Halloween is a very special holiday. The spooky decorations, scary movies, and unique costumes are only part of what makes Halloween fun!
You might be wondering how this holiday even began. Well, Halloween origins go back 2,000 years! Halloween originated from the Celtic festival called Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts had celebrated New Year’s on November 1st marking the end of summer and harvest, and the beginning of long dark winters, which they usually associated with bad things. Some had believed that the day before the new year the boundary between the living and the dead blurred. On the night of October 31st, they celebrated Samhain, which was believed to be the day ghosts returned to the earth.
One of the most fun things to do at Halloween is looking at the decorations and scary setups people do, and the place where they go over the top. Salem, the town in which the infamous Salem witch trials took place. Salem, Massachusetts sure goes all out during Halloween, from the annual Haunted Happenings festival which dates back to 1982, to Hawthorne Hotel’s haunted ball! Salem has several fun and spooky activities to do, they welcome tens of thousands of visitors every October! The annual Haunted Happenings Festival has many attractions and activities to do like visiting the Salem witch museum or even a pet costume contest ‘howl-o-ween’.
There are also world records based around Halloween like the world’s heaviest jack-o-lantern weighing 2,350 pounds which was achieved in 2020 by Travis Gienger at the world championship Pumpkin weigh-off. Another was the world’s first zombie apocalypse math equation, in 2009 students and mathematicians at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa created the world’s first math equation for surviving a zombie apocalypse, They had calculated that if there was a zombie outbreak in a city with a population of 500,000 people, zombies would outnumber the living in 3 days. And, in my opinion, the strangest one is a man, Rick Swenson, who traveled the world’s longest journey in a hollowed-out gourd. On October 15, 2016, Swenson sailed more than 25 miles in the Red River, Swenson had grown his pumpkin and hollowed the insides.
I asked some classmates different questions about Halloween like ‘What’s your favorite scary movie?’ The answers included Wish Upon, Nightmare on Elm Street, Level 16, Annabelle, Scream, The Mimic, The Ring, and Coraline! I asked these same students what their most embarrassing Halloween costumes were, and they were interesting.
These costumes included a duo costume with dad where this student was coffee and the dad was a donut, Other interesting costumes were an inflatable unicorn rider costume, Uma from descendants, and even Betsy from curious George. Now we must keep in mind all of these were from over 4 years ago! It will be interesting to see what people decide to be this year.
The most interesting question I asked was ‘What’s the creepiest/scariest thing that ever happened to you? and these were very interesting! The top 3 most intriguing ones were
– “I was at my house when I heard voices coming from under the house in a little crawlspace, when I went to check down there I saw a black silhouette of a person creeping out from the wall.”
-“me, my cousins, and siblings were sleeping in the living room when at like 4 in the morning we heard scratches and voices from the kitchen”
-“I heard a ghost in my kitchen. I was alone at night, waiting for my dad to get off of work. I was just on my phone when I heard a crash from my kitchen. Later when my dad got home he asked if everything was okay and I asked if anything was broken in the kitchen. He said no.”
While some people may have scary experiences associated with Halloween it remains a fun holiday for all! We hope you have a spooky good fall.
