The Unreal History of Halloween
Magical Kale, Teen Romance, and the Truth About Halloween Fortune-Telling
A young couple is happily married with an infant daughter sometime in the second half of the nineteenth century. On Halloween night, the wife falls asleep so deeply nothing can wake her, not even her baby’s cries. Frustrated, her husband is forced to mind the baby himself while his wife continues sleeping unperturbed. When at last she wakes, she tells her husband,
I thought I was dragged against my will into a strange part of the country where I had never been before, and, after what appeared to me to be a long and weary journey on foot, I arrived at a comfortable looking house. I went in longing to rest, but had no power to sit down, although there was a nice supper laid out before a good fire, and every appearance of preparations for an expected visitor. Exhausted as I felt, I was only allowed to stand for a minute or two, and then hurried away by the same road back again.
The wife dismisses this as nothing more than a perplexing dream, but her husband instantly suspects witchcraft. A short while later the husband dies, leaving his wife an eligible young widow. The woman’s uncle offers to set her up with his bachelor neighbor, but when this neighbor sees her, he reacts with shock.
“A year or two ago,” he confesses to the uncle, “I tried a Halloween spell, and sat up all night to watch the result. I declare to you most solemnly, that the figure of that lady, as I now see her, entered my room and looked at me. She stood a minute or two by the fire and disappeared as suddenly as she came.”
The bachelor farmer murdered this woman’s husband, however unwittingly, all because he dared to try to see his own future. This classic Halloween story, retold in R. Chambers 1869 Book of Days, plays with Halloween customs long familiar to nineteenth-century readers. It also reveals the reason fortune-telling is considered transgressive even today. Seeking to know the future isn’t a passive act, but a way to actively change your fate. It’s daring, it’s dangerous—and it works.
For hundreds of years before costumes or trick or treating, the chief preoccupation of Halloween was fortune-telling. While the Celtic festival of Samhain and its early Christian counterparts were community-wide events celebrated by people of all ages, by the seventeenth century the holiday was primarily celebrated by teenagers and young adults. For all young people, but especially young women, Halloween was the time to learn the identity of your future spouse, and often to influence who that spouse would be. If, as it’s often said, the boundary between worlds is thinnest on October 31, then it’s thinnest too at the age where childhood and adulthood inhabit the same body. Anthropologists dub Halloween a “liminal festival,” one that serves to mark a boundary, and so it’s no wonder that for much of the holiday’s history it was kept by those who stand at the border between obedience and rebellion, reliance and responsibility, and of course, between virginity and sexual initiation.
Though fortune-telling has largely lost its association with Halloween, girls’ fortune-telling games never went away. As little girls growing up in the 1980s and ‘90s, my friends and I played slumber party games like MASH and SHAMPOO, folded paper fortune-tellers, and scanned the suburban sidewalks for signs like ancient augurers scanning the skies. Any object might hold predictive power, from a flipped coin to a scrap of paper left turned up— suggestively— on top of the trash can almost as if someone or something had left it there. Though we lacked the courage to invoke the spirits with a Ouija board, we thrilled to stories of classmates who had dared to do so, with predictably terrifying results.
These forays into fortune-telling were not impartial information-gathering. We knew what results we wanted, and what results our friends wanted, and we were generous in our interpretations of the spirit-ridden world. I wanted to marry a sophisticated and well-mannered professor of literature or history, but I couldn’t imagine a pool of eligible bachelors outside the ones I already knew from school, so my MASH columns were populated by boys like Robert, the goofy, gangly volleyball captain, and John, the quiet, awkward science fiction fan who sat behind me and once wrote a love poem containing the word “omniverse.” Of course, since none of these boys knew we were alive, it was an entirely abstract affair. We girls collected, traded, and negotiated our crushes like a fantasy football league, and these relationships lived nowhere except in the reams of notes we passed between ourselves. We padded out these fortune-telling games with the names of celebrity crushes, and the two groups, boys in math class and boys in Seventeen, seemed equally probable.
In 1898, Martha Russell Orne capitalized on Victorian Americans newfound fascination with all things Halloween to produce the 48-page booklet Hallowe’en: Its Origin and How to Celebrate It with Appropriate Games and Ceremonies, which sold for 25 cents. After tracing the holiday’s roots from fire-lit Druidic festivals to the tamer celebrations of her day, “providing a great deal of innocent fun and flirtation for youths and maidens of every degree,” Orne provides a detailed how-to for throwing a Halloween party, including playlists of popular tunes, recipes, and instructions for 23 different fortune-telling games.
Orne’s Victorian Halloween party is dedicated to matchmaking. “Invite only unmarried friends,” Orne begins, “married couples are rather de trop on such occasions; and especially avoid all formality.” Ladies and gentleman are to be paired off immediately upon arrival, either by the host or according to various games of chance. (One method Orne suggests involves placing different kinds of seeds into empty walnut shells and letting guests find their matching shell.)
Orne’s party is a whirlwind of prognostication. “The success of the evening greatly depends upon unflagging in the proceedings being maintained,” she explains. “To this end the order of exercise contained in the program should be carried out in quick succession. A game must be stopped the moment it ceases to absorb attention, preferably even sooner.” In this breathless spirit, Orne rushes the reader through a list of familiar favorites, from pouring melted lead to bobbing for apples marked with the initials of eligible bachelors and ladies.
Historians and folklorists have described dozens of fortune-telling games, each with dozens more minor variations, in an attempt to catalog a practice as improvisational and unruly as the teenagers who practiced it. Some of the best-known come to us from Robert Burns’s 1785 poem “Hallowe’en,” which popularized pastimes like kaling outside his native Scotland. Near-identical games were played in England, Ireland, Wales, the Isle of Man, and France. By the time Halloween migrated to the United States in the mid 19th century, the tradition had already been refined by centuries of creative schoolgirls with crushes on the Roberts and Johns of their day.
Kaling required young people (sometimes in same-sex pairs, sometimes in male-female pairs) to enter fields or vegetable gardens on Halloween night. In Scotland, the vegetable of choice was kale; in Ireland and later in the United States it was often cabbage. Sometimes the pair would walk into the field backwards, sometimes blindfolded, to pull a kale stalk out of the ground and inspect it for clues to their future mate. Was the stalk tall and thin? Short and gnarled? Did it taste bitter or sweet? Was it clean or caked with mud? After “kaling,” the stalk might be nailed up over the front door: the first person to enter through that door would be the future spouse, or perhaps only bear the initials of the future spouse. (All these games are flexible, after all, filled with loopholes and exceptions in case, say, your brother walks through the door first. Or simply a man you do not wish to marry.) In a more bawdy variant, young people would pull three oat stalks from the ground, and if the third lacked the top grain, it indicated a future spouse would not enter the marriage a virgin. (In Burns’s poem, a boy and girl go alone to the fields to pick stalks and lose their virginity during the course of playing the game.)
Another popular game was pitching hazel nuts into an open fire. As always, there were many variants, including writing names or initials on the nuts before tossing them and seeing which burn the brightest, or burn the longest, or which “jump” together or apart. In “luggie bowls” (captured in James Joyce’s short story Clay), three bowls are set out: one with clean water, one dirty, one empty. Young people choose a bowl blindfolded, or leap over the bowls on the ground, and whichever one they touch or knock over reveals their fate: clean water means marrying a virgin; dirty, a widow or widower; empty, a lifetime as a single person.
On Halloween night, rings, thimbles, coins, and other divinatory tokens were hidden in any number of foods, including fortune cake, barm brack (made with black tea and dried fruits), colcannon (mashed cabbage, potatoes, and onions), and champ (potatoes mashed with butter, milk, and spring onions, with tokens). Even bobbing for apples was originally a form of divination, each apple bearing the initials of an eligible man or woman. In a game that seems more than a little dangerous, young people would pour molten lead into water to “read” the shapes it made. This, of course, was in addition to reading tea leaves, or coffee grounds, or playing cards, or any number of other things. The beauty of Halloween and of fortune-telling and of young girls’ superstitions is that anything can be read for clues, from the number and arrangement of seeds inside an apple to the movement of floating walnut shells. Adolescents live in a haunted world where the everyday stuff of adult life shimmers with secrets. Combined with the teenage tendency towards egocentrism, it’s easy to imagine that everything from kale stems to mashed potatoes is, in some sense, about you.
Throughout her guidebook, Orne includes asides that make it clear the Halloween games are meant to be rigged. Ambitious young men and women shouldn’t merely wait for the future to reveal itself, they should endeavor to change it. Of one game Orne says, “Stand alone before a mirror, and by the light of a candle comb your hair; in due time the face of your future conjugal companion will appear in the glass, peeping over your shoulder. No young man would disappoint her at such a critical opportunity.” In another, a young lady is instructed to peel an apple in front of a mirror and waits for a vision of her true love, and “if her lover has spirit enough to be worthy of her he will step softly in, peep over her right shoulder, and ask for a slice of the fruit.” Of yet another game, Orne says, “This is a grand opportunity for a gentleman to covertly pop the question,” or again “He would be a booby, indeed, who would not take advantage of the means thus afforded of determining his standing in the affections of his lady-love.” Of games meant to elicit dreams, Orne says, “Any young girl with first-class dreaming machinery can easily find her own true love,” for “in the medley of dreams” you can see whatever you want to see.
Orne is not the only one who hints that fortune-telling games are subject to more than just random chance (or the intercession of spirits). In an 1886 Harper’s Monthly Magazine, William Sharp recalls a Halloween molten lead game played in Ireland, adding that “in one or two cases, to judge by the laughter and the blushing denials, the guesses seemed to be based on something more substantial than mere fancy.” In an 1870 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine, author Helen Elliott includes a short story in which the young Nell spurns her lover Ned, then reunites with him during a romantic Halloween fortune-telling game (he surprises her with a kiss as she walks backwards into the basement). They are married, but soon after he goes to fight with the Union army and is mistakenly reported dead. Believing herself a widow, Nell reunites with Ned again many Halloweens later, this time while playing a fortune-telling game with a ball of yarn. In both instances, of course, Ned has engineered the results, and nothing supernatural has transpired.
Of course, Orne was a Victorian, and her writing is marked by a specifically Victorian mix of condescension and credulity. It’s hard to know how seriously the people who began these traditions might have taken them; or perhaps, whether taking them seriously always meant playing them straight. There is so much that is creative and improvisational about these games. It’s easy to imagine a 16th-century Scottish teenager trying to keep a straight face as she solemnly walks backwards into the cellar, playacting reverence, while her friends stifle giggles and the young man she already knows she loves waits nervously, practicing his face for the mirror. Fortune-telling is meaningful but it is playful, too, and the meaning lies together with the play. The fortune-telling games that young ladies played in the 16th-century, like their modern slumber party counterparts today, were a form of collaborative storytelling. Like clasping hands across a Ouija board, they required everyone to play along.
The Halloween described by Orne and Sharp and Burns is not scary. Though Orne does include a very silly sample ghost story in her booklet, Halloween was primarily a romantic and erotic holiday, not a macabre one. Death is rarely mentioned (somewhat out of character for the death-obsessed Victorians). Violence even less so. If fear exists, it’s the anticipatory fear of gazing into a swirl of molten lead waiting to see your lover’s initials, not the bloody terrors of today’s Halloween. One of the few “scary” games Orne recommends involves leaving a carved pumpkin lit up in a dark room, “where the young people may stray on it unawares, or it is hidden away in the grounds in some secluded nook to which each swain must some time or other lead his sweetheart for ‘a good scare,’ taking pains to see that no real bogies are around, and then availing himself to the full of the privilege of consoling her half-feigned terrors.” Like frightened teen girls clinging to their dates’ arm during B-movie matinees, the scares in Orne’s Halloween are just manufactured opportunities for courtship.
And yet, even if early Halloween parties were light on the macabre themes that would come to dominate the holiday later, still they contained a frisson of real fear. Gullible teens playing spooky games were perfect fodder for pranks. In Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, John Gregorson Campbell recounts the story of a young girl casting yarn into a kiln to ask whom her husband will be. A prankster grabs the yarn, gives a tug, and answers “the devil,” terrifying the poor girl out of ever trying divination again.
In other stories, sometimes more sinister is at work. In her collection of Irish legends, Lady Jane Wilde (the mother of Oscar Wilde) recounts this frightening result from someone who performed this ritual on Halloween night:
A lady narrates that on the 1st of November her servant rushed into the room and fainted on the floor. On recovering, she said that she had played a trick that night in the name of the devil before the looking-glass; but what she had seen she dared not speak of, though the remembrance of it would never leave her brain, and she knew the shock would kill her. They tried to laugh her out of her fears, but the next night she was found quite dead, with her features horribly contorted, lying on the floor before the looking-glass, which was shivered to pieces.
In all these stories and many like them, the person who seeks to know the future learns a lesson and swears to never do it again.
Why should it be forbidden to know your own future? After all, it belongs to you. Consulting fortune-tellers is elicit in many cultures, not least in the Christian world where Halloween fortune-telling flourished for centuries. Today many people still believe we shouldn’t ask questions about the future because the spirits who answer may be evil, perhaps even the devil himself. Of course there’s no reason the results of casting nuts into the fire couldn’t be relayed by benevolent angels instead, except we believe the asking to be wicked. More secular wisdom councils that a reliance on fortune-telling leads to passivity and denies free will. If you know— or believe you know— what will happen, then you have no agency. The idea is that once you know that you are fated to marry a man named Bob, you stop doing anything and just wait around for Bob to appear.
In fact, for generations of young ladies on Halloween, these fortune-telling games were anything but passive. Conditioned by their culture for passive waiting (for a man to choose you, for your parents to approve a partner), they rejected waiting. They wanted to know what would happen, they wanted to know now, and if they had to ask the devil himself, they weren’t afraid to try.
What’s more, these ladies weren’t above cheating. What does a “handsome” kale stalk look like? Is a hazelnut moving in a “faithful” way? What initials do you see in a peeled apple? How do you choose to interpret a dream? Fortune-telling games weren’t just a way to passively receive messages from the other side, but a way to rip aside the veil, to take control of your own life, to plunge headlong into adulthood, into freedom, into whatever is waiting on the other side.
The “other side” is often understood to be the land of the dead, which is in turn understood to be scary and best represented by flickering candlelight in gothic mirrors (then) or blinking animatronic lawn zombies (now). But the other side for teenagers is just the future, the adult world of acid reflux and couples counseling and car payments. Most of us will never be stalked by a serial killer, eviscerated by a werewolf, or eaten by zombies. Our future is the long rebuke of adult life, the other side constantly receding, until more of your life is behind than before, and then, one day, all. The world will lose its portentous shimmer and reveal itself to mean nothing more than just itself. For hundreds of years on Halloween night, young women reached across the divide because they believed there was something there they could reach. They worked together, they improvised, they faked it, they made it so.
And what happened to the young bachelor farmer, the one whose attempt at fortune-telling cost an innocent man his life? He married the young wife and adopted her infant daughter, the story says, and they lived happily ever after.
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