In the spirit of Halloween we are asking the question, are ghosts real? For centuries people from every corner of the world have answered that question with stories, rituals, and sometimes fear. Today we’ll look at what different cultures say, what science explains, and why belief in spirits remains so widespread.

In Japan, ghost stories center on the yūrei — spirits of the dead who return when funeral rites are incomplete or when they have unfinished business. Yūrei appear in classical theatre and art as pale, long-haired figures dressed in white, and occupy a clear place in Japanese rituals like Obon.

In Latin America one of the most famous spirits is La Llorona, the weeping woman who mourns the children she lost and is said to haunt rivers and canals — a tale used across generations to scare children away from danger and to explain tragic loss. This legend has countless local versions across Mexico and the Hispanic world.

Across much of the Muslim world the idea of invisible beings called jinn has long explained misfortune, possession, and strange phenomena — creatures mentioned in scripture and folklore that can be benevolent or dangerous, depending on tradition. For many believers, encounters with jinn are the culturally appropriate way to describe ghost-like experiences.

Science doesn’t find evidence for spirits that survive death, but it does offer explanations for many ghost experiences. One of the most well documented is sleep paralysis — a temporary state between sleep and wakefulness where the body stays immobile while the mind is conscious, often producing vivid, terrifying hallucinations of intruders, pressure on the chest, or figures in the room. Cross-cultural studies show these episodes are often interpreted as ghosts, demons, or jinn depending on local beliefs.

Other explanations include illusions caused by low-frequency electromagnetic fields, carbon monoxide poisoning, or the brain’s pattern-matching trying to make sense of vague stimuli — all of which can create the sense of a presence without any supernatural agent.

Belief in ghosts also fulfills social and psychological roles. Ghost stories comfort by giving meaning to loss, enforce cultural norms, and create collective cautionary tales. In times of stress, grief, or uncertainty people are more likely to interpret ambiguous events as supernatural. Surveys show belief is common: around four in ten adults in some countries say they believe in ghosts, and belief levels vary widely by nation and culture.

History shows organized movements around ghosts too — Victorian spiritualism, for example, turned séance-going and mediumship into a social phenomenon in the 19th century, blending grief, science, and entertainment.

Across the globe there are famous haunted places and repeatable reports: unexplained sounds in old houses, cold spots, and objects that seem to move. Investigators sometimes document odd audio, video artifacts, or electromagnetic spikes — but these findings rarely stand up to controlled testing. In contrast, many haunting claims are later linked to environmental causes, pranksters, or psychological suggestion. Sleep-paralysis and mass social priming can also turn a rumor into a local ‘epidemic’ of sightings.

So, are ghosts real? The short answer: not in the scientific sense as disembodied minds proven to persist after death — but ghost experiences are very real to the people who have them. Culture, brain states, environment, and social meaning all shape how we interpret those experiences. Whether you call them spirits, jinn, yūrei, or hallucinations, they tell us something powerful about how humans process loss, danger, and mystery.

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The origins of Halloween, as we celebrate it in America, are deeply rooted in medieval Celtic traditions. The Celts believed that the souls of the dead visited the living on the last day of October. The Celts held a festival to honor these souls and they called it Samhain (pronounced sow-when). The festival also represented the beginning of winter and the start of the new year.  A tradition during Samhain was to dress up in costumes and share treats and food with the wandering spirits. The Celts believed that those who were without costumes could be possessed by the visiting dead. This was the first historical instance of “costuming” in relation to what we now know as Halloween. 

As Christianity spread across Europe and the world, cultures collided, and the festival of Samhain inspired All Saints’ Day, a celebration of all the saints of the church. All Saints’ Day was celebrated on November 1st under the name All Hallow Mass, and the day before was referred to as All Hallow’s Eve, which was then shortened to Hall’o’een.  

In the 17th century, children dressed in costumes made out of animal skin or straw, called Skeklers, as they visited houses while dancing and singing and begging for gifts. This tradition was called guising, and was an early form of modern “trick-or-treating.” There were also similar rituals all across Ireland and Great Britain. These rituals provided the framework for Victorian Halloween festivities. 

In America, celebrations were limited largely because of religious groups that believed that these holidays spread the ideas of Satan, and therefore discouraged the celebration of these holidays. It wasn’t until the mid-1850s, when a huge wave of Irish Immigrants came to escape the Potato Famine that Halloween started to take root in America. The Americans who did celebrate at this time were heavily influenced and inspired by the Robert Burns poem called “Halloween” that was published in 1786. The poem contained footnotes on how to throw a Halloween party in rural Scotland, and Victorians mimicked those guidelines to throw their own parties in America. Unlike the modern celebration of the holiday, the Victorians’ Halloween held a lot of romantic implications, and was celebrated mainly among adults. These Victorian Halloween parties had the intention of matchmaking guests. Because of this, many Halloween stores pushed love related themes and matchmaking games and some party hosts would encourage guests to dress in costumes.

In the early 20th century, Halloween started to transform, and new traditions arose such as townwide Halloween parades and children being the center of the celebrations. Clowns, witches, devils, and ghosts continued to be popular Halloween costumes. Many costumes were made of crepe paper. This was because The Dennison Manufacturing Company began publishing an annual series of Bogie Books starting from 1909. These books demonstrated how to use crepe paper to make homemade Halloween costumes and decorations.

During the 1920s the slip over was the most popular kind of costume because it was so simple and inexpensive to make. The slip over was a straight slip of crepe paper cut out at the neck and hanging straight down the front and the back. It is noted that the slip over examples from the Bogie Books look way more elaborate and embellished than just a sheet over the head. Most families wore simpler costumes. Additionally, paper masks were a common Halloween costume, and were often homemade by cutting paper into the shape of a face and then painting it. 

Sadly, there were many racist and colonial beliefs that led to costumes like blackface, redface, brownface, and yellowface: these costumes were and still are about establishing White supremacy through making fun of people of color. These depictions were only funny to white audiences, and were harmful, demeaning, and insulting to the victims. In the early 20th century, minstrel shows were incredibly popular, and blackface was used as a popular Halloween costume as well. Redface dates back to the Boston Tea Party in 1773, when protesters dressed as Mohawks. And because of White supremacy and colonialism, redface continued to be popular for centuries after.  In the 1930s, racism was prevalent, and ethnic costumes were not viewed as a problem among the White community. While researching, I found newspaper clippings of lists of Halloween costume ideas for children that included very offensive “ideas” such as “Aunt Jemima” and “Chinese Princess” (see below).

A new kind of costume that came about in the 1930s, the cartoon character costume, was the first Halloween costume to reference Pop Culture in any way. In 1937, Ben Cooper Inc. was established.  The company was originally a vaudeville and theater costume company, but rebranded after not receiving enough business during the great depression and also because audiences were moving away from the stage and towards radio and film. Ben Cooper soon realized that children would want to dress up as the characters they saw in movies so the company went to Walt Disney, immediately after the release of Snow White, and started producing a Disney filled Halloween costume catalogue. Disney also partnered with the McCall Pattern Company in 1932, so families had the option to sew their own Mickey and Minnie costumes if they couldn’t afford already made ones.

During the 1940s, due to wartime and wartime rations, Halloween was not at its peak. Many children of the 40s had Halloween costumes constructed from old clothes and trick-or-treating was curtailed because of sugar rationing. However, for women the popularity of costume pin-up photos led to a new idea of “sexy costumes”. Pin-up photos were huge in the 1940s, partially because of the big name Hollywood actresses who would model to promote their movies. Another reason is that the US Government employed pin-up as wartime propaganda, promoting the idea that these “beautiful all-American women were girls worth fighting for”. Of course, whatever is trendy in the media becomes trendy for the masses, so pin-up inspired Halloween costumes became very popular at this time. 

The 1950s and 60s led to a rise of the middle class, so now that families had a larger income, they were able to afford television sets, and because of this, consumers’ interest in dressing up as TV characters increased. Cowboy and Western costumes were really popular in the 50s, because there were so many Western shows at the time. The 1950s, also, led to some more costume innovations such as the vacuum form latex mask. Thanks to this technology, we started seeing celebrity and politician masks. The 1960s was also a time of second wave feminism, so we started seeing more sexual costumes in line to match the times. In 1996 Julie Newmar made her debut as Cat Woman in the Batman TV Series, which inspired many other women to dawn Halloween catsuits.

In 1974 the New-York Greenwich Village Halloween parade was started. The parade began as a small community event organized by puppeteer and mask maker Ralph Lee. It wasn’t long before some very risqué and controversial costumes started to take the spotlight in the parade. This festive atmosphere combined with the sexual revolution and changing ideals of modesty and fashion led many more people to experiment with “sexy costuming.” Soon enough, bars clubs and adult entertainment venues started seeing profitability in hosting Halloween events and retailers saw the opportunity to capitalize on ready made sexual outfits. The 70s was definitely the time when Halloween became a celebration for adults once again. 

Also during the 70s and 80s there was a new craze for grotesque costumes. The successful release of the movie Halloween, which came out in 1978, led to an increase in Halloween associated horror movies and sparked a whole genre of films. This inevitably led to October Horrorthons and also this new general interest in bloody graphic tones of Halloween. Compounded with the fact that there was a lot of public fear at the time, horror movies became a popular form of escapism. Public fear at the time included real-life horror stories from the Vietnam War and Halloween-associated fears such as widespread rumors that people were putting poison in the candy handed out for trick-or-treating. As a result we see a lot of grotesque costumes, even ones mimicking real world events. For example some masqueraders chose to dress up as Tylenol bottles at the height of the contamination scare in 1982. And then in 1994 the most publicized costumes were the highly insensitive bloody O.J. and Nicole Simpson costumes. Denise Brown, Nicole Simpson’s sister, issued a public appeal to boycott the products that exploited the crime, but it was too late. This, unfortunately, led to a lot more cases of blackface as people bought costumes to resemble O.J. Simpson. Overall the late 20th century marked an increase in commercialization as the holiday nationalized and then globalized in the 80s Sears was one of the first department stores to host a Halloween section within their store called the Halloween Shop at Sears. Temporary Pop-Up Halloween Stores subsequently launched in the 1990s such as Halloween Express in 1990 and Spirit Halloween in 1999. 

By the 21st century, Halloween had become the second largest decorating retail holiday after Christmas and American companies even started to export their Halloween products to other countries for higher profit. Bringing us to contemporary times, Halloween costume conventions have not actually changed that much. We still wear scary costumes, and we still wear political costumes. We still wear sexy costumes. And we definitely still wear costumes based on Pop Culture and movies. Halloween has always been a reflection of our culture, the ability to dress up as anything you want allows people celebrating Halloween to use their bodies as canvases to display their likes, dislikes, and general thoughts and feelings. Having long shed its original religious pedigree, Halloween is an unofficial unregulated holiday that has fostered creativity and experimentation among the masses.

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By definition, candy is a rich sweet confection made with sugar or other sweeteners and often flavored or combined with fruits or nuts. Dessert refers to any sweet dish, for example, candy, fruit, ice cream or pastry, served at the end of a meal.

History

The history of candy dates back to ancient peoples who must have snacked on sweet honey straight from beehives. The first confections were fruits and nuts rolled in honey. Honey was used in Ancient China, Middle East, Egypt, Greece and the Roman Empire to coat fruits and flowers to preserve them or to create forms of candy. 

The manufacturing of sugar began during the middle ages and at that time sugar was so expensive that only the rich could afford candy made from sugar. Cacao, from which chocolate is made, was re-discovered in 1519 by Spanish explorers in Mexico.

Before the Industrial Revolution, candy was often considered a form of medicine, either used to calm the digestive system or cool a sore throat. In the Middle Ages, these treats appeared on the tables of only the wealthiest at first. At that time, it began as a combination of spices and sugar that was used as an aid to digestive problems.

The price of manufacturing sugar was much lower by the 17th century when hard candy became popular. By the mid-1800s, there were more than 400 factories in the United States producing candy.

The first candy came to America in the early 18th century from Britain and France. Only a few of the early colonists were proficient in sugar work and were able to provide the sugary treats for the very wealthy. Rock candy, made from crystallized sugar, was the simplest form of confection, but even this basic form of sugar was considered a luxury and was only attainable by the rich.

Industrial Revolution

The candy business underwent major changes in the 1830s when technological advances and the availability of sugar opened up the market. The new market was not only for the enjoyment of the rich but also for the pleasure of the working class. There was also an increasing market for children. While some fine confectioners remained, the candy store became a staple of the child of the American working class. Penny candy became the first material good that children spent their own money on. 

In 1847, the invention of a molding press allowed manufacturers to produce multiple shapes and sizes of candy at once. In 1851, confectioners began to use a revolving steam pan to assist in boiling sugar. This transformation meant that confectioners didn’t have to continuously stir the boiling sugar. The heat from the surface of the pan was also much more evenly distributed and made it less likely the sugar would burn. These innovations made it possible for only one or two people to successfully run a candy business.

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