A spotlight on Halloween’s roots in an ancient Celtic holiday grows in the Philadelphia region

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Through Saturday evening, Philadelphia’s streets will be filled with ghouls and goblins, ghosts and witches, and countless other more niche costumes.

Dressing up in disguises, from the fantastical to the terrifying, is just one of the modern-day Halloween traditions that come from the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain — a celebration that people in the Philadelphia region and beyond are increasingly exploring on its own terms amid the usual spooky season revelries.

From spiritual practices to business owners’ events, Samhain is getting its turn in the spotlight.

What is Samhain?

Samhain, pronounced SOW-in, is the Irish word for November, said Joseph Lennon, director of the Center for Irish Studies at Villanova University.

The holiday was first celebrated throughout Ireland, Britain and other places where Celtic people lived stretching as far back as Neolithic times, according to some historians. People dressed up in costumes, carved turnip heads, built fires and ate sweets on the night halfway between the fall equinox and the winter solstice, marking the end of the harvest season and the start of the darker time of the year.

“There’s folk stories. There’s pseudo-history stories. There are medieval tales. There are legends,” Lennon said. “So all woven throughout that are stories of this night when the door between the worlds is the most porous.”

Samhain’s rituals were characterized as existing in a liminal space, between the past and future, at a time when the afterlife and the spiritual world are closer to the world of the living, he said.

“Samhain is a way to venerate the dead and to think about the dead,” he said. “But it’s also a way to revere the future, because it’s a children’s holiday here, and it’s about celebrating children. So I love that it’s both backward-looking and forward-looking.”

The tradition of children dressing up in costume, Lennon said, came out of people’s fears of this perceived proximity to unearthly realms.

“That’s when you have to be careful of the good people from the other side coming over to snatch children,” he said. “So you have to disguise your children, preferably as something ugly and and grimy or grubby or scary, so that they won’t look like the sweet innocents that they are to be taken away to the other side.”

Bringing Samhain to Old City

Neill Laughlin, co-owner of Sassafras Bar and Restaurant in Philadelphia’s Old City neighborhood, recalls carving turnips — ”pumpkins were unheard of” — and donning a mask as a child in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He and his peers performed songs and recited rhymes to receive money from his neighbors on the night of Oct. 31. They then would go out for a meal with their families and tell stories.

The focus was on community, Laughlin said, “the old heritage of people gathering together, over a cocktail or a beer and some food, and remembering the past and what it signifies to them today.”

Laughlin and his business partner, Donal McCoy, who is also Irish, are inviting more people to share that aspect of their heritage with their first-ever Samhain street festival Saturday evening.

Musicians, jugglers, stilt walkers and fire dancers will entertain guests and passersby starting at 5:30 p.m., Laughlin said, and the restaurant will feature a suite of Samhain-themed cocktails.

“I feel like Halloween’s kind of gotten away from its origins, where it’s more for children collecting candy, and I think today people are interested in the origins of events and what starts them and where did they come from,” he said.

Saturday’s event is also a way for Irish people to “hold on to our heritage,” he said.

“That’s part of the adventure of the evening, will be to have people learn something new about what Halloween really is and where it all came from,” Laughlin said.