Halloween: A History of the World's Most Haunted Holiday

What if almost everything you think you know about Halloween is wrong?

Halloween: A History of the World's Most Haunted Holiday traces the night from its origins as Samhain, an Iron Age Irish festival marking the turn from summer to winter, through two thousand years of accident, adaptation, and reinvention, to the trillion-dollar American holiday it has become today.

This is not the tidy, secondhand version of Halloween's history repeated every October in listicles and classroom handouts. This book goes back to primary sources and archaeological evidence to separate what actually happened from what people simply prefer to believe:

Why the Church's move to All Saints' Day almost certainly had nothing to do with stamping out Samhain How a Roman goddess of orchards got credited with inventing apple bobbing, and why the dates don't match Why Salem's witch trials happened in the spring, not October, and how a shame-filled city spent three centuries avoiding its own history before turning it into a billion-dollar tourism industry How a father who murdered his own son with poisoned candy became the accidental origin of a decades-long, largely unfounded moral panic Why the devil's horns belong to the Greek god Pan, the witch's broom is half a household chore and half a torture confession, and the traditional orange and black color scheme was invented by a twentieth-century paper company How John Carpenter's $300,000 film permanently welded slasher cinema to a single calendar date Why Halloween became one of the most significant nights of the year for LGBTQ communities, and what that has to do with a hillside bonfire in Iron Age Ireland Spanning Celtic Ireland, imperial Rome, the medieval church, the Scottish witch trials, Ellis Island, Victorian courtship rituals, Prohibition-era vandalism, Cold War candy factories, and Tokyo's Shibuya crossing, this is a rigorously researched, richly detailed, and genuinely surprising account of how a single night came to mean so many different things to so many different people, and why, after two thousand years of being claimed, contested, and reinvented, it refuses to go away.

For readers of popular history, folklore, and the true stories behind the traditions we take for granted.