Embers Across the Sea: The Journey of Samhain

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The Atlantic crossing in 1847 was treacherous, but not merely for the storms that battered our ship. I, Margaret O’Sullivan, fled the Great Hunger with something more than potatoes blighted in my homeland—I carried the old ways, the memories of Samhain, when the veil grows thin.

My grandmother had taught me, by flickering hearth light in County Cork, how our ancestors marked the end of harvest. October 31st—when summer died and winter began, when the aos sí walked freely, when the dead might visit their kin. We carved turnips then, hollowing out faces to ward off Stingy Jack and his ilk, those spirits trapped between salvation and damnation.

“Remember,” she’d whispered, “the Church gave us All Saints and All Souls, but the old feast persists beneath, like roots under stone.”

Boston Harbor, 1847. The Americans watched us Irish with suspicious eyes, clustering in our neighborhoods, preserving our customs. But children are marvelous alchemists—they transform fear into wonder.

By the 1870s, I watched from my boarding house window as young ones discovered our jack-o’-lanterns. But here, turnips were scarce. The native pumpkins, orange as autumn flame, proved far easier to carve. The Indigenous peoples had their own harvest traditions—the moon of falling leaves, ceremonies of gratitude. Slowly, imperceptibly, the traditions began to merge.

The Scots brought guising—costumed children performing for cakes and coins. The English, their autumn divination games—bobbing for apples, mirror-gazing for future spouses. Even the German immigrants contributed, their fairy tale witches joining our supernatural pantheon.

By 1890, I had lived to see the transformation. Victorian Americans, hungry for community celebration but wary of our “papist” ways, began hosting “Hallowe’en parties.” They softened our spirits into parlor games, our protective bonfires into decorative candles.

Ladies’ magazines printed instructions for “quaint Irish decorations.” The middle class embraced what they called “rustic charm”—never knowing they danced where ancient druids once stood. The séance craze of the Spiritualists added their own flavor—speaking to the dead became fashionable rather than feared.

Young Elizabeth Thornton, the banker’s daughter, knocked at my door one October evening in 1895, wearing her mother’s old dress as a “costume.”

“Trick or treat, Mrs. O’Sullivan?” she chirped, though that exact phrase wouldn’t become standard for decades yet.

I gave her soul cakes, the same recipe my grandmother used for the poor who came souling on All Hallows’ Eve, praying for our dead in exchange for food. Elizabeth didn’t know she was participating in a tradition stretching back a thousand years.

The 20th century arrived, and with it, Halloween became truly American. The ancient festival of the dead became a children’s holiday, then a community celebration. Vandalism on “Mischief Night” led towns to organize parades and parties—civilization’s answer to chaos.

By the 1920s, I was ancient myself, watching from my rocking chair as the town decorated with mass-produced decorations. The jack-o’-lantern grinned from every porch, no longer warding off Stingy Jack but welcoming trick-or-treaters. Witches on broomsticks replaced the bean-sidhe. Skeletons danced where once we feared the restless dead.

The candy companies discovered Halloween in the 1950s. Sacred became sweet. Fear became fun. The veil between worlds became tissue-paper thin decorations in shop windows.

Yet something persists, doesn’t it?

On October 31st, when children don costumes and walk door to door in the gathering dark, they unknowingly reenact ancient protections. When we carve faces into pumpkins, we still ward off the darkness. When we dress as monsters, we still confuse the spirits that might wish us harm.

The evangelical churches that once forbade the practice now host “Harvest Festivals” and “Trunk or Treats”—returning, unknowingly, to the celebration’s agricultural roots. They offer safe spaces for children, just as the ancient Celtic communities gathered together when the veil grew thin.

Modern pagans have reclaimed Samhain, while Mexican-American communities brought Día de los Muertos north, enriching our autumn commemorations with marigolds and sugar skulls. The wheel turns, and old traditions wear new masks.

I write this in 1925, my 95th year, on All Hallows’ Eve. Tonight, millions of American children will trick-or-treat, never knowing they participate in humanity’s oldest negotiation with death and darkness.

The Irish brought Samhain across the sea in our hearts and empty bellies. America transformed it, commercialized it, sanitized it—and somehow, in doing so, preserved it. For what is Halloween but humanity’s eternal declaration? That we will meet the dark time of the year with light, the threat of death with life, fear with celebration.

Listen—can you hear them? The footsteps on the porch, the giggling ghosts and miniature monsters? They carry plastic pumpkins instead of turnip lanterns, demand candy instead of soul cakes. But they still walk the ancient paths, these little souls, marking the boundary between summer and winter, light and dark, the living and the dead.

The veil remains thin on October 31st. We just decorated it with cobwebs and hung a “Happy Halloween” sign.

Stingy Jack still wanders between worlds. We simply call him a decoration now.

The jack-o’-lantern glows on every American porch, a new world monument to an old world truth: some traditions are too powerful to die. They just learn to wear costumes.