Halloween Fun Facts

Have you ever stopped to wonder who the first people to celebrate Halloween were? Or who came up with the idea of trick-or-treating? Do you know what vampires and mummies really are? Here are some interesting facts about Halloween:

• About 2000 years ago, the Celts celebrated a holiday called the “Samhain”, named after the god of death. They believed that on the last day of October the dead souls would go back to their former homes. The scared Celts would leave their homes and go into the fields. There they would build a large bonfire to scare off the ghosts. This was the ancestor of our Halloween.
• The Celts also believed that the souls roamed the earth, playing tricks on human beings to mark the season of diminishing sunlight (winter).  To avoid being harmed by these spirits, the people would also make offerings of sweets and other delicacies, and disguise themselves as one of the roaming spirits. Sounds familiar? You got it – the practice of trick-or-treating is a survival of this early Celtic practice!
• The bloodsucking vampire figure first appeared in Hungarian Folklore in the sixteenth century.
• A vampire bat weighing 1 oz. needs a tablespoon of blood a day.
• The first vampire film “Dracula” was made in 1921. Since then, over 150 films have been made about Dracula.
• The author of “Dracula”, Bram Stoker, based the character on a historical character called Vlad the impaler.
• Dracula was written in 1897.
• In ancient Egypt the dead were preserved and tightly wrapped in cloth. This process is called mummification. They believed that this would enable them to live forever.
• The oldest known mummy was found in the Alps encased in ice. It was over 5,300 years old!
• The discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, led to countless “mummy” monster movies. The first mummy horror film entitled “The Mummy” was released in 1932.