The trouble started before dark. A mob of more than 200 youths rampaged through the streets, hooting and whistling – armed with bags of flour. Men, women, tram conductors, train passengers, a couple on their way to the theatre, were all coated in white. The gang smashed a streetcar window and threw flour inside. Then someone threw a stone that split open a man’s head. “Rowdyism has stamped out innocent fun,” wrote The New York Times. It was October 31, 1894, in Washington, DC.

For a long time in North America, Halloween spelt trouble. What had started as the importation of quaint Celtic folklore by Irish immigrants in the mid-19th century had morphed into something ugly. Halloween was, after all, a night when the order of things – social and supernatural – was upended, a liminal zone in which shadowy elements could come out to play. As some pushed it too far, others attempted to tame it. In 1923, for example, Omaha’s police commissioner hatched a plan to recruit the city’s 500 worst-behaved boys as cops, just for Halloween. Then, in 1945, Toronto police were overrun when teenagers ditched their high-school Halloween party to turn the city centre into a bonfire, using petrol to set alight tram tracks. By 1950, US president Harry Truman’s Senate judiciary committee recommended reframing October 31 as a celebration of “youth honour”. The idea didn’t catch on.

Today, despite its chequered history, Halloween has spread well beyond the US. Saudi Arabia, while not explicitly recognising Halloween, has instituted a “horror weekend” around the same time of year. In Japanese cities, especially since the arrival of Disneyland in Tokyo, streets are packed with kawaii (cute) and spooky dress-ups. In Australia, where Halloween can be regarded with ambivalence, some front doors will be draped in mock cobwebs and jack-o’-lanterns, and millions of dollars will be spent on witches’ hats, skeleton suits and plastic pitchforks in preparation for parties and trick or treating.

Is there more to Halloween than businesses cashing in? Where did it come from? And what does it mean today?

When did Halloween come to Australia?

In 1982, the movie, E.T., blitzed box offices in Australia and charmed audiences with its depiction of trick or treating in American suburbia; the extra-terrestrial waddled about, adorable under a white sheet. Back then, trick or treating was a rare activity for Australian youngsters. “My first experience of [Halloween] would have been through the movie, E.T.,” says Damien Kelly, a father of two from the Melbourne suburb of Coburg. “I thought Halloween looked pretty cool.”

These days his front porch features figurines including a vampire and skeleton. “When I noticed it was being celebrated, I was like, let’s do this, the kids will love it,” he says.

Rewind to the mid 19th century, and you get closer to the beginnings of Halloween in Australia. Caledonian societies run by Scottish immigrants would host themed dinners for several hundred people at a time. “For the Scots community, it was one of their rallying points for the year,” says Mark Oxbrow, author of Halloween: Pagan Festival to Trick Or Treat. “If you were in Scotland, everyone was just doing things in their houses,” he says, whereas in Australia, Halloween “brought everyone together for a big celebration with different generations all muddled in these big, decadent grand halls”.

At one event in Perth in 1910, bags of sweets and nuts were handed out to 300 children, who danced and “dooked” for apples. And with the lights turned out at a hall in South Australia the same year, “eight weird figures, attired in long white gowns and beards appeared” and “danced grimly” to bagpipes.

By 1930, some homes were hosting Halloween events. At one party in Sydney’s leafy Mosman, “lights were lowered, and a weird ghost appeared in the dance room”. The house was decorated with witches, skulls and crossbones, owls and pumpkins, wrote the Daily Pictorial. Cardboard owls, sweet-bowls carved from pumpkins and tiny silk bats stuck to toothpicks lodged in bat (apple) pies were all a cinch to conjure, The Sydney Mail insisted: “Anyone with even moderate skill can sketch a black bat flying athwart an orange moon.”

During World War II, macabre parties were held for visiting US servicemen where they could relax by having their palms read and jitterbugging.

In 1944, the American Service Club in Phillip Street showed the “only obvious signs of Halloween in Sydney”, the Daily Telegraph reported, the space decked out with “a horror chamber, necromancy in a seer’s tent and clanking chains and weird noises”.

Halloween is an American thing, right?

As with Mexico’s Day of the Dead, Halloween evolved from centuries of folklore becoming enmeshed with monotheistic religious practice – namely via the Catholic Church. An early iteration was the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sah-win), marking the end of summer, when a good harvest could deliver food for celebration.

For the pre-Christian Celts, days and years were divided into light and dark halves; the shift between them was considered a dangerous time. “The old year is coming to an end, it’s dying, and the permeable wall between the spirit world and the material world is exceptionally thin at that particular time of the year,” explains Carole Cusack, professor of religious studies at the University of Sydney. “So, the dead walk. The gods are visible. People can have uncanny encounters – it’s expected.”

Fairies, goblins and other spirits were considered part of everyday life. A flickering light over Irish and Scottish bogs – probably a chemical reaction, say scientists now – gave rise to a ghost named Will-o’-the-wisp, who misled travellers. That tale is one foundation for the flickering lanterns carved from vegetables on Halloween, historians say.

In the Irish tale of Stingy Jack, a man tricks the devil into paying for his drink. When the man later dies, he shows up at the gates of hell carrying a hollowed-out turnip he’s been snacking on. But the devil won’t let him in, instead lobbing a hot coal at him that lands in his turnip. Jack wanders the world for eternity, carrying his turnip lantern.

Communing with the dead was par for the course, too. Cusack explains that in Celtic folklore, “the dead know things that the living don’t”. In another centuries-old tale, the warrior Nerai clinches a prize for bravery from his king (and receives helpful visions of the future) with help from a hanged captive whose dead body he carries to get a drink. “I was very thirsty when I was hanged,” the corpse confides.

As Christianity spread through Europe, folk events were incorporated into the Christian ecclesiastical calendar, says Cusack. All Hallows’ Eve, on October 31, precedes All Saints’ Day on November 1, for remembering the lives of saints, and All Souls’ Day on November 2, when Catholics traditionally visit the graves of loved ones (this is the Day of the Dead, in Spanish, Dia de los Muertos).

“Halloween was a day for what was called souling; people would come and pray for the people they knew who had died,” says historian Nick Rogers, author of Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night. “If other people prayed hard enough for your ancestors, they would get into heaven.” Returning spirits and the souls of the dead were appeased with offerings of food and drink, which transformed into a ritual of knocking on doors and asking for soul cakes in exchange for performances. (In Ireland, communities still light bonfires and eat oatcakes on Halloween, says Cusack.)

‘From the 1850s until the 1930s, the trick side of things is predominant. The traditions that get brought over are to do with pranking, some forms of ritualised begging, some violence.’

In Scotland, a similar activity emerged called guising where children would wear face coverings and traipse from house to house performing songs or poems in exchange for money or food. “You weren’t necessarily dressing up as a witch, you were putting a false face on,” says Oxbrow. The tradition also involved pranks: taking gates off fences or moving cows and sheep into gardens.

As settlers brought Halloween to North America in the 19th century, their folk traditions travelled with them. Across the Atlantic, pumpkins were plentiful and easier to carve than turnips – but pranks slid into civil unrest. “Some of the papers said, ‘It’s going to die out; it’s a quaint little Irish holiday’. But it didn’t,” Rogers tells us.

Halloween is what’s known as a ritual of reversal, says Macquarie University anthropologist Dr Chris Vasantkumar, who grew up in rural Pennsylvania. During the festival, “the usual roles in society are turned on their head for a short period of time”. Over time, it seesawed between trick and treat. “From the 1850s until the 1930s, the trick side of things is predominant. The traditions that get brought over are to do with pranking, some forms of ritualised begging, some violence.” Costumes and house parties were one way to “reduce the chaos being caused by working-class youth, in particular”.

The growth of suburban life in the United States post-war saw treats become more the focus, says Vasantkumar. “You don’t know your neighbours, but you also have a kind of optimistic faith in the social fabric for people to get along and take care of each other.”

In the 1970s, this gave way to a stranger-danger mindset. Urban myths about contaminated lollies sprang up. “It seems to derive, in part, from a story of a dad in Texas who killed his child for insurance money with poison candy,” he says. “There’s a shift away from, ‘OK, kids, go walk around by yourself and go have the cookies the neighbours made’ to ‘We’re going to follow you around, you’re gonna eat stuff that was made by a major confectioner – and it’s been X-rayed by the police.’”

Halloween can be ‘a transgressive pleasure that’s separate or different from the usual, Let’s have a beer.’

In the ’80s and ’90s, Halloween became corporatised but in the past 20 years, there’s been a pushback. “There’s a whole set of people who have adopted a do-it-yourself approach to Halloween,” says Vasantkumar. “For these folks, it’s really about personal expression and creativity.”

One Halloween, he saw someone on the San Francisco subway dressed as the H1N1 (swine flu) virus, “sticking the proper number of green balloons [in each protein] to a tracksuit”. “A friend of my wife dressed up as a Freudian slip one year.” Recently, a friend’s child dressed up as a wall, he adds. At the very least, he says, in the US, Halloween can be “a transgressive pleasure that’s separate or different from the usual, ‘Let’s have a beer’.”

What does Halloween mean today?

On a street in Bentleigh East in Melbourne’s south-east, 25 households jostle to outdo their neighbours’ decorations every Halloween. A life-sized headless horseman, hay bales lined with carved pumpkins, skeletons sitting on benches and a mummy hanging from a tree await the crowds of kids who descend on the street to trick or treat.

“We’re a very competitive bunch,” says resident Kirsten Novytarger. As a newcomer to the street several years ago, she wanted to get to know the neighbours. “It’s a community thing; we all talk to each other. You walk around with another parent, you’re meeting the neighbours for the first time.”

Several of the houses were spending hundreds of dollars on sweets alone for the trick-or-treaters while the local tennis club was hosting a sausage sizzle to raise funds. Of nearly 4000 Australian adults surveyed via text message by Roy Morgan in September 2024, 632 planned on celebrating Halloween, nearly half spending money on trick or treating costumes and one in five on parties.

But while consumption culture remains part of the Halloween mix, self-expression has perhaps become its most appealing aspect. “There’s not really another dress-up festival in the year, where you can just go off and be Barbie for the night,” says Mark Oxbrow.

But there may well be a deeper meaning too. Oxbrow believes all the mock skulls, ghosts and supernatural themes play a role in helping people acknowledge fear and death. “If you dress up as the things you might be afraid of, it’s a chance in some ways to deal with it,” he says. Clinical psychologist Tamara Cavenett says there’s a close link between fear and excitement. “In very young children, some of the costumes and dress-ups and activities can be a little bit scary” but it’s also an opportunity to help a child work through their fears, she tells us.

Nick Rogers recalls public unease over Halloween parades in New York City after the September 11 terrorist attacks. “Some people said we should ban Halloween; we just had real terror, we should ban terror,” he says. Then there was a reframe: “The interesting thing about that Halloween was a lot of people dressed up as firemen, in red, white and blue, as the Statue of Liberty. They made it patriotic.”

In Australia, popular inspirations in recent years have included the character of Wednesday Addams, a spin-off from the Addams Family franchise – she is a demure teen who sets bags of piranhas on a team of water-polo jocks who’ve been bullying her brother – while scary perennials include Freddy Krueger (think, metal-clawed hand) and the baddie from Scream (black cloak, Munch-like mask).

‘I had someone do a sexy Karl Marx … It’s terrifying to some people.’

In the inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, the staff at Rose Chong Costumiers helps dress an “endless deluge of mummies and witches”, sexy vampires, Barbies and even Britney Spears lookalikes. There’s also a big call for the “elegant but creepy” look, says costumier Dan Knight, “like, Rothschild Surreal or Elegant Heretics”. “They’ll wear Joan of Arc but she’s in a sparkling gold gown with, like, blood dripping from her eyes,” Knight says. The vibe needn’t be horror per se. “Last year I had someone do a sexy Karl Marx. They did a big grey beard and a big black coat and then red lingerie and the Communist manifesto. It’s terrifying to some people.”

Why do some people love Halloween – but others hate it?

Not everyone wants to drape themselves in gothic noir at Halloween. “It’s just a piece of worthless commercialisation inherited from America,” says Cusack. “I was brought up Catholic, completely 100 per cent Irish. We never did it. The whole thing has come into our culture comparatively recently … from, largely, horror films and popular culture.”

Certainly, some Catholic clerics have warned about Halloween’s association with the occult. A Czech priest apologised after he stomped on pumpkins – “symbols of evil spirits” – that turned out to have been carved by children for a parade. And the senior chaplain of a Melbourne private school told parents in 2023 that Halloween created an impression that “what is actually potentially spiritually dangerous is innocuous” and the school did not promote “a practice that, in some cases, causes annoyance, destruction of property and havoc for our neighbourhoods”.

Meanwhile, in the States, says Vasantkumar, “there are people for whom Halloween is the biggest day of the year”. “This is the one holiday that allows transgression, allows me to take a step back from my work schedule, allows me to focus on my own personal creativity”. Australians like any excuse to party, he says. “It feels like Australians are still trying it on.”

Costumier Alicia Slater, of the Little Shop of Horrors Costumery in Mornington, notes: “Everybody loves Christmas … The thing is, you’ve got to buy presents and go to awkward dinner parties with family. Halloween is just about having fun.”

Isn’t the spring racing carnival about dressing up too? Sure, says Dan Knight, in a “fancy, nice” way. “But the only point of Halloween is, get silly and get dressed up.”

– with Angus Holland

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