Show Notes
Before Halloween had pumpkins, candy, costumes, or trick-or-treating, there was Samhain.
At the edge of winter, the cattle came home, the fires burned, and old stories warned that the boundaries between worlds had opened. The dead could return. Fairies came out of the earth. Headless riders crossed the countryside. And sometimes, something followed you home.
From a warrior who carried a talking corpse into the night to spectral black sows, fairy armies, divination rituals, sacred fires, and the old legends that eventually crossed the Atlantic and became part of Halloween as we know it, we're going back to where so much of it began.
Welcome to Day One of **31 Days of Halloween**.
More from Haunted American History
In 1967, the RMS Queen Mary arrived in Long Beach, California, after more than three decades crossing the Atlantic.
In Savannah, Georgia, ghost stories are everywhere.
On November 13, 1974, a young man ran into a bar in Amityville, New York, shouting that his parents had been shot.
In 1907, a wealthy Boston businessman named Thomas Lawson published a novel called Friday, the Thirteenth.
In 1891, a jeweler in Salem, Massachusetts, began selling a silver souvenir spoon decorated with a witch on a broomstick.