The origins of Halloween date back over 2,000 years to a popular Celtic festival called Samhain. At this time, the New Year was on November 1st and it marked the end of summer and the beginning of the long, cold, dark winter. Winter was a dangerous and uncertain time, and the presence of death lingered.

The Celts would celebrate on the eve of the New Year. They believed that on the eve of the New Year the boundary between the world of the dead and the world of the living became blurred and spirits would mingle with the living. Spirits would return to the land of the living causing trouble, damaging crops, and searching for bodies to possess. If a spirit took control of a living body, they could enter the afterlife.

To avoid being possessed by these roaming spirits the living would extinguish fires in their homes to make it uninviting and later relight their hearth fires from the common source of Druid fire located at Usinach (in the middle of Ireland). The living would also wear ghoulish costumes and parade noisily around the neighbourhood to try to confuse the spirits. This was meant to make it hard for the spirits to distinguish between who was dead and who was alive.
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