Ancient Folklores of Halloween

Dating back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when the boundaries between the living and the dead blurred into one for a solitary day, the modern celebration of Halloween has embraced nearly all of the boogymen pandemic to human folklore—some dating back as far as 6,000 years ago.

Witches

Witches, for instance, date back as far as 900 BC, when wart-nosed, broom-riding hags cast spells of doom over innocent lives, while vampires have their roots in ancient Greek mythology, only to surge in popularity during the Middle Ages, before reaching rock star status following the 1897 publication of Bram Stoker’s wildly popular novel, Dracula.

Werewolves

Another folklore favorite is werewolves, which have their roots in the oldest surviving prose in Western literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, when a semi-mythical Mesopotamian king spurned a potential love interest after she turned her previous lover into a wolf.

Zombies

Rooted in Haitian voodoo legend, zombies make up another mainstay of Halloween ghoul, when decaying, flesh-eating corpses come back to life to torment the living, most likely with some of the worst bad breath known to man.

Mummies

Dating back to the ancient Egyptians, mummies play a close second to zombies, making many horror genre filmmakers in Hollywood boatloads of cash. The devil also makes the list of Halloween unsavories, making his first appearance in the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis in the form of a serpent whose temptation of Eve and later Adam, led to their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, dooming their offspring to mortality, suffering and death.

In more recent times, American culture has embraced a legacy of ghost stories and sightings, further blending the lines between the living and the dead, yet perhaps the most disturbing of all scary folklores is the clown, or more precisely, the evil clown, which has its roots as far back as the fifth dynasty of Egypt in 2400 BC, reaching a new zenith in 1960s and 70s America, when serial killer John Wayne Gacy performed as Pogo the Clown at children’s hospitals in-between his killing sprees, making the ancient folklores of Halloween, a sleepless nightmare for anxious humans everywhere.