7 Halloween Superstitions Our Ancestors Actually Believed
Long before Halloween became a night of costumes, candy, and scary movies, it was surrounded by rituals meant to reveal what the future held. In Ireland, Scotland, Britain, and later North America, Halloween was considered an especially powerful night for divination, and many of the traditions people practiced were surprisingly romantic. People used apples, mirrors, nuts, dreams, and even cabbages to answer the questions we are still asking now: Who will I fall in love with? Will they love me back? What is waiting for me next? Here are seven Halloween superstitions people genuinely believed.
1. Look Into a Mirror at Midnight to See Your Future Lover
This one feels like the beginning of a horror movie now, but it was once a genuine Halloween love-divination ritual. An unmarried woman would enter a darkened room, often carrying a candle and eating an apple, then gaze into a mirror around midnight. If everything worked, the face of her future husband was supposed to appear over her shoulder. The belief became popular enough to appear on Halloween postcards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
2. Throw an Apple Peel Over Your Shoulder to Learn Who You’ll Marry
Instead of throwing away the peel, people once turned an apple into an oracle. The apple had to be peeled in one continuous strip before the peel was tossed backward over the shoulder. Whatever letter it resembled when it landed was believed to be the first initial of a future spouse. Apples appear again and again in old Halloween divination traditions, particularly those involving romance.
3. Put Two Nuts in the Fire to Find Out if Your Love Would Last
Before checking someone’s relationship status, apparently you could simply ask a hazelnut. One old Halloween tradition involved naming two nuts after two people and placing them near the fire. Different versions of the custom interpreted the details differently, but nuts burning peacefully together could be read as a promising sign for the relationship, while jumping, cracking, or separating could spell trouble. Halloween was even known in parts of England as “Nut Crack Night” because nut divination was so closely associated with the holiday.
4. Put Something Under Your Pillow to Dream About Your Future Spouse
Halloween dreams were once taken very seriously. In Irish tradition, putting a sprig of yarrow beneath your pillow was believed to encourage a dream about a future lover. Other recorded versions involved everything from apples to pieces of straw, and some traditions involved eating something salty before bed in hopes that a future spouse would appear in the dream offering water. Apparently, October 31 was once a very busy night for the subconscious.
5. Pull a Cabbage From the Ground to Learn What Your Future Husband Would Be Like
Yes, a cabbage. In recorded Irish Halloween traditions, people were blindfolded before choosing one from a garden. The appearance of the cabbage was then interpreted as information about a future spouse. Its size and shape could supposedly reveal physical characteristics, while the amount of earth clinging to its roots could indicate wealth. It may be one of history’s least romantic methods of romantic divination, but people really did it.
6. Bob for an Apple to Find Out Who Would Marry First
Apple bobbing was not always just a party game. Some Halloween celebrations turned it into romantic fortune-telling: whoever successfully caught an apple first was believed to be the next person to marry. Other old Halloween games similarly transformed ordinary seasonal foods into little predictions about love, marriage, and the future.
7. Choose a Mystery Bowl to Reveal Your Future
One Irish Halloween divination game involved blindfolding someone and placing several bowls or saucers in front of them, each containing a different object or substance. Whatever they touched was supposed to reveal something about the year ahead. In one documented version, choosing water predicted emigration, while finding a ring meant marriage was coming. Halloween was not simply a night to be frightened of the unknown. For generations before us, it was also a night to try to peek inside it.