Halloween Was Once a Romantic Holiday: Victorian Divination Games and Miss E. Blanche Bennett's 1900 Party

Facts from the original

• In the minds of many Americans at the turn of the century, Halloween was synonymous with romantic pairings rather than with scares.
• Between roughly the 1880s and the 1920s, hopeful hearts looked to October 31st for the promise of new love.
• Halloween traditions hark back hundreds of years to Pagan celebrations in the British Isles and on the European continent.
• Autumn was considered the time of year when the veil separating the worlds of the dead and the living was temporarily lifted.
• Conditions were thought to be optimal for communicating with the dead.
• Fortune tellers and others with certain gifts were believed to receive help from entities 'from the other side' in manifesting visions of the future.
• Fortune telling became a common aspect of Halloween that persisted for generations.
• By the time the practices were passed to the Victorians and crossed the ocean to America, they had become an annual tradition as tied to Cupid's arrow as to carving jack-o-lanterns.
• Lesley Bannatyne is a Halloween historian and the author of several books on the holiday, including Halloween: An American Holiday, An American History.
• Bannatyne describes Victorian Halloween celebrations as one part romantic inspiration, one part reconstructed history and one part Victorian marketing.
• Bannatyne says Halloween stories became almost operatic with regard to passion and less concerned with actual ghosts.
• Victorians threw Halloween parties featuring divination parlor games, many designed to reveal the identity of one's future spouse.
• Such games were often reflected in short stories published in magazines and newspapers of the day.
• Bannatyne says Victorian storytellers used the historical divination games of Halloween as devices to shuffle lovers together.
• In stories, heroines ate apples at midnight on Halloween while looking in a mirror to see the face of a future husband.
• Characters followed balls of unwound yarn to dark barns and cellars and fell into the arms of a gallant hero.
• They cooked dumb suppers, attended romantic bonfires, put nuts on grates and bobbed for apples.
• Apple-peel divination: carve an apple in one long spiral peel and throw the peel over the left shoulder; it lands on the floor in the shape of a letter, the first letter of a future spouse's last name.
• The article's author re-created several 19th century Halloween games at a Halloween dinner party a few years earlier.
• A charm was baked into a strawberry shortcake; by Victorian custom, the guest who received the slice with the charm or ring would meet the love of their life in the following year.
• Bannatyne says young Victorians tried to bite bags of candy hung by threads from chandeliers or doorways.
• They carved initials on pumpkins and, blindfolded, tried to stick a pin in an initial to determine the name of their future mate.
• They set tiny walnut-shell candle boats afloat in a tub of water and predicted the course of their lives from the movements of the fragile vessels.
• Evidence of the parlor games Victorians played survives on the Halloween postcards they mailed.
• A real Victorian Halloween party took place in Ocean Grove, New Jersey on October 31, 1900, at 116 Heck Avenue.
• The hostess was Miss E. Blanche Bennett, who was known for her parties and planned this one to the utmost detail.
• She was probably inspired by women's periodicals of the day.
• The party was reported in the Ocean Grove Times of November 3, 1900.
• The party featured costumes and masks, a gypsy fortune teller, bubble blowing, apple bobbing, walnut boats, food, flirtation games and singing.
• Bennett married Harry G. Shreve in 1902.