Halloween

Find out more about the history of Halloween, from the origins of the celebrations to why we use the term 'trick-or-treat'…

Halloween postcard

10 things you didn’t know about the history (and mystery) of Halloween

Trick photograph. (Photo by LM Melander and Brothers) entitled 'The Haunted Lane,' depicts a pair of men terrified by a female ghost, mid-to-late 19th century. (Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images)

5 historic hauntings for Halloween

Being invited to become a 'guest' of the Tower of London in medieval England meant, more often than not, that you would soon be food for the crows. (Image by Getty Images/RM Creative)

10 historical haunted sites across Britain

In 1733, as part of a plot to blow up a Protestant church, a group of Catholics claimed they were being terrorised by a poltergeist… or so the story went. (Illustration by Ben Jones for BBC History Magazine)

5 Georgian ghost hoaxes

An illustration of a group of supposed witches

A very brief history of witches by Suzannah Lipscomb

This 1867 magazine illustration shows a group of children preparing for Halloween. (Photo by American Stock/Getty Images)

General Early Modern

The origins of Halloween: tricks, treats and cobbled streets

A woman on a medieval ducking stool

Q&A Were ducking stools ever used as punishment for crimes other than witchcraft during the Middle Ages?

This 16th-century woodcut depicts King James VI at the North Berwick witch trials, the case that first sparked his obsession with hunting. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

James VI and I: the king who hunted witches

Helen Duncan, a 20th-century medium and spiritualist, allegedly summoned spirits draped in ‘ectoplasm’ – organic matter emitted from her body. In the 1930s she was denounced as a fraud, and in 1944 prosecuted under the 1735 Witchcra Act, which forbade conjuring spirits. (Photo courtesy of Ashmolean Museum/University of London)

Conjuring up the dead: Helen Duncan and her ectoplasm spirits

Glamis Castle is said to be the most-haunted castle in Scotland. (Photo by mpalis via Getty Images)

A royal ghost tour: 5 haunted sites around Britain

A depiction of a witch on a broomstick. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

Halloween history quiz: test your knowledge

A view of the Reculver Towers, Reculver, England. (Photo by Loop Images/UIG via Getty Images)

8 of Britain’s most mysterious ruins

A view of a calander showing the date, Friday the 13th. (Photo by William C. Shrout/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

10 historical superstitions we carry on today

An illustration of a group of supposed witches being beaten in front of King James VI and I, c1610. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King James’s witch hunts

In this painting from c1650, a witch wields a broomstick as demons and 'familiars' (helpers of witches) congregate before her. (Photo by Rischgitz/Getty Images)

History quiz – witchcraft and superstition