Halloween

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

A spider on its web, woodcut, 1547. (Image courtesy of Wellcome Collection)

A sign of the devil or a miracle cure? How people felt about spiders in the Middle Ages

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 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