This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including yours.

Send them to Our American Stories.com.

Today we're going to bring to light the Halloween stories that have been hiding in the dark,

answering the question, why do we participate in these strange celebrations every Halloween season?

Here to tell the story are two of the foremost authorities on Halloween, Leslie

Vanatine and Lisa Morton.

Leslie is the author of Halloween, an American holiday, and American history.

Lisa is the author of Trick or Treat, a history of Halloween.

Here's Leslie and Lisa with the story of Halloween.

I'm Leslie Vanatine. I've been looking at researching and writing about Halloween for over

35 years now, and it's still interesting to me. And so I guess if you wanted to start the story of Halloween, you could go back to Sowan,

which was a time of year in northwestern Europe.

That's Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany.

It means summer's end.

Sowan means summer's end.

And it was time of year around November 1st where tribes would move their livestock back to winter quarters to keep them safe.

And they would gather together. It was kind of a little bit like our Thanksgiving in that people would come together. They'd play games, eat, drink, tell stories.

And because it was a big community kind of day or festival, the dead were naturally part of it.

And there was a belief that the other world was especially present at this time at summer's end because we were going

into the dark and dangerous season and it's always good to consult with the ancestors when you're

going into something dangerous. Salon, which by the way is spelled S-A-M-H-A-I-N, it looks like it should be pronounced Sam Hain, but it's not, it is Salon, was a day that they did indeed celebrate on October 31st. Their festivals started when the sun went down, so it began actually on the evening of October 31st and then spilled over into November 1st.

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