The Halloween Games Your Great-Grandmother Actually Played

Robert Burns wrote a poem called Halloween in 1785. He footnoted it himself, so his English readers could follow along, and those footnotes are the reason we know precisely how these games were played. Four of the six below come straight out of it.

None of these are inventions. All of them were played the in kitchens, by people who wanted to know.

The apple peel

Pare an apple in one unbroken strip. Throw the peel over your left shoulder. The letter it makes when it lands on the floor is the initial of the person you will marry.

This is the most forgiving divination ever devised, and everyone knew it. Almost any curl of peel can be read as a letter if you want it badly enough. A B is a P if you turn your head. An S is a C that kept going.

That is not a flaw in the method. People doing this in 1780 were not fools, and they were not fooled. The peel does not tell you who you will marry. It tells you whose initial you were hoping for, in the half second before you looked down. The apple is only a way of catching yourself in the act.

If you do it: one apple, one paring knife, one unbroken strip. If the peel breaks, you were rushing. That is also an answer.

The nuts on the hearth

Name two nuts for two people. Set them side by side in the fire.

If they burn steadily together, the love is true. If one cracks, hisses, or leaps out of the grate, you have your answer about that person.

Before October 31 was widely called Halloween in England, it was called Nutcrack Night. That is the whole name. An entire holiday, in one part of the world, named for this one thing that people did to find out whether they were being lied to.

There is a version of you that would rather find out this way than ask him.

If you do it: two hazelnuts, one fire or one heavy pan. Name them out loud. Then watch, and do not look away when it starts.

The mirror at midnight

A candle, a mirror, midnight, and nobody else in the house. In some versions you eat an apple while combing your hair. A face appears over your shoulder, and it belongs to the one you marry.

This game produced more real terror than anything else on this list, and there is a reason.

A candlelit face in an unsteady mirror at midnight is precisely the condition under which human vision starts inventing faces. Low light, a single flickering source, a reflection that will not quite hold still, and a mind that has been told to expect somebody. It works. That is exactly the problem with it.

If you do it: five minutes. No phone. Stop the moment you want to stop, and let nobody tell you that you failed.

The three luggies

Three bowls on the hearth. One holds clean water, one holds dirty water, and one is empty. Blindfolded, you reach out.

Clean water means you marry someone who has never been married. Dirty water means a widow or a widower. The empty bowl means no marriage at all.

This one is Burns, footnote and all. The bowls are shuffled between each attempt, and by the rules of the game only the third try counts. Nobody has ever adequately explained why three. It is simply how it was done, in a kitchen, with everybody watching, and the third bowl was the one that mattered.

If you do it: have somebody else move the bowls. Go three times. Believe the third.

The ring in the barmbrack

A ring, a coin, a rag, a pea, and a thimble, baked into a sweet loaf. Everyone takes a slice and gets the year they bite.

Ring is a wedding. Coin is money. Rag is money trouble. Pea or thimble means no wedding this year.

This is the only Halloween divination that is also dinner, and the only one that walked intact into the supermarket. Irish shops still sell barmbrack in October with a ring baked inside it. You can buy your fortune at a till, wrapped in plastic, and it will still be the same fortune it was three hundred years ago.

If you do it: bake it or buy it. Tell people what is in the bread before they bite down.

The hemp seed sowing

At midnight, walk the edge of a churchyard or a plowed field. Cast seed over your left shoulder, saying what you sow and who you sow it for. Do not look behind you until you finish.

Then look.

Burns recorded this one too, and it is the least cozy game on the list by a considerable distance. Eighteenth century farm people did it alone, in the dark, at a graveyard, on purpose.

The looking back was the entire point. Everything before it was getting up the nerve.

If you do it: walk it. Say out loud what you actually want. Look back exactly once, and then go straight home.

What they were really doing

Notice what almost every one of these has in common. There is a crowd.

Modern occultism inherited a solitary Halloween. One person, one candle, one journal, silence. That version is real and it has its place, but it is not the old version.

The old version happened in a crowded room with people shrieking. Somebody held the bowls. Somebody watched you bite the bread. Somebody was standing behind you at the fire when your nut jumped out of the grate, and somebody said something about it, and everybody laughed except you.

A fortune that nobody else heard was not considered a fortune at all. The witnesses were not incidental. They were the mechanism. You cannot pretend you did not see the peel land if seven people saw it land.

That is worth sitting with, if you have been doing all your divination alone.

Six questions

Which of these is yours depends less on what you believe and more on what you are actually asking, and how much you are willing to be frightened in order to find out.

We built a quiz for it. Six questions, and it will hand you one of these six games. Then go and play it, in a room with other people, the way it was meant to be played.