Why Do We Celebrate Halloween? The 2,000-Year Story

We carve faces into vegetables. We send kids to knock on strangers' doors for sugar. Then we pay good money to get chased through fake haunted houses. So why do we do any of this? The answer seems to go back more than 2,000 years, to bonfires on the hills of Ireland. In this video: Samhain, All Hallows' Eve, soul cakes, a drunk called Stingy Jack who tricked the Devil, and the first jack-o'-lanterns, which were made from turnips. We also look at how trick-or-treating appears to have started as a bribe, and why your brain might actually enjoy being scared. Chapters 0:00 Why is Halloween so weird? 0:43 Samhain 1:36 All Hallows' Eve 2:21 Souling & Guising 3:06 Stingy Jack 3:58 From Turnips to Pumpkins 4:39 Trick or Treat 5:42 Cats, Bats & Apples 6:38 Why We Love Being Scared 7:41 Where it all began Sources: National Retail Federation 2026 Halloween forecast; History.com; Online Etymology Dictionary; Andersen et al. (2020), Psychological Science; Scrivner et al. (2021), Personality and Individual Differences; The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image credits: "Snap-Apple Night" by Daniel Maclise (1833), public domain. Robert Burns by Alexander Nasmyth, public domain. Chandos portrait of Shakespeare, public domain. "Emigrants Leave Ireland" by Henry Doyle (1868), public domain. Irish turnip jack-o'-lantern, Museum of Country Life: photo by rannṗáirtí anaiṫnid, CC BY-SA 3.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0). Footage: Pixabay. Sound effects: Freesound (CC0). #Halloween #History #SoThatsWhy