Halloween's Odd Old Cousins: Soul Cakes, Masks and Turnip Lanterns

Last week I made the case that October belongs to the dead, and toured the famous remembrance holidays: Samhain, Allhallowtide and Dia de Muertos. This week, meet their odd old cousins. These are the customs that never got their own greeting cards. People sang at doors for small spiced biscuits, carved grimacing faces into root vegetables and asked an apple, out loud, who they were going to marry. Halloween grew strange in the dark. The strangest parts are the ones history nearly lost.

Going a-souling

Long before the plastic pumpkin bucket, there was souling. From the medieval period onward in England, the poor, and often children, went door to door around Halloween and All Souls' Day singing and saying prayers for the souls of the household, its friends and its departed relatives. The payment was a soul cake: a small round spiced cake, really more of a biscuit, made with oats and seasoned with nutmeg, cinnamon and ginger, sometimes studded with raisins or currants.

The exchange was beautifully blunt. You gave cake. They said prayers for your dead. English Heritage cites a record from 1511: "we read in old time good people would on All Halloween Day bake bread and deal it for all Christian souls." That is more than five hundred years of baking for the dead. Souling survived into the 20th century in pockets of the countryside, and historians see it as one of the ancestors of trick or treating. So the fun-size candy bar in your cupboard owes its existence to a biscuit you have probably never tasted.

Guising: camouflage for the living

The mask is the oldest trick in Halloween's whole repertoire. During Samhain, people may have worn disguises, sometimes animal skins, to confuse or hide from the spirits of the dead believed to walk the earth that night. On the one evening the dead came visiting, the living apparently decided the safest thing to be was somebody else.

In 16th-century Ireland and Scotland, the door-to-door version was called guising: children in masks or cast-off clothing, offering a small trick, song or joke in exchange for food. Irish children asked for "any nuts or apples", and that is usually what they got. The phrase "trick or treat" did not appear until around the 1920s, in Canada. Before that there was mumming, an early Irish practice in which performers dressed as spirits and did silly acts for food and drink. So when you pull a rubber mask over your head this year, remember: the costume was never decoration. It was camouflage.

Stingy Jack and his turnip

The pumpkin is a newcomer. The jack-o'-lantern began in the British Isles, carved from turnips and other root vegetables. The Irish folktale behind it belongs to Stingy Jack, a man so slippery that he tricked the Devil twice, once into turning into a coin that Jack pocketed beside a silver cross, and once up a tree that Jack marked with a cross of his own. When Jack died, heaven would not take him. Hell, understandably sore about the whole business, refused him too. Condemned to wander the dark forever, he was given a single glowing coal, which he tucked into a hollowed-out turnip. People called him Jack of the Lantern.

Carved faces on turnips, and later pumpkins, were believed to help guide or ward off wandering spirits. When Irish and Scottish immigrants carried the custom to America in the 19th century, they found a native gourd far bigger and far easier to carve, and the orange version took over. If you want to honor the old ways this year, try carving a turnip instead. It is exactly like whittling an angry potato, and it gives a porch a genuinely haunted look.

Apples, nuts and the fortune-telling games

Before candy, the two standard Halloween treats were apples and nuts. And since the night was thought to be unusually good for seeing what was coming, apples and nuts were promoted to oracles. The parlor games of the 19th and early 20th centuries were fortune telling with the lights turned low:

• Bobbing for apples could name your match. Apples were tagged with names, and the tag on the one you caught pointed to your future sweetheart. In snap apple, apples hung from strings, and the first person to bite one was said to be on the way to wedded bliss.

• The apple peel trick. Peel an apple in one unbroken strip, throw the peel over your shoulder, and the shape it lands in is meant to be the initial of your future love.

• Some places called the night nutcrack night. A nut named for you and a nut named for your sweetheart went side by side by the fire. If they roasted slowly and quietly together, a happy marriage. If they cracked and jumped apart, well. The nuts had opinions.

One popular story credits the Romans with bringing apples to Halloween through Pomona, their goddess of orchards. The historian Lisa Morton has thrown cold water on that one. The simpler explanation is that apples ripen in October, and the party was already scheduled.

What the odd old cousins share

Line them up and the pattern shows. Food offered at the door. A disguise, so the dead walk past you unknowing. A small flame carried out into the dark. The future told by firelight with whatever the harvest gave you. Modern Halloween kept every one of those shapes, the candy, the costumes, the carved faces, the party games, and quietly emptied out the reasons. I find that more charming than sad. The reasons are still there, waiting under the wrapper, for anyone curious enough to look.

Keep wandering

If you like your history strange, I keep a whole series of it: the Incredibly Strange & Completely Random Holidays series, where I chase down the odd, the obscure and the occasionally haunted corners of the calendar.

And if you would like more of this in your inbox, my newsletter lands once a month with new art, new releases and a free downloadable calendar.

Which of Halloween's odd cousins would you bring back for one night? Tell me in the comments. I read every one.

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One more thing from the dark

Speaking of old customs and things that refuse to stay buried, my new novel arrives this Saturday, October 31. Eleanor's Garden is psychological horror about Jessica Stuart, who inherits her Great-Aunt's estate and believes her luck has finally changed. Then strange things begin to happen in the garden. Some gardens do not grow life. They feed on it.

The paperback and eBook release on Halloween: Follow me on Amazon. If you want the keepsake, the Collector's Edition hardcover is out now on Amazon. It adds botanical illustrations I created myself and insight into the mythology behind the story: Collector's Edition.