KnowSodaHalloween fun facts: 13 spooky facts (all of them true)
Pumpkins, vampires and black cats: almost everything we link to Halloween has a stranger story than it seems. Soda went through the cards and picked 13 facts for 31 October, with a quiz at the end.
Where Halloween comes from
“Halloween” is short for “All Hallows’ Eve”, the eve of All Saints’ Day: the night of 31 October, before the feast on 1 November.
Its oldest roots are usually traced to Samhain, the Gaelic festival that marked the end of the harvest and the start of the dark half of the year. On that night, people believed, the border with the otherworld grew thin.
The first lanterns weren’t pumpkins: in Ireland and Scotland people carved turnips. Emigrants to North America switched to the pumpkin, bigger and easier to hollow out.
The earliest known use of “trick or treat” in print is from 1927, in a newspaper in Alberta, Canada.
Ghostly lights and black cats
“Jack-o’-lantern” isn’t only the carved pumpkin: it’s also an old name for the will-o’-the-wisp, the ghostly light that, in folklore, leads travellers into the marshes. It may be marsh gas catching fire.
In the US and much of Europe, a black cat crossing your path is bad luck. But in Britain and Japan, black cats are often thought to bring good luck. Soda approves.
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Folklore & Superstitions
7 ideas · 10 questionsMonsters from novels
Mary Shelley began Frankenstein at 18, during a ghost-story contest in 1816. And careful: Frankenstein is the scientist; his creature has no name.
The same contest also produced The Vampyre, one of the first vampire tales, by John Polidori.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, from 1897, shaped the modern vampire. Tales of the restless dead drinking blood are centuries old, but many famous details were added later by writers and films.
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Classic Novels
7 ideas · 10 questionsScares on screen
Nosferatu (1922), one of the earliest surviving vampire films, was an unauthorised Dracula: Bram Stoker’s widow sued, and a court ordered every copy destroyed. Luckily, some survived.
The Blair Witch Project cost about 60,000 dollars to make and earned over 240 million.
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Genres (Film & TV)
7 ideas · 10 questionsCreatures of the night
Bats are the only mammals that can truly fly, and brown bats sleep about 20 hours a day.
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Animals
7 ideas · 10 questionsA grim paint
From the 1500s to the 1800s, one popular brown paint had a grim secret ingredient: ground-up Egyptian mummies. When the painter Edward Burne-Jones found out, in 1881, he was so horrified that, the story goes, he gave his tube a proper burial.
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Techniques & Color
7 ideas · 10 questionsAnd don’t mix it up with the Day of the Dead
In Mexico, on 1 and 2 November, families welcome the spirits of their loved ones with altars, orange marigolds, candles and sugar skulls. It’s a joyful celebration, not a sad one.
Its great symbol, La Catrina, began around 1910 as a print by José Guadalupe Posada mocking Mexicans who aped European fashion. And Mexico City’s big parade only began in 2016, inspired by a James Bond film.
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Festivals & Celebrations
7 ideas · 10 questionsQuick quiz
Tap your answer to see if you got it, and why.
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Question 1 of 5
Frankenstein is the name of the monster.
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False. It’s the scientist’s name.
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Question 2 of 5
In parts of Britain, black cats are lucky.
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True. Soda approves.
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Question 3 of 5
A sudden fright in a horror film is a “jump scare”.
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True. Built to make you jump.
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Question 4 of 5
No mammal can fly.
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False. Bats can.
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Question 5 of 5
The Day of the Dead is in the spring.
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False. It’s on 1 and 2 November.
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