Welcome to the Halloween Library

It's a strange story how this all began. I was out of work, living in Pittsburgh in 2001, and ended up starting an internet business selling old prints of maps and photos. I saw someone on eBay doing the same, and I thought, what the heck, I'll give it a try. Since then, it has kept going and going, evolving and becoming more and more.

About 25 years ago I acquired a large number of images from the Library of Congress, and I hand-categorized tens of thousands of them. Through this, I began to see all kinds of interesting imagery, notably imagery about Halloween. This led to a multi-year, in-depth study of the holiday: the origins of its many traditions, its multifaceted ethnic history, the whole thing.

How the books came about

In 2008 I put together a little book called Pictorial America: Halloween. I didn't pay much attention to it until after the pandemic, when I noticed it had gathered 31 reviews on Amazon. No one promoted it. No advertising at all. That was the first clue that made me realize how big Halloween is online. Arcadia has just reissued it.

In 2024 I decided to do a survey of all the Halloween sites online, for no good reason other than curiosity. To my astonishment, I found that more than 100 million people follow Halloween on social media. Horrifying!

Back in 2017, with this growing evidence of a massive following, I began working on a book about the history of Halloween with a friend, Edward Moran, a writer in New York City. It took us 7 years, but we came up with a book about 300 pages long. A publisher liked it, but told us it was way too long. It needed to be split up. Into 7 books! (Eeeek!)

The first of the 7, Hollywood Halloween Horrors, comes out next Halloween. If you've watched TV or gone to the movies in the past 30 years, you are going to love it. Both books are on The Books page.

What this site is

The Halloween Library is a free public gallery, open to everyone. It holds vintage Halloween postcards, old Halloween pictures from the Library of Congress, the pictures from the Pictorial America Halloween book, and images from the coming book about Halloween in Hollywood. Prints are available for anything in the public domain.

This blog is where the stories behind the pictures go. Every post and every picture has a place for comments at the bottom, so tell us what you remember, what you know, or what you'd like to see next.

Why October 31

Up here in Maine, within a few days before or after October 31, the temperature drops significantly. It happens every year. I've come to understand why Halloween was traditionally the dividing line between summer and winter.

The good news: rather than burning bonfires to keep the spooks, ghosts, goblins and evil spirits away, we now party, eat candy and make mischief. That is the evolution of this strange and popular holiday.

Being able to study history the way I have has been extremely gratifying. I'm eager to share it with all of you, since this is our history.

To start, read 100 Years Since Houdini Died on Halloween. This Halloween is the 100th anniversary.