The party had just died down and all the revelers were heading home. All, that is, except for three young women, each of whom had a different destination in mind. The first was headed off to a cabbage field. Once there, she planned to walk backwards, steal the first plant her heel hit, and take it home to examine its roots. The second girl went searching for a salted herring, which she would then eat in three bites—bones and all—before going to sleep without drinking any water.
In America, Halloween traveled from the British Isles with the earliest settlers, although celebrations were modest—mainly singing and ghost stories while girls played at foreseeing their future husbands—and were limited to a handful of states. Then, in the mid-1800s, millions of Irish immigrants, fleeing the devastating potato famine, brought their traditions with them and helped spread the holiday nationwide.
Nut games were also common. According to The Better Days Books Vintage Halloween Reader , 18th-century English women would walk around a walnut tree three times on Halloween shouting, “Let him that is my true love bring me some walnuts!” Then they'd watch, waiting for a fetch to appear. In Ireland, three nuts were placed on a fire, representing three of the player’s crushes. “The Test of the Nuts” by Dorothy M.
Kale could also be hung over a doorway with the stalks numbered and assigned to each girl. Then, the first man to walk through the door would have the same initial as the future husband of the girl assigned stalk number one, the second man had the initial of the second girl’s hubby, and so on. In America, cabbage was placed over a door as well, but this time, the first man who got conked on the head by a falling cabbage shared the same initial as someone’s groom.
But of all these traditions, mirror divination was long considered the most popular pastime for girls on Halloween, as described by the Los Angeles Herald in 1909: “In a thousand boarding schools a thousand girls will creep down the cellar stairs holding a mirror and a candle as the hour strikes twelve, looking fearfully for the reflected face which is to tell them of the future, and in more than a thousand apartment houses—where there are no cellar stairs—young women will eat an apple before a...
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