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There is a particular kind of darkness that belongs to late October. Not the comfortable darkness of a switched-off lamp, but something older and less negotiable. The Celts knew it. They built an entire festival around it. And though we have dressed it in plastic skeletons and supermarket candy, that ancient unease has never fully left us.
We call it Halloween. They called it Samhain (pronounced Sah-win*, if you want to say it correctly in the dark)*. And the distance between the two is both enormous and, strangely, almost nothing at all.
When the Year Died
The ancient Celtic calendar was divided not by solstices but by the rhythms of agriculture and livestock. Samhain, falling on the 31st of October, marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter. Which is to say, it marked the beginning of the dying time. Cattle were slaughtered. Stores were counted. The land went cold.
But the Celts understood something that we, in our centrally heated modernity, prefer not to think about: that thresholds are dangerous. The moment between summer and winter, between abundance and scarcity, between life and death — that liminal space does not belong cleanly to either side. And on Samhain, that threshold extended beyond the seasons.
It extended between the worlds.
The Thinning
The Celts believed that on the night of Samhain, the veil between the living and the dead grew thin to the point of translucence. The aos sà — spirits, faeries, and the restless dead — could cross over with terrifying ease. This was not metaphor. This was cosmology. The boundaries that normally kept the supernatural at bay simply… relaxed.
And so the living faced a choice: hide, appease, or disguise.
Many chose all three.
Offerings of food and drink were left at the edges of fields and doorsteps — not out of generosity, but out of negotiation. Here is what you want. Take it and leave us alone. Bonfires were lit on hilltops, partly for warmth and ritual, and partly because fire had always been the most reliable barrier against things that should not be. Communities would extinguish their hearth fires and relight them from the communal flame, symbolically dying and being reborn alongside the year itself.
The Face You Wear
Here is where it gets interesting. The tradition of dressing in costume on this night did not begin as whimsy or theatre. It began as camouflage.
If spirits were walking among the living, the solution was elegant in its logic: become one of them. By wearing grotesque masks and ragged disguises, people hoped to move through the dangerous night unrecognised, to blend into the procession of the dead and pass unharmed. The costume was not a disguise for fun. It was armour.
There is something genuinely chilling about this when you sit with it. Every child waddling down a suburban street in a ghost costume is, whether they know it or not, participating in a ritual act of mimicry that is over two thousand years old.
The Turnip in the Dark
Before we go any further, we must talk about the turnip.
The jack-o’-lantern, that grinning, orange icon of modern Halloween, is a North American invention born of practicality. When Irish and Scottish immigrants arrived in the New World in the 18th and 19th centuries, they brought their Samhain traditions with them, including the carving of lanterns to ward off evil spirits. In the old country, those lanterns were carved from turnips. Large, knobbly, difficult turnips, hollowed out with considerable effort, their faces far more unsettling than any pumpkin’s could ever be precisely because the medium resists you.
If you have never seen a carved turnip lantern, seek one out. The flesh glows differently. The features have a quality that is less decorative and more genuinely wrong;Â a grimace rather than a grin. It is not hard to believe that such an object might actually frighten something.
The pumpkin was simply more available, more compliant, and more photogenic. The turnip was scarier. Draw your own conclusions about which tradition was wiser.
The Circle Closes
Now consider this: in the United Kingdom and Ireland today, American-style Halloween, complete with pumpkins, trick-or-treating, store-bought costumes, themed parties, has become enormously popular, having crossed the Atlantic in the latter half of the twentieth century and accelerated dramatically in the 1990s and 2000s. There is no small irony here.
The holiday emigrated from Ireland and Scotland to America. It was transformed there by a new continent, by different gourds, by the industrialisation of festivity. And now it has returned — polished, commercialised, orange — to the islands where it was born. In Dublin and Edinburgh and Cork, children now go trick-or-treating in plastic capes, past doorways decorated with imported pumpkins, on the same ground where their ancestors left offerings for the aos sà in genuine terror.
The old festival has come home dressed in its own costume, unrecognisable to itself.
Why It Endures
What strikes me most about Samhain, and about Halloween in all its incarnations, is that it has survived because it answers something real. Every culture on earth has a version of this: a night when the dead are close, when the darkness is different, when it is prudent to acknowledge forces larger than yourself.
We do not, perhaps, believe in the aos sà anymore. But there is a reason that late October still feels genuinely uncanny, that the thinning of the light in these weeks carries a weight that June darkness never does.
The Celts didn’t invent that feeling. They just had the good sense to name it, and to take it seriously.
Perhaps we should too.