm not here
to tell anyone how to see Halloween. Believe what you believe.

(17:02):
If it's just fun for you, let it be. But
for me, it's fascinating how perspectives evolve, how curiosity you
re shape so that you think we know. Maybe this
is what awakening feels like, to look at something familiar
and suddenly see all its layers, the secret, the strange,

(17:23):
the dark, and the delightful. I guess that's what Little
Weird has always been about, not just cheesing what's odd
or creepy, but rediscovering the weird and the wonderful. Because,
as they say, you can come as you are, but
you won't leave as you came. So tonight, if you

(17:43):
carve a pumpkin or whisper a story in the half
light was for a moment, Remember what this night once was,
A prayer, a plea, a pack between life and death.
Because even now the veil hasn't closed, it only waits,
patient familiar for the next October. In the theory it awake.

(18:05):
If you enjoyed the Night's episode, don't forget to follow
lalil Word podcasts, where we explore stories that sit between
fact and folklore, reason and reverence, the curious, and the
almost realm. If you'd like to go even deeper into
the Night's history, tracing the full history of sowing, the Druines,
and the origins of modern Halloween, there is a special

(18:28):
extended version of this episode available exclusively for our Lailword
subscribers on Speaker and Coffee. It's a more documentary style exploration.
Let's meet more history, all still wonderfully weird. You'll find
the link in the show notes, along with sources and
references us in this episode. For more strange tales and reflections,

(18:52):
visit Lailward Universe on sub Stuff and Coffee, where every
post keep still under Live. Share this episode with someone
who loves a good mystery and tell me what do
you believe about Halloween. Is it superstition, celebration, or something
that still whispers in the dark. Stay curious, stay human,
and stay just a little weird. Thanks for listening.