13 Halloween Traditions to Get into the Spooky Spirit

Get into the spooky spirit this fall by reviving 13 historic Halloween traditions that draw upon the holiday’s supernatural qualities. According to folklore, the veil between the natural and spirit worlds thins on All Hallows’ Eve, making it the perfect night for magic, prognostication, and honoring the dead. Let’s get metaphysical!

13 Historic Halloween Traditions

Many of the following Halloween traditions were Irish and Scottish folk customs. In particular, we know all about Scottish divination rituals thanks to Robert Burns’ 1785 poem, “Hallowe’en.” The rituals centered on young adults calling upon spirits to help foresee their future spouse. And really, not much has changed in the 21^st century. Don’t we all want to know which couples are endgame?

In the 19^th century, these folk customs made their way to the United States via immigration. Old World practices took on new American twists, creating time-honored Halloween traditions. While you may recognize some of these customs, many fell out of favor in the early 20^th century. For several decades, however, they had a chokehold on American culture, as evidenced by their consistent appearance in turn-of-the-century Halloween party books.

Now, not all customs were about finding out if the hottie next door was going to be your hubby. Other traditions stemmed from the holiday’s association with honoring the ancestral dead. Still others were a reaction to the mischief and pranks by roving bands of teenage boys plaguing American cities. Little shitheads.

Now that we’ve got some background, let’s explore these historic Halloween traditions and how you can incorporate them into your festivities this spooky season.

1. Discover Your True Love with a Mirror Ritual

Mirror, Mirror, on the wall, will he ghost or even call? Is it real or in my head? I swiped right, but am I being misled?

While modern dating is a nightmare, let’s be real, it’s never been easy. Young women in 18^th and 19^th-century Ireland and Scotland were nervous as hell about finding their true love. As a result, they often resorted to divination rituals to reveal their future husbands. Mirrors were an important tool in this task, as Robert Burns tells us in his poem.

He describes a young woman standing in front of a mirror on Halloween night. After eating an apple, the face of her true love appears in the reflection. Alternatively, the young woman could produce the same result by standing in front of a mirror by candlelight and combing her hair. Future hubby would appear, looking over her shoulder.¹ Cool, yet creepy.

The magic behind this ritual goes back to the Celtic belief in spirits of the living, known as “fetches” in Ireland and “wraiths” in Scotland. Normally, seeing these spirits would be scary AF because they were a portent of death. But if they appeared on Halloween night, marriage was in the cards.

Over time, variations of this ritual appeared. Try this one from 1898:

1. Stand in front of a mirror at midnight on Halloween.
2. You can be indoors, with a candle in one hand and a mirror in the other. Or you can walk backwards several steps outside in the moonlight with a mirror in your hand. Either works.
3. Repeat the following rhyme:

Round and round, O stars so fair!
Ye travel and search out everywhere
I pray you, sweet stars, now show to me
This night who my future husband shall be

A Tale of Success

So, does this actually work? Well, it did for Madge Falconer in 1880s Scotland. William Sharp relayed her tale in “Hallowe’en: A Three-fold Chronicle,” from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 1886. Our girl Madge was 14 years old and desperately in love with her 17-year-old neighbor Ralph. Unfortunately, they couldn’t get married because she was too young. Thankfully, child brides weren’t a thing at this point. Anyway, Ralph moved to India, which really put a strain on their relationship. In his absence, Madge pined away for 7 years.

She still wasn’t over him by the time she turned 21, so she decided to perform the mirror ritual on Halloween night. To her chagrin, the face reflecting back at her wasn’t dear Ralphie, but an older man with a wicked face scar. Despite this, she dated Ralph after she moved to India. But alas, it was not meant to be, because they broke up. Shortly after, Madge met Major Colville, an older man with a battle scar. She recognized his face as the one from All Hallows’ Eve, married him, and lived happily ever after.³

So, for all of you trying this ritual, I hope you find your own Major Colville.

2. Burn Your Nuts to See if Your Relationship Will Last

Another divination ritual involved nuts, particularly chestnuts or hazelnuts, which were abundant during the harvest. As with all of these folk customs, there were variations to the ritual, but the main goal was to discover who you’d marry, or if a relationship was endgame.

Burns dedicates 4 stanzas in his poem to nut burning, indicating the Scots were really into this one. Americans liked it too, because it appears in every late 19^th and early 20^th-century Halloween party book I’ve consulted. So, it’s a tried-and-true method of divination.

Here are two variations for you to try:

Ritual 1

This ritual is to determine your true love. Or you can give this one a go if you’re in a dilemma like Kelly Rowland and don’t know whether to choose your boo or Nelly.

1. Grab some chestnuts or hazelnuts.
2. Assign a name to each nut. You may also want to include a wildcard nut for a possible unknown entity.
3. Throw the nuts into the fire and watch them burn, baby.
4. The nut that burns the brightest and longest represents your true love.

Ritual 2

Perform this divination ritual to find out if your relationship is the makings of an epic romance novel or if it’ll fizzle out and become a cautionary tale. Warning! Do this at your own risk, and don’t blame me if the outcome sucks.

1. Grab two nuts (😏) to represent a couple. Assign a name to each nut.
2. Throw them into the fire and watch them react.
3. If one of them hisses and steams, that associated person is a troublemaker and is dragging the other person down.
4. If they both act out, you’re both toxic and need to break the fuck up.
5. If they burn together, this is a match made in the stars. Nothing says true love like burning to ash together.⁴

3. Bobbing for Apples

Don’t apples just scream autumn vibes? While their abundance this time of year has produced fall favorites like apple cider and apple pie, they were also a popular tool for predicting the future.

Bobbing for apples goes back. Way back. It was popular in Britain at least 400 years ago but fell out of fashion by the 19^th century. Scotland and Ireland, however, still enjoyed bobbing for apples, and the Halloween tradition made its way to the United States.

Surprise, surprise, bobbing for apples was a way to discover your future beau. Here’s how it was done:

1. Fill two tubs with water and apples. Carve, adhere, or insert the initials of girls’ names into the apples. Put them in one tub. Do the same for boys’ names to the remaining apples and put them in the other tub.
2. Tie participants’ hands behind their backs and blindfold them. Bring them to the appropriate tub.
3. Have the participants retrieve apples with their teeth.
4. The name in their apple is their prophesied spouse.

Another variation is to forgo initials and have everyone bob for apples at the same time. The first person to retrieve an apple will be the first to be married.

Alternatively, you can just bob for apples for fun, and the person who gets the first or most apples gets a prize, not a spouse. I mean, not everything is about getting married, right? Give me a monetary prize for crying out loud.

4. Pare an Apple to Discover Your True Love’s Initial

Apples were also used in this fun divination ritual designed to (what else?) find your future love. Are we sensing a theme for 19^th-century Irish, Scottish, and American youth?

To enact this Halloween tradition, follow these simple steps:

1. Pare the skin of an apple.
2. Fling it over your head as you recite the following incantation from 1898.
3. The apple paring will reveal the initial of your future spouse’s first name.

I pare this pippin round and round again,
My sweetheart's name to flourish on the plain;
I fling the unbroken paring o'er my head,
My sweetheart's letter on the ground is read

Phoebe Halliwell from Charmed performed this ritual in “All Halliwell’s Eve,” Season 3, Episode 4. Phoebe, a witch with the power of premonition and one of the all-powerful Charmed Ones, is sent back in time to save her colonial ancestor. She performs the ritual at a Halloween fair, which reveals that the name of her true love begins with the letter “C.” The relevant scene in the video below ends at 1:40.

SPOILER ALERT! Phoebe thinks the letter stands for Cole (the dude with the long hair), but he’s not who she ends up with. The apple isn’t wrong, though—it’s the fruit of knowledge after all—because it’s later revealed her true love is someone else whose name begins with a C.

So, if you try this ritual, learn from Phoebe, and don’t automatically assume that the letter stands for the name of the person you’re currently shagging.

5. Use Luggie Bowls to Reveal Your Fate

Luggie bowls were yet another prognostication tool popular in Scotland and Ireland. The all-knowing bowls determined if you’d marry the love of your life or end up a spinster, sad and alone. This Halloween tradition made its way to the United States, where it was practiced from the late 19^th century to the 1940s.

Follow these steps to predict your future:

1. Grab some luggies, which are small bowls with handles (lugs). If you don’t have any, no problem. Substitute regular bowls or saucers.
2. Fill your luggies with 3-4 different substances, each of which has a unique prediction of how your life will turn out. See below for your options.
3. Arrange the luggies on a table.
4. Blindfold each participant and have them reach out to touch a bowl. The one they land on predicts their fate.

Filling Your Luggies

Click on the “+” to expand the text and explore your substance options and meanings.

Luggies in Action

If you think some of the fates the luggies predict sound harsh, it’s because they are. In Burns’ poem, Uncle John performs the ritual, touching the empty bowl three times in a row. He’s so pissed that he throws the bowls into the fire.

In order, on the clean hearth-stane,
The luggies three are ranged,
And ev’ry time great care is ta’en
To see them duly changed;
Auld uncle John, wha wedlock’s joys
Sin Mar’s-year did desire,
Because he gat the toom [empty]-dish thrice,
He heav’d them on the fire
In wrath that night. 

While this Halloween tradition is supposed to be all fun and games, be careful what you place in the bowls. In James Joyce’s short story, “Clay,” Maria gets a grim prediction. The first time she performs the ritual, she touches a bowl with a mound of clay, representing an early death. While this is startling, Joyce uses the clay to represent her metaphorical death resulting from a drab and unfulfilled life. There’s much to-do about the outcome, and the substances in the bowls are replaced. Maria tries once more, selecting a prayer book. As you can imagine, this represents a life devoted to God in a convent, not the hubby she was hoping for.⁹ If you decide to enact this ritual, be kind to yourself and include fun options.

6. Make Soul Cakes

Get thee to a kitchen and bake some soul cakes this Halloween! Soul cakes were associated with souling, a tradition practiced as early as 1511 in the British Isles.¹⁰ Souling—which took place on November 1 (All Souls’ Eve)—involved groups of children and adults going door-to-door, offering prayers for the dead in exchange for food and beer. The kiddos would also offer up a song, like this one from 1880:

Soul! Soul! A soul-cake;
Good mistress, gi'us a soul-cake,
One for Peter, one for Paul
And one for them as made us all.
An apple or a cherry
Or anything else to make us merry
Oh! Good mistress, to the cellar
And fetch us a pail of water.
It is a good fame
To get a good name.

Malikhpur, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Soul cakes, also called saumas cakes/loaves, were the most important food item distributed by homeowners. These small round seedcakes were considered good luck, and many soulers chose to keep them instead of consuming them.

Recipe

You can opt to recreate a historic soul cake recipe by following the instructions in the following video by Tasting History with Max Miller.

If you’d like to make a more modern soul cake recipe, try Coco in the Kitchen. Alternatively, you can pick up a copy of Llewellyn’s Sabbat Essentials: Samhain for a soul cakes recipe, along with other yummy Halloween bites.¹² Finally, Mickie Mueller also makes a great modernized version in Llewellyn’s Little Book of Halloween.¹³ She has adjusted original ingredients and instructions to suit our modern palates and baking techniques.

Enjoy your soul cakes! Maybe don’t try to recreate souling, though, because trick-or-treaters will be pissed if you give them bread instead of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Don’t be that house.

7. Make Dumb Cakes

Another Halloween tradition from kitchens past was the practice of baking dumb cakes. Meant to predict a future spouse, this ritual is fun but challenging because it has to be done in complete silence (dumb=mute). Have you ever tried getting a group of teenage girls together and telling them they can’t talk? Yeah, good luck with that.

If you’re up for this challenge, follow these instructions:

1. Gather your besties in your kitchen between the hours of 10:00­–11:00 PM on Halloween night. Make sure everyone is aware beforehand that they’ve got to zip it throughout the entire ritual. Seriously, not a peep!
2. Each participant grabs a handful of wheat flour and puts it on a sheet of white paper. Next, each takes a large pinch of salt and sprinkles it over the flour.
3. Select one of your silent buddies to take all the lumps of salted wheat flour and combine them into one piece of dough. For some reason, don’t use spring water to do this (it’s from 1898…so…maybe use whatever you want).
4. Now, each participant takes a piece of the dough to make their cake. Each bestie rolls out the piece to flatten it and marks it with their initials using a pin.
5. Bake the cakes, but as soon as you place them in the oven, back away. Sit as far away as possible as they do their thing. Make sure your cakes are done by 11:00 PM.
6. Between 11:00 PM and midnight, make sure each participant turns their cake once.
7. At midnight, the future spouse of the first one in your friend group to be married will enter the room and touch the cake with their initials. As Martha Russel Orne says in her book, “This is a grand opportunity for a gentleman to covertly pop the question.” So, this ritual is the perfect proposal for the Halloweenie in your circle.¹⁴

Make an Entire Meal Silently

A variation of this ritual is to bake a dumb supper, which in this case is not for honoring the ancestral dead. I discuss that type of dumb supper below. In this Irish and Scottish ritual, unmarried women cooked, served, and ate an entire meal in complete silence, and sometimes did every action backward, so that the living spirits of their future husbands would appear. As previously mentioned, these spirits were portents of marriage on Halloween night.¹⁵

8. Hold a Dumb Supper for the Dead

While dumb cakes were all about marriage, similar rituals focused on a very different outcome. Dumb Suppers were also an offering to the dead, particularly among African Americans in the United States. An account from Vicksburg, Mississippi, gives us an inside look:

“Two people should cook it together, neither saying a word during the process. Get some dirt from the dead person’s grave and set it in a saucer in the middle of the table. Cook something such as turnip greens, that the dead person liked to eat, set the table for three, and put up three chairs. Then bless the food without speaking to one another and start in silently to eat. Watch the third plate: Unseen hands will manipulate the fork and knife, greens will be taken from the dish all the time, but the chair will remain vacant. All will be well, but should you speak while your invisible guest is with you the wind will blow, the dogs bark, the chickens cackle and thunder and lightning appears to frighten you.”¹⁶

While this is a fascinating tradition, you don’t have to get dirt from your loved one’s grave to hold a dumb supper. Modern witches have modified it so you can feast with the ancestral dead without a trip to the cemetery. The gist of the ritual is to set out food for living guests and deceased loved ones. At the beginning of the meal, invite your ancestors to join. Then, dig in, eating in total silence. Once the meal is complete, kindly ask your ancestors to take their leave. Remember, this ritual is respectful and is to be done with love. Don’t mess around. If you’d like detailed instructions from a seasoned witch, check out Silver Ravenwolf’s book, Halloween: Customs, Recipes & Spells.

9. Carve Old World Turnips

Before the modern jack-o’-lantern, terrifying turnips ruled Halloween in Ireland and Scotland. They come from the Irish legend of Stingy Jack, a deceitful man who escaped a premature trip to Hell by tricking the devil. Since Jack was a major douche, he was denied entry to both Heaven and Hell upon his natural death. The devil was fed up with his ass and turned him away, dooming Jack to endlessly wander the earth. As the door was hitting Jack on the way out, the devil threw him an ember to light the darkness. Jack placed it in a hollowed-out turnip, creating a lantern to guide his way. To read a version of Jack’s tale, see The Origins of the Jack-o’-Lantern.

As you can imagine, when kiddos heard this tale, they were like, “Cool!!! Let’s make creepy turnip lanterns and walk around with them on Halloween!” And so, they did.

In addition to children carrying turnip lanterns as they went door-to-door on All Hallows’ Eve, adults were practical by using them as they went to and fro in the evenings. These lanterns got the name “jack-o’-lantern” largely due to a phenomenon in the Irish boglands. Gas was combusting from decaying matter, causing mysterious lights to appear out of thin air. Since Irish villagers didn’t know science was at play, they believed it was magic and called the lights “jack-o’-lanterns,” à la Stingy Jack.

Thus, a Halloween tradition was born, resulting in “jack-o’-lanterns” made from carved turnips that are truly the stuff of nightmares.

Make Your Own Turnip Lantern

This spooky season, try your hand at carving a turnip. It’s harder to do because, unlike pumpkins, they aren’t hollow. But if you’re willing to put in the work, you can create something that will scare small children when they visit your house.

When you head over to the grocery store to buy your turnips, don’t actually buy the root veggie labeled turnip. It’s way too small to carve. Grab yourself a big-ass rutabaga. To hollow it out, cut off the top. Then, attack the inside of that sucker with a melon baller until you’ve scooped out enough to get an LED tealight inside. The next step is to carve a face in it, similar to how you carve a pumpkin. You can use a paring knife or a pumpkin-carving saw for this part.¹⁷ Place the tealight in, put the top back on, and proudly display your gruesome masterpiece.

10. Carve Jack-o’-lanterns

If there’s one Halloween tradition that reigns supreme today, it’s carving jack-o’-lanterns from pumpkins. Although Halloween didn’t come to the United States until the Irish and Scots immigrated in the 19^th century, Americans had been carving pumpkins for years. They were just doing it during the harvest and Thanksgiving. John Greenleaf Whittier places the orange squash in this context in his 1850 poem, “The Pumpkin.” He proves that Americans were carving faces into the pumpkins before the introduction of Halloween:

When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin
Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!

When Halloween made its way over to the New World, it became clear that pumpkins were far superior for creating jack-o’-lanterns than turnips. By the early 20^th century, pumpkins became the king of Halloween.

So, get your Halloweenie on this year, and carve some pumpkins!

11. Tell Ghost Stories Around a Fire

All Hallows’ Eve is the perfect time to tell bone-chilling ghost stories and scare each other shitless. As Harper’s Weekly notes in their December 1894 issue, “The tradition of telling ghost stories on Halloween derives from both the Celtic belief in the rising of the ancestral dead on October 31 and from the Christian directive to honor the souls of the departed on Hallowmas [All Saints’ Day].”¹⁹

It’s really simple to partake in this Halloween tradition. All you need are some terrifying ghost stories. Some of my favorites hail from Victorian Gothic Horror, particularly short stories by Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens.

Gothic Tales by Elizabeth Gaskell

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Elizabeth Gaskell’s spine-tingling tales explore both supernatural and real-life horrors. You’ll encounter evil doppelgängers, family curses spanning generations, and ghosts beckoning you out into the cold, wintry night. You’ll discover an extravagant party where the guests are well-known fairy tale characters, but with a twist. If you survive the supernatural, you’ll read of mysterious disappearances based on local rumors, the tale of a young woman caught up in the Salem Witch Trials, and the dangers of handsome men and ungrateful sons. Gaskell delivers a collection of spooky short stories that will leave you unnerved.

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08/24/2026 11:35 pm GMT

Ghost Stories by Charles Dickens

$14.00

Charles Dickens is best known for A Christmas Carol, where the three Ghosts of Christmas give Ebenezer Scrooge a rude awakening. But did you know he wrote a myriad of other ghost stories? This volume is a chilling compendium of Dickens’ other ghostly and supernatural tales. You’ll read about goblins kidnapping a curmudgeon, a spirit attending a murder trial, and a premonitory specter appearing before tragic accidents. In typical Dickens fashion, the ghosts are not just spooky but teach the characters—and readers—a moral lesson. So, remember: if a phantom appears in your house, it might be because you need a reality check.

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08/25/2026 01:15 am GMT

Now, the best place to tell ghost stories is around a fire (millennials, are you getting flashbacks to Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark?), but really, you can do it anywhere. I distinctly remember getting scarred for life as a young child when my older cousin decided to recount the story of Bloody Mary in my grandma’s bedroom. It was so scary that it instilled in me a lifelong fear. So, use whatever location you’ve got.

In fact, in his 1903 Halloween party book, Stanley Schell advises to go all out and throw a full-on “grewsome Ghost-Story party” at your house. Each guest is required to narrate their own spine-tingling tale. The scariest story that is also believable wins a prize. Schell advises you to limit your guests to 12 because some folks just drone on and on.²⁰ There’s nothing scarier than a person who doesn’t know when to shut up.

12. Throw a Halloween Party, Victorian Style

Throwing a Halloween party is a time-honored tradition, but this year, give it a Victorian twist. By the 1890s, Halloween parties were all the rage, especially among unmarried young people interested in divination rituals and matchmaking. To make your party stand out in the 21^st century, include some of the rituals and games we’ve already discussed. Bust out those luggie bowls, burn some nuts, bob for apples, and bake dumb cakes. While you’re at it, hold a ghost story competition! You could even make soul cakes for dessert, along with fall staples like cider donuts, apples, and pumpkin pie.

To host the perfect Victorian Halloween Party, you’ve got to decorate your house to terrify your guests. Deck the halls with jack-o’-lanterns, ghosts, witches, black cats, and skulls. Make it dark and spooky with black drapery and sound effects. As you greet your guests, make a dramatic entrance.

But don’t take my word for it. Go straight to the primary sources. A plethora of Halloween party books were published in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, so let them be your guide. They’re freely accessible on the Internet Archive, ready to make your party one for the ages.

• Hallowe’en: How to Celebrate It by Martha Russel Orne, 1898.
• The Jolly Halloween Book by Dorothy M. Shipman and Others, 1900.
• Hallowe’en Festivities by Stanley Schell, 1903.
• Games for Hallowe’en by Mary E. Blain, 1912.

13. Attend a Halloween Parade

As Halloween became popular in 20th-century America, mischief and pranking by young boys was getting to be a real problem. Halloween pranks had a long tradition in the British Isles, but American adults were getting pissed.

Enter Anoka, Minnesota. The city was so annoyed at waking up on November 1 to find their cattle roaming Main Street and their windows full of soap that they decided to do something about it. In an effort to distract boys from being little shitheads, Anoka held the first official Halloween celebration in 1920. The festivities included a parade and put them on the map as the “Halloween Capital of the World.”²¹

Other city officials throughout the United States took note and began holding their own parades. Among the early adopters were Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Glens Falls, New York. Speaking of New York, perhaps the most well-known annual parade is held in Greenwich Village. The Village Halloween Parade began in 1973 and has become more extravagant as the years go by. So, partake in this historic Halloween tradition and attend a parade this spooky season!

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Footnotes

1. Burns and Cunningham, Complete Works, 93. ↩︎
2. Orne, Hallowe’en, 16. ↩︎
3. Sharp, “Halloween,” 854-56. ↩︎
4. Blain, Games, 14-15. ↩︎
5. Walsh, Curiosities, 506. ↩︎
6. Blain, Games, 26. ↩︎
7. Blain, Games, 25. ↩︎
8. Burns and Cunningham, Complete Works, 95. ↩︎
9. Joyce, “Clay,” 120-129. ↩︎
10. Morton, Trick or Treat, 57. ↩︎
11. W.T. Kenyon, ‘Malpas: All Saints’ Day, 1880′, Cheshire Sheaf, (1880), 185-6, quoted in Lisa Morton, Trick or Treat (Reaktion Books, 2019), 58. ↩︎
12. Rajchel,  Samhain, 120-121. ↩︎
13. Mueller, Llewellyn’s, 129-131. ↩︎
14. Orne, Hallowe’en, 25. ↩︎
15. Bannatyne, Halloween, 59, 75. ↩︎
16. Puckett, Folk Beliefs, 103. ↩︎
17. Mueller, Llewellyn’s, 74-78. ↩︎
18. Whittier, “The Pumpkin.” ↩︎
19. Harper’s Weekly, Vol. 38, Part 2, December 15, 1894. ↩︎
20. Schell, Hallowe’en, 190. ↩︎
21. Morton, Trick or Treat, 77. ↩︎

Bibliography & Further Reading

*Several of the following links are Amazon affiliate links, which means I earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no cost to you.

Bannatyne, Lesley Pratt. Halloween: An American Holiday, an American History. Gretna: Pelican Publishing Company, Inc., 1998.

Blain, Mary E. Games for Hallowe’en. New York and Newark: Barse & Hopkins, 1912.

Burns, Robert, and Allan Cunningham. The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing His Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. With A New Life of the Poet, and Notices, Critical and Biographical. Edited by Allan Cunningham. Boston: Philips, Sampson, and Company, 1855.

Harper’s Weekly, Vol. 38, Part 2. December 15, 1894.

Joyce, James. “Clay.” In Dubliners (Grant Richards Ltd. Publishers, 1914), 120-129.

Kenyon, W.T. “Malpas: All Saints’ Day, 1880.” Cheshire Sheaf 11 (1880): 185-6.

Morton, Lisa. Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. London: Reaktion Books, 2019.

Mueller, Mickie. Llewellyn’s Little Book of Halloween. Llewellyn, 2018.

Orne, Martha Russell. Hallowe’en: How to Celebrate It. New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1898.

Puckett, Newbell Niles. Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro. Dover Publications, 1969.

Rajchel, Diana, and Llewellyn. Llewellyn’s Sabbat Essentials: Samhain: Rituals, Recipes & Lore for Halloween. Llewellyn, 2015.

Ravenwolf, Silver. Halloween: Customs, Recipes & Spells. Llewellyn, 1999.

Schell, Stanley. Hallowe’en Festivities. New York: Edgar S. Werner Pub. & Company, 1903.

Sharp, William. “Halloween: A Threefold Chronicle.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, November 1886, 842-56.

Walsh, William S. Curiosities of Popular Customs and of Rites, Ceremonies, Observances, and Miscellaneous Antiquities. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1898.

Whittier, John Greenleaf. The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, Complete. The Standard Library ed. Houghton Mifflin, 1892. Digital File.