By Christina Fisanick, PhD
Being born on Halloween automatically gave me a reason, as a lover of archival research, to become an armchair expert on the ancient holiday. I spent much of my childhood in the stacks of the Moundsville Public Library reading about its origins, and the past decade or so scouring newspaper repositories to better understand how international and national trends have impacted the ways in which Wheeling and the Ohio Valley have embraced this night of ghouls and goblins. I found what you might imagine: dozens of party announcements, warnings from police about vandalism and ways to stay safe, costume photographs, and small accounts of kindness and destruction. What I’ve learned in these many years of research is that the ebb and flow of how we participate in this ancient holiday reflects on our values as a society in much the same way as other rituals and traditions take the shape of their time period. Nothing, not even centuries-old harvest celebrations, takes place in cultural vacuums.
Ancient Origins
What we now know as Halloween developed over centuries from seasonal customs and Christian observances in Europe. One important root is Samhain (pronounced “SAH-win”), the Gaelic festival marking the beginning of winter on November 1, with celebrations beginning the evening before when it is believed that the boundary between the living and the dead is thin. We know that European immigrants brought Samhain and Halloween traditions with them to the Ohio Valley. [1]
On October 27, 1895, the Wheeling Sunday Register offered readers an elaborate account of Halloween entertaining elsewhere. English country-house guests arrived for festivities involving harvest decorations and courtship games. In one curious detail, a cabbage concealed a small present. The page placed Halloween within a larger world of seasonal customs and social aspiration. [2]
In Scotland and Ireland, from where many of northern West Virginia’s early European settlers came, youth would often participate in superstitious games thought to bring good fortune and predict the future, like uprooting a cabbage. [3]
Turnips, Pumpkins, and … Cabbages?
According to collected accounts, young men and women eligible for marriage were blindfolded, brought to a garden, and told to uproot the first cabbage stalk they could find. Its length, thickness, and curves were all used to analyze if the participants would make a good couple. Soon into this practice, however, it became common to pull a neighbor’s cabbage instead of your own and hurl it at their front door. This tradition was carried to America by Scottish and Irish immigrants in the 19th century, but eventually became the province of mischievous youths around the country, including right here in Wheeling.
A year later, an article from the Wheeling Daily Register describes the cabbage custom in detail, along with other marriage predictors, including roasting pairs of nuts, tying hemp, drying a shirt sleeve by the fire, and eating an apple in front of a mirror. In one way or another, all these rituals were supposed to predict the identity of future spouses.[4]
The latter article refers to Hallow-een as “one of those pleasant domestic anniversaries consecrated by tender associations to the old folks,” so we know these traditions in one form or another were part of the way the holiday was celebrated throughout the region.
All Hallows
Christian observances helped shape Samhain’s name and meaning. Halloween means All Hallows’ Eve, the evening before All Saints’ Day on November 1. Together with All Souls’ Day on November 2, these occasions connected the season with honoring saints and remembering the dead. Across Britain and Ireland, traditions included disguised visitors, food offerings, and “souling,” in which people went door to door seeking food in exchange for prayers for departed souls, which sounds quite a bit like what we have come to see as trick-or-treating. [5]
By 1905, local reports supply more elaborate community celebrations of the holiday. The November 1 paper described Halloween gatherings in Wheeling and nearby Benwood, including taffy pulling and a meal of pumpkin pie and cider. At a Benwood gathering, guests competed to tell weird ghost stories. On November 5, another society account looked back on a South Penn Street party with popcorn, taffy, corn, pumpkins, and yellow chrysanthemums. The writer called Halloween parties “old-fashioned.” [6]
From the beginning, adults were thoroughly involved in Halloween festivities of all kinds. On Halloween night in 1907, a country-club phantom party required guests to appear as phantoms or in domino costume, a form of masquerade dress. An oyster supper and orchestra music accompanied the evening. The November 3 society pages also recorded home gatherings and church-group entertainment. [7]
The Rube Dance and Other Oddities
The dances continued through the 1930s. More than two hundred people attended an Elks “rube dance” on October 30, 1934, with men in overalls and women in gingham. Cornstalks and pumpkins decorated the ballroom, and the evening stretched into the early morning. Other pages describe children’s masquerades, church parties, and club dinners. These notices show how much work went into making Halloween: preparing food, arranging music, decorating rooms, and bringing people together. They also reflect the newspaper’s social priorities. The people whose parties received long guest lists were not the whole city, obviously. [8]
This early evidence complicates later claims that adults only recently discovered Halloween. When commercial features in the 1980s and 1990s promoted adult entertaining as a new development, Wheeling had decades of adult parties behind it.
Outside the ballroom and church basements, however, another question kept returning: what should be done about mischief?
Tricks Turn Treacherous
Wheeling was participating in a national debate. In Anoka, Minnesota, civic leaders organized a Halloween celebration in 1920 partly to divert children and teenagers from destructive pranks. A parade and free treats offered an alternative. In the Des Moines area, a campaign begun in 1938 encouraged October 30 “Beggars’ Night” activities, with children performing a song, poem, or other small entertainment to earn a treat. Different communities tried different arrangements, but the reasoning was recognizable: adults could help shape the night by providing something worth doing. [9]
In Wheeling, the Warwood Boosters Club announced a children’s costume parade and free films for October 31, 1941. PTA and civic celebrations appeared in the 1947 notices. By October 28, 1951, Pete Heil’s News-Register feature, “Halloween Has New Look,” described the larger effort to channel young people’s energy into organized festivities. The article recalled destructive behavior and contrasted it with parades, treats, and entertainment. Police Chief James Stanley said vandalism had fallen to almost nothing in the areas covered by the previous year’s celebrations. [10]
Nearby Moundsville made the exchange between entertainment and behavior explicit. An October 22, 1951, report announced that children from Moundsville and Glen Dale could attend the community party if they had not been caught committing harmful Halloween pranks beforehand. School-distributed tickets asked them to pledge not to damage property during the month. An invitation to a party also served as a lesson in citizenship. [11]
Apples Replace Cabbages
The children did not always honor the adults’ hopes, of course. A November 1, 1955, Wheeling report contains enough material for a small Halloween drama. Mrs. Robert Mowder of Virginia Street on the Island made forty candy apples. Word spread, the apples disappeared, and a child came back to ask, “do you got any more of them candy apples, lady?” In Woodsdale, five children thanked a giver by singing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Another resident on North Front Street reportedly handed out thirty-five pounds of candy and still found their garbage cans overturned. [12]
Those homemade apples also locate Wheeling within a broader change in American Halloween. The Smithsonian traces the growing promotion of packaged Halloween candy to the 1950s, while noting that homemade treats continued alongside commercial sweets into the 1970s. Wrappers offered convenience and, increasingly, reassurance about what a child was eating. A candy apple could come to signify both a neighbor’s effort and something a parent might hesitate to accept. [13]
Safety became an increasingly prominent part of the coverage. Some concerns were concrete: a 1971 regional article included a child’s account of a younger brother struck by a vehicle the previous Halloween. Other warnings concerned the possibility that a stranger might contaminate a treat. These dangers should not be collapsed into one story. [14]
Treats Turn Treacherous
Fear of poisoned candy intensified nationally after the 1982 Tylenol poisonings. Sociologist Joel Best’s research distinguishes that fear from substantiated injury: in his investigation, he found no verified report of a child killed or seriously injured by a contaminated treat collected while trick-or-treating. Yet warnings and suspicions could still change what families and officials were willing to permit. The history of Halloween includes the consequences of feared events as well as documented ones. [15]
The Ohio Valley’s responses were far from uniform. In 1977, Benwood substituted a parade and party for trick-or-treating, while nearby towns allowed rounds during different time windows. A regional story described about fifty CB-club vehicles helping authorities observe conditions and report trouble. In 1985, Bellaire restored trick-or-treating after a suspension, accompanied by patrols and candy checks. [16]
Modern Takes
The rules never contained the whole holiday, though. On October 31, 1973, Pat and Doug Neal of Colerain remarried in the Park View Memorial Garden Chapel near Oglebay Park. Their children attended, friends dressed for Halloween, and guests appeared as the devil and a giant banana. The next day’s News-Register feature described a cake fashioned as a miniature elm tree with a scarecrow and witch. [17]
Other Halloween celebrations offered different kinds of fear and amusement: nature walks, zoo activities, and haunted attractions. A 1994 notice for the Victoria Theatre’s Catacombs of Screams in the Dark gave admission prices and warned that the attraction might be too frightening for children. The old pleasures of masks, darkness, and suspense could be arranged as an educational outing or sold as an evening’s entertainment. Somehow, the home party survived within a wider calendar of choices. [18]
That range of choices becomes especially clear in 2020. On October 30, the newspaper advertised a planned River City costume party and reported that a vineyard near Adena had cancelled its annual party because of COVID-19 concerns. On October 31, Wheeling cancelled its scheduled trick-or-treating after Ohio County moved to gold on the state’s COVID alert map. [19]
The pandemic introduced a new reason to limit contact, but the question of how much gathering and freedom to allow was familiar. Across the decades, Wheeling residents had already negotiated the boundary between a holiday’s pleasures and its possible harms. The reasons for concern changed, but the desire to celebrate persisted.
Looking across these pages, I am struck by how often Halloween belongs to several generations at once. Adults host the dances and prepare the food. Children learn the route from one door to another. Young people test the limits. Years later, someone tells a reporter how different it all used to be. Jane Sampson Howard did that in 1969, on the birthday she shared with the holiday and with me.
Howard, a woman in the Dallas Pike area, celebrated her ninetieth Halloween birthday. [Special Note: my maternal family line is Sampson, and Howard may be a relative, although I have not established that connection as of this writing.] Born in 1879, she remembered a Halloween before children expected treats at every door. Her recollections included an attempted wagon-hiding prank interrupted by a farmer, community celebrations, and a Mae West costume. Together, these memories offer a reminder that Halloween had already changed considerably within her lifetime, and yet the desire to mix and mingle with “the other side” remained constant. [20]
Author bio: Dr. Christina Fisanick teaches writing and literature at Pennsylvania Western University and is an internationally known expert in digital storytelling. A native West Virginian, her creative and scholarly work often explores themes of labor, resilience, and identity in working-class communities. Fisanick is a founding member and current president of the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia (WANA) and the co-host of WANA LIVE!: The Virtual Reading Series. She is the author or editor of more than 30 books, including Pulling the Thread: Untangling Wheeling History (North Meridian 2024) and Digital Storytelling as Public History: A Guidebook for Educators (Routledge 2020). Her shorter works have appeared in Still: The Journal, Archiving Appalachia, Rust Belt Magazine, the Pittsburgh Review of Books, and Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, among others. In addition, Fisanick is the co-editor of the Journal of Appalachian Studies. Learn more at christinafisanick.com.
Bibliography
- National Museum of Ireland. “Traditions and customs of Halloween / Samhain.” https://source.museum.ie/en-IE/Collections-Research/Folklife-Collections/Folklife-Collections-List-(1)/Religion-and-Calendar-Customs/Hallowe-en-Samhain.
- Wheeling Sunday Register. “All Halloween.” Oct. 27, 1895, archive p. 7.
- The Trustees of Reservations. “Halloween Night’s Destructive Origins.” Sept. 24, 2025. https://thetrustees.org/arts-culture/halloween-destructive-origins/.
- Wheeling Daily Register. “All-Hallow E’en.” Oct. 30, 1869, p. 3. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84026847/1869-10-30/ed-1/?sp=3.
- English Heritage. “What are soul cakes and what’s their link with Halloween?” https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/halloween/soul-cakes/. Stephen Winick. “Welcome to Folklife Today, and…Happy Halloween!” Library of Congress, Oct. 30, 2013. https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2013/10/welcome-to-folklife-today/.
- Wheeling Daily Register. Nov. 1, 1905, archive p. 3; Wheeling News-Register. Nov. 5, 1905, archive p. 10.
- Wheeling News-Register. Nov. 3, 1907, archive pp. 10–11.
- Wheeling Intelligencer. Oct. 31, 1934, archive p. 8; Oct. 29, 1935, archive p. 7; Oct. 31, 1936, archive p. 7; Oct. 29, 1938, archive p. 7. The Intelligencer. Oct. 28, 1985, archive p. 12; Oct. 27, 1997, archive p. 9.
- Anoka County Historical Society. “Anoka Halloween: The Centennial.” https://anokacountyhistory.org/anoka-halloween-the-centennial. City of West Des Moines. “Halloween in West Des Moines.” https://www.wdm.iowa.gov/government/parks-recreation/activities-programs/featured-programs/halloween-in-west-des-moines.
- Wheeling Intelligencer. Oct. 27, 1941, archive p. 5; Oct. 31, 1947, archive p. 20. Pete Heil. “Halloween Has New Look.” Wheeling News-Register, Oct. 28, 1951, archive p. 53.
- Wheeling News-Register. Oct. 22, 1951, archive p. 15.
- Wheeling News-Register. “Log of the Roving Reporters.” Nov. 1, 1955, archive p. 13.
- Caitlin Kearney and Kamilah Stinnett. “From homemade Halloween treats to colorfully packaged candies.” National Museum of American History, Oct. 30, 2014. https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/homemade-halloween-treats-colorfully-packaged-candies.
- Wheeling News-Register. “Halloween Is Fun But Dangerous.” Oct. 24, 1971, archive p. 54.
- Joel Best. “Halloween Sadism: The Evidence.” https://www.joelbest.net/halloween-sadism.
- Wheeling News-Register. Oct. 28, 1977, archive p. 27; “Don’t Let Halloween Be a Horror Story,” Oct. 24, 1985, archive p. 36.
- Stephanie Baber. “Happy Halloween Goblins.” Wheeling News-Register, Nov. 1, 1973, p. 17, archive p. 34.
- The Intelligencer. Oct. 26, 1994, p. 13, archive p. 27. Wheeling News-Register. Oct. 23, 1988, archive p. 76. Sunday News-Register. Oct. 22, 1989, archive p. 20.
- Wheeling News-Register. Oct. 30, 2020, archive p. 17. City of Wheeling. “Trick or Treat Cancelled.” Oct. 31, 2020. https://www.wheelingwv.gov/media/Press%20Releases/Trick%20or%20Treat%20Cancelled%20PR.pdf.
- Marilyn Hamm. “Woman Born on Halloween Dotes on Fun of Old Days.” The Intelligencer, Oct. 31, 1969, archive p. 75
