The Surprising Origins of 5 Spooky Sayings

Whenever autumn rolls around, Halloween culture takes center stage seemingly everywhere you look. Streaming services trot out their best horror programs, pumpkin products proliferate across supermarkets, and your neighbor manages to fit a Home Depot’s worth of kitschy decor on their tiny front lawn.

You start seeing the spooky in everything—even in language that isn’t necessarily Halloween-specific. In honor of the season, here are the origins of five eerie idioms, from skeletons in the closet to graveyard shift.

Skeletons in the Closet

Harboring someone’s skeleton in your closet is pretty damning and shameful, so it’s a fitting metaphor for a damning or shameful secret. When the expression gained popularity in the early 1800s, it often referenced a family secret. In one 1815 lecture, for example, physician Joseph Adams mentioned people’s impulse “to conceal the skeleton in the closet,” the skeleton being their family history of a hereditary disease. William Makepeace Thackeray, credited with popularizing the phrase in literature, stated in an 1845 Punch magazine piece, “There is a skeleton in every house.”

The origins of skeletons in the closet are up for debate. One theory points to Bluebeard, a French fable featured in Charles Perrault’s famous 1697 collection of fairy tales. Bluebeard is a wealthy man who forbids his wife from entering a specific room in their castle. She disobeys him and finds the room filled with the corpses of his previous wives.

Another theory suggests that the phrase is related to the 18th- and early-19th-century practice of robbing graves to supply physicians and medical students with cadavers. As the custom enraged the public, it seems plausible that a physician might hide any snatched skeletons when they weren’t in use—but there’s no evidence to support the theory.

The Witching Hour

In its loosest sense, per the Oxford English Dictionary, the witching hour refers to “the time, [especially] the dead of night, when bad or sinister things are believed to be most likely to happen.” The expression was inspired by the old folk belief that witches and other supernatural beings are incredibly potent and busy in the middle of the night. 

So when exactly is the witching hour? Midnight is probably the most popular answer, but it’s also been said to last from midnight to 3 a.m. or from 3 a.m. to 4 a.m. For what it’s worth, Shakespeare—among the first to commit the belief to paper—didn’t specify a time. In Hamlet, the titular prince says, “ ’Tis now the very witching time of night, / When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out / Contagion to this world.” (Though most of the characters are still awake at that point, so maybe it’s not 3 a.m.)

The Bard’s witching time had given way to the witching hour by the mid-eighteenth century, as evidenced in Elizabeth Carolina Keene’s 1762 poem “Nightmare”: 

“ ’Tis the baleful witching hour,
Lo! the moon withdraws her light;
Hark! from yonder mould’ring tow’r
Screams th’ ill-boding bird of night . . . ”

Devil’s Advocate

These days, a devil’s advocate is anyone arguing against a given stance—be it as an annoying contrarian or for the nobler goal of examining an issue from all sides. But it started out as a real job. In the Roman Catholic Church, the devil’s advocate (advocatus diaboli in Latin) was tasked with arguing against a candidate in consideration for sainthood (or beatification, a precursor to sainthood). The devil’s advocate would expose you if you faked your miracles or had any other skeletons in your closet.

Sources date the term’s origin to Pope Leo X’s papal reign between 1513 and 1521, though the position itself wasn’t formalized until 1587. Its official name is promotor fidei, Latin for “promoter of the faith,” and it’s no longer a pivotal part of the canonization process (Pope John Paul II made some changes in the 1980s).

Make Your Blood Curdle (Or Run Cold)

If something makes your blood curdle or run cold, it fills you with terror. According to the Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms, both expressions grew out of medieval beliefs about the body’s four humors, one of which was blood. “Under this scheme, blood was the hot, moist element, so the effect of horror or fear in making the blood run cold or curdling (solidifying) it was to make it unable to [fulfill] its proper function of supplying the body with vital heat or energy,” the book explains.

Even without any link to the four humors, the phrases are consistent with other figurative fear-related language. If your blood runs cold and you’re covered in goosebumps, you’re no doubt experiencing a chilling, hair-raising event. If your blood curdles, on the other hand, it’s too thick to keep pumping—forcing you to stop dead in your tracks, scared stiff.

That said, to curdle the blood wasn’t always exclusive to fear; it originally covered any “strong negative emotion,” per the OED, especially “fear or dread.” Its earliest known reference, from Edmund Spenser’s 1579 poetic work The Shepheardes Calender, tackles much more than just those two. It’s all about how depressing it is when a little February sunshine tricks you into thinking that spring has arrived, only for winter to reappear, “Drerily shooting his stormy darte, / Which cruddles the blood, and pricks the harte.” You pay for your false hope with “weeping, and wayling, and misery.” A bloodcurdling ordeal, to be sure, just not in the spooky sense we’re most familiar with.

Graveyard Shift

According to legend, the phrase graveyard shift first referred to the practice of sitting in a graveyard all night to free anyone who had accidentally been buried alive. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your penchant for the macabre), the historical record doesn’t support this origin story. In fact, graveyards don’t seem to have been involved at all: Early mentions of graveyard shift and graveyard watch, which both gained popularity in the late 19th century, allude to various gigs occurring in the middle of the night.

“All of the principal gambling houses run three shifts of men for each game. The after midnight early morning run is called the graveyard shift, but why that name should be applied to those hours more than to any other group of hours, is not quite clear,” a Pennsylvania newspaper wrote in 1888. Other graveyard shifts and watches, running from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. and from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., were cited in newspapers.

Gershom Bradford’s 1927 Glossary of Sea Terms claims that the graveyard watch (12 a.m. to 4 a.m., in this case) was named “because of the number of disasters that occur at this time.” However, another nautical reference from 1929 says it was “so called on account of the silence throughout the ship.” As the dead of night is characteristically quiet wherever you are, the latter explanation seems especially logical.

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