Halloween's Ghosts And Devils Come From Real Belief, Its Witches Do Not

Halloween fills shop windows and costume racks with ghosts, devils and witches, the same three figures English speakers have been quietly invoking all year in ordinary phrases. Strip away the fancy dress and the language underneath turns out to be older, and in one case much newer, than the holiday itself.

Ghosts leaving the body

“Give up the ghost” now describes a printer dying or a car refusing to start, but the phrase begins with an actual death. Give up the ghost appears in Miles Coverdale’s 1535 translation of Acts 12:23, describing the death of Herod: “And he was eaten vp of wormes, and gaue vp the goost.” The ghost here is the spirit or soul departing the body at the point of death, the same belief that animates every ghost story told this week. The jump to machinery came centuries later. James Kirke Paulding’s 1832 novel Westward Ho! describes something failing with the line, “At length it gave up the ghost, and, like an over-cultivated intellect, became incurably barren.” The idiom moved from theology to engines without losing its original shape.

The colour most tied to Halloween’s spectres has its own explanation, and it is not about complexion. To go white as a ghost links to the old practice of wrapping the dead in a white burial shroud, which shaped how ghosts were pictured and described long before anyone drew a cartoon sheet with eye holes cut in it.

Naming the devil, naming a witch

Halloween costumes rarely skip the Devil, and the phrase tied to him is rooted in a genuine taboo rather than a joke about timing. The earliest recorded English version appears in Giovanni Torriano’s 1666 Piazza Universale: “The English say, Talk of the Devil, and he’s presently at your elbow.” The belief behind it was serious. Speak of the devil enshrined the superstition that naming the Devil aloud was dangerous, mirroring the old reluctance to speak the name of God directly. The light, knowing way the phrase gets used now, when someone walks in just as they’re being discussed, is a modern softening of what was once treated as a real risk.

Witches complete the Halloween cast, and English has a blunt way of describing cold weather through one of them. The instinct is to assume “colder than a witch’s tit” has been in circulation since the witch trials of Matthew Hopkins in the 1640s, but no printed trace of the phrase survives from that era. The earliest confirmed appearance of colder than a witch’s tit is in Francis Van Wyck Mason’s 1932 American mystery novel Spider House. Three centuries separate the actual witch hunts from the phrase that sounds like it should have grown out of them.

What the costumes get right

A ghost giving up its presence at death, a shroud’s whiteness clinging to every description of one, a name too dangerous to say aloud: these were not decorative turns of phrase but statements of what people genuinely believed happened at the point of death and in the presence of evil. The witch’s cold tit runs the opposite direction, a twentieth-century coinage borrowing the look of ancient folklore without any of its age. Halloween packages all three together, but only two of them earned their place through real superstition.