12 HALLOWEEN MYTHS THAT WON'T DIE

Every October the same Halloween claims come back around, copied from one list to the next. While researching 100 Halloween Facts, Fact-Checked, we kept running into the same ones, and a lot of them don't hold up. Here are twelve, with what the sources actually say.

1. "The word Halloween first appeared in 1745." Merriam-Webster dates its first known use to around 1700, in Scotland (Merriam-Webster).
2. "The Church moved All Saints' Day to November 1 to stamp out a pagan festival." Historians say there's no evidence that was the reason (UC Press).
3. "Samhain was the Celtic New Year." That's a modern guess by scholars of mythology. The old sources never say it (Aberystwyth University).
4. "The ancient Celts wore costumes on Samhain to hide from spirits." There's no hard evidence for that. The costumes we can document come from later door-to-door customs like Scottish guising (Snopes).
5. "Bobbing for apples comes from the Roman goddess Pomona." Halloween historian Lisa Morton rejects the idea. Apples were simply ripe and plentiful at the end of October (History.com).
6. "Jack-o'-lantern is named after Stingy Jack." Maybe, but the word was English slang for a night watchman in the 1600s, long before anyone carved a pumpkin (Merriam-Webster).

7. "A pope ordered Europe's cats killed, and that let rats spread the Black Death." The 1233 letter people point to, Vox in Rama, describes a supposed cult ritual. It never orders any cats killed (Snopes).
8. "Black cats rarely get adopted." In ASPCA data, black cats were adopted roughly in proportion to their share of shelter cats (Humane Pro).
9. "Bats became a Halloween symbol because bonfires drew bugs, and bugs drew bats." It's a plausible theory, not documented history (Popular Science).
10. "Blind as a bat." Bats can see, and some large fruit bats see about three times better than we do (National Park Service).
11. "You swallow spiders in your sleep." There's no case of it anywhere in the scientific or medical literature (Burke Museum).

12. "Strangers poison Halloween candy." Sociologist Joel Best went through decades of reports and found no child killed or seriously hurt by a stranger's treat. The one real Halloween candy murder, in 1974, was committed by a father who poisoned his own son for the insurance money. And he wasn't executed on Halloween, as the story often goes. It was March 31, 1984 (Snopes).

One more: Halloween isn't America's second-biggest commercial holiday either. We cover that one, and four other lessons Halloween has for small businesses, in What a 2,000-Year-Old Holiday Knows About Brands.