The Surprising History Behind 5 Popular Halloween Costumes

What would a witch costume be without a pointy hat? Why do pirates wear so many accessories that would be impractical on the Seven Seas? And how did it come to be that throwing on a bedsheet was all you needed for a ghost costume? 

The outfits we wear for Halloween have a story to tell—one often far removed from the historical reality they’re said to represent. And if you find yourself looking for a conversation topic with a person dressed as Batman, maybe they’d like to hear how a Renaissance polymath inspired the look. 

With that in mind, here are the stories behind five of the most popular adult Halloween costumes as predicted by the National Retail Federation. (We’ve skipped over cats, as that costume is fairly self-explanatory.)

Witch

It’s often said that the standard witch outfit emerged from medieval women called alewives who brewed and sold beer (or ale, as much as that distinction still exists). The story goes that the women selling beer needed the tall hat to help them stand out in a crowd. 

That’s almost certainly fiction. 

In her book Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600, Judith M. Bennett writes that alewives were often depicted in a negative light, with at least one late poem (circa 1517) describing a fictional alewife doing all sorts of wicked things, including dealing with a witch. And while it doesn’t explicitly identify the alewife as a witch, the implication is likely there.

But by 1517, the alewife was in the process of disappearing (at least in England), with Bennett noting that brewing was largely a man’s game by 1600. That’s problematic for two reasons: The first is that, in England, the peak witchcraft trial period was around 1563-1712; it largely occurred throughout continental Europe around the same time. Secondly, during the peak witchcraft trial period, artistic depictions of witches tended to show them as either naked or looking like everybody else in the community. The classic witch outfit doesn’t emerge until the 18th century at the very earliest, when alewives are mostly out of the picture. While it’s possible individual alewives might have been accused of witchcraft, it’s unlikely they created the archetype for witches in general. 

As for where the outfit does come from—there is no clear answer. One popular explanation is  antisemitism, which traces the witches’ hat to the headpiece Jewish people were forced to wear in several countries. People have also proposed that the hat represents a Quaker hat, a capotain (most famous as the “Pilgrim hat”), or even a reference to the goddess Diana.

But it’s very possible there’s no deeper meaning to the outfit and it harkens back to those earlier depictions of witches when they wore everyday clothing. There are many 17th century paintings of women in black robes and tall hats with no suggestion of witchcraft. This leads some authors to suggest that in the 17th and 18th centuries, the modern witch’s outfit was a perfectly standard outfit for people to wear. As the outfit started to become a bit out-of-date, the imagery turned into a parody of rural and folksy elderly women and, from there, witches.

Vampire 

Vampires are suave, handsome, and look great in a tux. Unless that vampire is the original Dracula. In Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula is described as “a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere” (elsewhere in the story, a de-aged Dracula is described as having a black moustache and pointed beard, but “His face was not a good face”). 

According to Smithsonian Magazine, the tuxedo element emerged in the 1924 stage production of the story. Because of the requirements of a visual medium, Dracula’s powers of seduction had to be made visibly evident—hence, a good-looking guy wearing a fancy outfit. 

This production also gave us the now-iconic large collar on the cape (with the cape itself also being credited to the stage production). According to writer David J. Skal, “Originally, the collar had a distinct theatrical function: to hide the actor’s head when he stood with his back to the house, thus allowing him to slip out of the cape and down a wall panel or trapdoor, effectively disappearing before the audience’s eyes. Though the trick collar had no subsequent purpose in film adaptations, it has become a signature feature of vampire costuming for all time.”

Batman

Batman co-creator Bob Kane has listed many influences for the character over the years. Zorro is apparent, but Kane also said one of his most important influences was The Bat Whispers, a 1930 film that tells the story of a thief who dresses as a giant bat (ish) to rob his victims (because the movie ends with an entreaty to not reveal the twist ending, this is a spoiler-free summary). A final influence was a Leonardo da Vinci drawing called the “Ornithopter” that, Kane felt, would make the person wearing it look like a giant bat. 

Except beyond a vaguely bat-inspired framework, Kane’s creation had little in common with the modern superhero. Kane’s was flashier, wearing a Robin-esque mask and a red suit with more explicitly bat-like wings à la the ornithopter. The modern Batman design is more readily attributable to the under-appreciated Bill Finger. According to Kane, 

“One day I called Bill and said, ‘I have a new character called the Bat-Man and I’ve made some crude, elementary sketches I’d like you to look at.’ He came over and I showed him the drawings. At the time, I only had a small domino mask, like the one Robin later wore, on Batman’s face. Bill said, ‘Why not make him look more like a bat and put a hood on him, and take the eyeballs out and just put slits for eyes to make him look more mysterious?’ At this point, the Bat-Man wore a red union suit; the wings, trunks, and mask were black. I thought that red and black would be a good combination. Bill said that the costume was too bright: ‘Color it dark gray to make it look more ominous.’ The cape looked like two stiff bat wings attached to his arms. As Bill and I talked, we realized that these wings would get cumbersome when Bat-Man was in action, and changed them into a cape, scalloped to look like bat wings when he was fighting or swinging down on a rope. Also, he didn’t have any gloves on, and we added them so that he wouldn’t leave fingerprints.”

While there were many other influences—it’s now widely acknowledged the first story and some of the early artwork were reworkings of other media—and some changes over the years (the Batman logo on his chest especially has changed dramatically depending on the editors and artists), Finger’s character design helped forge one of the most memorable and popular superheroes of all time. 

Pirate

Compare the following images: This one barely seems like a pirate. Beyond the hat, the many guns, and the smoke, there’s simply not that much that would be out of place in the 21st century.  The second picture, however, is much more piratical. There’s a headscarf, a sash, wide pants, even an earring if you zoom in far enough. 

They’re both artistic depictions of Blackbeard, but the first one is from the 18th century—less than two decades after his death (though it is not necessarily a perfect depiction)—while the one on the right is from the early 20th century. Why the change? It’s generally credited to one man: Howard Pyle. 

Pyle was an illustrator in the late 19th/early 20th century, a time that saw Golden Age pirates pop up in comic operas and stories like Treasure Island and Peter Pan. This naturally made Pyle want to illustrate pirates as well, but he didn’t go to the archives for his research. Part of his philosophy was that his illustrations had to stand alone, as he famously noted, “Don’t make it necessary to ask questions about your picture. It’s utterly impossible for you to go to all the newsstands and explain your pictures.”

To keep with that philosophy, Pyle looked elsewhere for his pirates. 

According to Anne M. Loechle’s Ye Intruders Beware: Fantastical Pirates in the Golden Age of Illustration, Spain was exotic to 19th-century Americans, and even to much of Europe. The country was a popular destination for artists and travel writers. Those people gave accounts that border on indistinguishable from modern depictions of pirates, with sashes, wide pants, and handkerchiefs around the head. Pyle may have been naturally drawn to the exoticness of Spain while coming up with his designs for pirate outfits.

But there might be something more. Pyle was working at a time when tensions between Spain and the United States were increasing, and the pirate can in many ways be contrasted with the era’s stereotypically white Navy man, with Loechle writing “The unexplored, maritime terrain [the pirate] shares with this U.S. sailor highlights their even greater difference: the Navy seaman is a white man; the pirate is racially ambiguous. With his headscarf, wide sash, short pants, and swarthy complexion, he looks nothing like the Anglo-Saxon cowboy or sailor. Instead, American illustrators chose to emulate contemporaneous Spanish gypsies and Spanish genre subjects. The pirate gained popularity despite, or more likely because of, the indeterminate nature of his national and racial identity.”

Pyle wasn’t just an illustrator. He also taught other artists, and many of his students went on to create famed pirate images based on his example, forever turning 19th-century Spaniards into the default American image of the pirate. 

Ghost

The origin of the classic bedsheet ghost is traditionally traced to Renaissance-era burial practices. People were buried in a shroud or a winding sheet, often instead of a coffin.

This sheet then migrated to the stage. In the early 16th century, beyond some flour to whiten the face, there was little to distinguish ghost characters from non-ghost characters on stage. This began to change by the late 16th century. A visual language emerged, with white sheets coming to represent ghosts (though not necessarily just for dramatic purposes: According to Performing the Unstageable: Success, Imagination, Failure by Karen Quigley, when ghosts show up in Shakespeare’s Richard III, the actors playing the ghosts had other roles and didn’t have time to switch full outfits. A sheet over the other costume likely proved a quick fix). 

And while modern audiences look at the bedsheet ghost as a source of humor and the epitome of the low-effort Halloween costume, in centuries past its ancestor was serious. Deadly serious. 

There are many accounts of ghost impersonators from the 16th to 19th centuries where it ends badly for either the hoaxer or the victim, whether that’s the hoaxer being beaten to within an inch of their lives or the hoaxed being robbed. One particularly notable example is from 1704, when thief Arthur Chambers is said to have been staying at a house he was planning to rob. The story goes that he then pretended his brother died and got permission to have the coffin brought to the house on its way to the burial. 

Chambers then wrapped himself in a winding sheet, dusted his face with flour, and hid himself in the coffin. According to one 18th century account he “[arose] from his mansion of death . . . and going downstairs into the kitchen with his winding sheet about him, set himself down in a chair, opposite to the maid, which frighting her out of her wits, she fell a screaming out, and crying ‘a Spirit, a Spirit, a Spirit.’” Chambers made off with 600 pounds’ worth of goods. 

So how did such a harrowing visage become a punchline? According to Owen Davies in The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts, in the 1920s and ‘30s, comedians took note of these hoaxes and incorporated them into their bits. This meant in films like Laurel and Hardy’s Habeas Corpus or Buster Keaton’s Neighbors, people somehow got covered by a sheet and were mistaken for ghosts—and while the characters in the film were terrified, the people in the audience were laughing. 

Davies writes, “As a consequence the slapstick ghost robbed the white sheet of its power to scare. Many millions today believe that the spirits of the dead walk the earth, but surely few people, if confronted with a white sheet on a dark night, would seriously cry ‘Ghost!’ Laurel and Hardy helped put paid to that.”

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