13 Questions That Reveal the Secret Soul of Halloween
Halloween doesn’t simply arrive with candy buckets and rubber masks.
It seeps under the door like a midnight draft, heavy with the scent of dried leaves, cloves, and stories we’ve been telling since fire first touched stone.
It’s beeswax candles trembling in the dark, root vegetables stewing into soup while October winds scratch at the windowpanes, and the gleam of a carved pumpkin grinning back at the night.
For me, Halloween was always more than costumes. I lived for it.
It was the one time of year you could become anything, slip into the skin of a monster, a ghost, a queen, or a hero.
It always felt like a celebration for the backstage souls of the world, the ones who felt most at home in all black, quietly running the show while others basked in the spotlight.
Halloween, for us, wasn’t about hiding. It was about being seen differently, if only for a night.
As a psychic medium, October is still the season where the requests for readings overflow.
Not because the veil between the living and the dead grows thinner (it is already as thin as breath, as translucent as memory), but because we choose to notice.
We lean into endings, into the final harvest, into the silence after the lights go out. And what we lean into expands.
That’s the true power of Halloween: not ghosts clawing through from the other side, but our own willingness to turn and face the shadow that’s been walking with us all along.
So come closer.
Read all 13 questions, all the way down to the last one.
Like a haunted clock striking midnight, each answer pulls you deeper into the marrow of this season.
And at the very end, the 13th chime, you’ll find the most valuable and unconventional truth of all.
If this is your first time here, you might be wondering what a psychic or tarot reading is really like. Here’s what to expect when you sit down for a session.
And if you already feel the pull and want to experience it yourself, you can book your session here and step into the conversation.
13. Where did Halloween come from?
Spoiler: it’s older than candy bars and rubber bats. Think fire, harvest, and a touch of church rebranding.
Halloween’s roots stretch back over 2,000 years to Samhain, the Celtic festival that marked the end of harvest and the descent into winter’s dark.
Bonfires roared on hilltops, disguises were worn, and offerings left out for wandering spirits, not because people thought the dead were locked out until October, but because they chose that moment to honor them.
When Christianity muscled in, Samhain was folded into All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, turning pagan fire into church-approved candlelight vigils. (While you’re at it, Google the origins of Christmas, religion has always had a knack for rebranding. No wonder some folks still call Halloween “evil.”)
Today, Halloween holds both sides of its lineage: the revelry of the living and the remembrance of the dead, one hand clutching candy, the other clutching memory.
12. Why pumpkins, and why carve them?
Before pumpkins, it was turnips. Yes, turnips, the nightmare fuel of your ancestors.
Before pumpkins, there were turnips.
In Ireland and Scotland, people hollowed out knobby root vegetables, carving grotesque faces meant to scare off wandering spirits.
When immigrants brought the custom to North America, the pumpkin stole the show, bigger, brighter, and far easier to carve than a stubborn turnip.
It became the lantern of choice, glowing like a firebrand against the night.
Every jack-o’-lantern we light today is both warning and invitation: a grinning mask that says, “keep danger away,” while at the same time beckoning the dark closer, just to see what it might reveal.
11. Why are witches tied to Halloween?
From healers to heretics, witches went from cradle-keepers to cultural rebels in black.
Witches weren’t always the cackling villains Hollywood loves.
Once, they were the midwives, healers, and herbalists who carried knowledge of plants, seasons, and cycles.
Over time, suspicion twisted reverence into fear.
Accusations of devil’s pacts, whispered gossip, and brutal witch trials turned wise women, and anyone who lived outside convention, into scapegoats.
But here’s the truth: most “witches” were simply people with independence, inconvenient voices, or knowledge that frightened the powerful.
That’s why Halloween has become a kind of refuge. The season now belongs to artists, queers, punks, and misfits who’ve taken the witch back as a banner of power and defiance.
And maybe that’s the deeper spell, this time of year gives permission to wear black, speak loudly, and stare death straight in the face.
In hospice work, I’ve learned grief rarely comes with an outward label.
Aside from the black clothes we sometimes associate with mourning, there’s no social indicator that someone is carrying loss.
Perhaps that’s why the blanket of autumn feels so fitting, transition seasons demand we acknowledge mortality, even flirt with it, and wonder what lies beyond.
Halloween, with its witches, becomes less about fear and more about facing the unknown with raw honesty.
Curious how tarot connects with the skies above and the cycles we feel in our bones?
Tarot and astrology have always shared a cosmic dialogue.
10. Why do we fear black cats on Halloween?
Once feared as omens, now worshiped on Instagram, but their real magic is trust.
In medieval Europe, black cats lived in the liminal space between reverence and fear. Some believed they were guardians, others saw them as omens.
Their midnight coats and unblinking stares unnerved villagers, and folklore spun tales of witches slipping into feline form to wander unseen. That suspicion has lingered for centuries, clinging to Halloween like a shadow.
But for me, black cats have never been figures of fear, they’ve always been companions of trust. My handle on one of the first ancient social platforms of the 90s was Black.Cat, because the archetype called to me so strongly.
I grew up with a black cat, and even now I carry an affinity for them.
When one crosses my path, I don’t shiver, I feel safe. Their invisibility, their ability to move through the world half-seen, has always felt like a shield.
Cats, too, have taught me something I bring into hospice care.
At the end of life, words fade.
Everyone eventually becomes nonverbal, and sometimes all that remains is blinking.
Cats already know this language. A slow blink from a cat is a handshake, a pact of trust.
It says, I see you, and I’m safe with you. Sitting beside the dying, I’ve come to recognize the same quiet exchange in the soft blink of those crossing over.
So no, black cats aren’t bad luck. They’re reminders that the unseen world has always brushed against us, silent but steady, if we’re willing to notice.
When you’re already reflecting on mortality and memory, tarot becomes becomes a mirror.
What makes the best tarot readings so transformative?
9. Where did werewolf legends come from?
Half-man, half-wolf, all shadow instinct. These stories howled before Hollywood ever did.
The werewolf is Europe’s cautionary tale made flesh, a reminder that under the right conditions, even the most civilized among us can crack, surrendering to the beast within.
Long autumn nights were fertile soil for such fears. Villagers whispered of shapeshifters while wolves prowled just beyond the firelight, their howls a chorus of everything untamed and uncontrollable.
As a travel addict, I’ve always wanted to follow those stories to their birthplace, Transylvania.
The closest I’ve come so far was wandering through Hungary and the Carpathian Mountains in Poland.
Those hills are steeped in old legends, the kind that cling to the soil.
Walking through the dense forest there, I felt the eerie press of unseen eyes, an unsettling, primal presence that raised the hair on my arms.
In North America, they might call such beings Skinwalkers, but the dread is universal: that something half-human, half-shadow still roams the trees, watching, eviscerating livestock during full moons.
At Halloween, werewolves still stalk our imagination, not just as monsters, but as metaphors.
They are the wildness we try to leash, the shadow instincts we’d rather deny. And maybe that’s why their stories endure, because deep down, we know the wolf is never entirely outside us. It waits, restless, in the dark.
8. Why do we tell ghost stories at Halloween?
A campfire, a candle, a chill, ghost stories are humanity’s way of flirting with death.
From Samhain onward, people believed the spirits of the dead slipped through the final harvest fields, brushing against the living like a chill in the wind.
Fireside tales became a way to both honor and fear them, keeping the dark at bay with words.
In Victorian England, ghost stories moved indoors, read aloud by candlelight on stormy nights, shivers shared as entertainment, but also as quiet rituals of remembrance.
For me, no writer captured that atmosphere better than Ray Bradbury. His The Halloween Tree has been my all-time favorite, my first love in literature this time of year.
Bradbury understood that ghost stories are more than fear; they are poetry, folklore, memory.
They bend time, letting us sit with the living and the dead in the same breath.
Even today, haunted houses and horror films are just the latest version of that old impulse.
We tell ghost stories not simply to scare ourselves, but to flirt with death from the safety of the firelight.
They remind us that mortality is never far, it sits at the table whether we invite it or not.
If you’ve ever wondered whether a tarot deck can open the door to the unseen…
Here’s how tarot cards can help you connect with your spirit guide.
7. Is the veil really thinner on Halloween?
Nope. Spirit doesn’t check the calendar. What changes is us, and that’s the haunting part.
I’ll be blunt: no.
The veil doesn’t suddenly shred open because the calendar says October 31st. Spirit doesn’t clock in seasonally, the dead don’t need a holiday to reach us.
The veil has always been thin, translucent as breath on glass.
What changes is us. We gather, we remember, we lend our collective consciousness to the subject of endings.
And attention is power. Where our awareness rests, energy expands.
So of course October feels haunted, not because the other side has moved closer, but because we’ve finally stopped distracting ourselves long enough to notice.
When people insist the veil is thinner, I roll my eyes.
It’s not more ghosts that appear this season; it’s more awareness. And that’s the real haunting, realizing the unseen world has always been walking beside you, waiting for you to look up and admit it.
Sometimes grief asks harder questions than words alone can answer.
Finding peace after the loss of a loved one is part of the work tarot and mediumship can hold.
6. Why do people feel chills or see shadows around Halloween?
Drafts become fingers, creaks become footsteps, or maybe, just maybe, it’s not your imagination.
Because October is a season dressed like a ghost story, your senses are already primed.
Streetlights flicker, leaves skitter like whispers, and every storefront is selling skeletons and goblins.
The mind loosens its grip in this atmosphere, and suggestion becomes a trickster, shadows lengthen, drafts feel like fingers, a creak becomes a footstep.
But some of it isn’t just suggestion.
Chills, flickers, the sense of something moving just outside your vision, these are the ways your body registers subtle shifts in energy.
Call it intuition, call it spirit, call it the subconscious alerting you: the room is not as empty as you thought.
Most of the year you’re too distracted to notice, but in a season built on endings, mystery, and old stories, you’re finally paying attention.
And when you pay attention, the unseen begins to show itself.
5. Can loved ones really send signs on Halloween?
They don’t wait for October. You’re just more likely to notice when the world echoes endings.
Yes, but here’s the truth: they don’t wait for October to do it.
Loved ones are untethered by the restrictions of time, and their signs slip into our lives constantly.
A song suddenly playing at the exact moment you were thinking of them, a familiar perfume drifting in an empty room, the flicker of a candle with no draft, these are whispers of presence, reminders that love doesn’t stop at the grave.
Halloween doesn’t open some cosmic door. What it does is open you.
When culture leans toward remembrance, when the air smells of endings and transition, when grief feels woven into the season itself, you’re more willing to notice.
And in that noticing, the signs feel sharper, closer, impossible to ignore.
So if a photo falls from the shelf, if an animal fixes its eyes on the air beside you, if you hear your name when no one’s there, don’t roll it off as coincidence.
That’s the season reminding you: connection survives death, and love is the one thing that never goes quiet.
4. Why do trick-or-treaters dress up?
Masks weren’t always cute, they once kept the dead off your doorstep. Now they set the stage for identity experiments.
Costumes aren’t just a sugar-fueled gimmick, they’re a ritual with teeth.
Long before kids in Spider-Man suits knocked on doors, villagers in Europe disguised themselves for mumming and souling: knocking from house to house, offering prayers for the dead in exchange for food.
Masks weren’t just play, they were protection.
If you looked like a spirit, the real ones were less likely to mess with you.
Over centuries, the disguises shifted: ragged cloaks, Victorian “fancy dress,” plastic monster masks.
But the current stayed the same, for one night, you could slip out of your skin and become something else.
Halloween has also been a stage for drag. Before drag brunches, there was October 31st, the one night outsiders could go big without permission.
It wasn’t always about female impersonation, but about creating a character, clownish or glamorous, that let hidden confidence roar.
Many artists, queers, punks, and misfits cut their teeth in costume on Halloween, testing out identities that later became lifelines.
That’s why dressing up still matters.
Halloween has always belonged to the backstage people, the ones who thrive in black clothes, the ones mourning quietly, the ones craving transformation.
A mask lets you play, but it also lets you practice being more than you believed you could be.
At its core, dressing up still carries the same current: freedom disguised as play.
For one night, the shy kid can be a pirate, the quiet adult a ghoul, the outsider a queen.
Halloween says: Put on the mask, and see what happens when you remember who you really are underneath it all.
3. Why is Halloween tied to death?
Skeletons grin for a reason, not to scare, but to remind you to savor the soup while it’s hot.
Because death is unavoidable, and cultures need rituals to face it without flinching. Halloween is the annual rehearsal.
Autumn itself teaches the lesson, trees shedding leaves, gardens collapsing back into the soil, the world exhaling before winter’s long silence.
Skeletons grinning from windows aren’t just decorations, they’re reminders: you are mortal.
The season itself is mortal. And yet, death here doesn’t arrive as an ending, but as a transition, one cycle bowing to the next.
That’s why the macabre feels strangely comforting in October.
The bones, the candles, the graves, they’re less about horror than honesty.
To recognize mortality is to be reminded that life is brief, and therefore urgent: enjoy your soup, kiss your children, hold your lovers close.
The macabre becomes a mirror, showing us that by staring at death, we can taste life more vividly.
2. Why do psychics and mediums say Halloween is their busiest time?
Because October makes people brave enough to ask the questions they dodge the other 11 months.
October itself feels haunted, not by ghouls, but by memory, longing, and reflection.
This is when grief sharpens, nostalgia thickens, and the soul aches to know if death is really an end.
People reach for psychics, mediums and tarot readings not because spirits suddenly draw nearer, but because their own hearts are cracked open, willing to listen.
I notice it in myself too. This season stirs a kind of restless honesty.
I clean out my space, purge the corners, and stay up far too late writing pieces like this one.
It’s reflection season, when we’re not just glancing back at where we’ve been, but asking who we are on the other side of endings, and where continuity of life may lead.
Most people avoid talking about death, terrified that naming it might summon it.
But here’s the plot twist: no one gets out of life alive. And maybe that’s the point.
Halloween’s parade of skeletons, skulls, and shadowy imagery confronts what we spend the rest of the year denying.
Want to know what really happens on the other side of life?
Here are 12 lessons spirit teaches us about what happens after we die.
1. What is the true meaning of Halloween?
Forget fear, the real spell of Halloween is attention to authenticity. Endings, beginnings, and the reminder you’re still here.
It’s the night humanity collectively leans in, asking harder questions than usual: What does it mean to end? What does it mean to begin again?
The veil has never been thicker or thinner, it has always been translucent.
Spirit does not wait for October 31st to draw near. What shifts is us. We put down our busyness long enough to notice the flicker in a candle, the whisper in a hallway, the memory in a song.
Halloween is an act of consent.
We allow ourselves to sit with mortality, to dress it up, to laugh at it, to invite it into our neighborhoods in the form of skeletons and masks. We flirt with endings because it makes us savor beginnings.
We honor the dead because it makes the living burn brighter.
As someone who works daily with tarot, mediumship, and grief, I’ve come to see Halloween not as a portal, but as a rehearsal.
A ritual reminder that death is not the opposite of life, it is its tutor, its punctuation, its shadow that makes the light visible.
So here is the true meaning of Halloween:
To remember the dead without fear.
To acknowledge your own mortality without superstition.
To live more vividly, because the clock is always ticking.
In the end, Halloween is the most human holiday of all. Not a night of terror, but of tenderness. Not proof that the veil is thin, but proof that our hearts can be.
And if you carry that lesson beyond October, then Halloween has done its job.
If all this has stirred something in you and you’re curious to explore more, here’s what to expect when you sit with me for a reading.
And when you’re ready to experience it firsthand, click here to book your session, the door is already open.
Written by Christopher Bennett, known professionally as The Tarot Medium, a highly regarded psychic medium and tarot reader based in Canada. With over 275 five-star reviews and a global reputation as one of the best psychics and most accurate tarot readers in the world, Chris offers evidential mediumship readings, psychic tarot sessions, and spiritual guidance trusted across Canada, the USA, the UK, and Australia. His clients span cities like Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Sydney, and Melbourne.
Chris specializes in psychic mediumship readings for those navigating grief and loss, tarot readings for love, career, and life purpose, and deeply evidential spiritual sessions that bring clarity, healing, and self-trust. His blog is often ranked among the best tarot blogs and best psychic blogs worldwide, weaving together rich storytelling, psychological insight, and spiritual wisdom. Recognized by many as one of the greatest tarot readers and genuine psychics working today, Chris continues to share his expertise through online psychic sessions, tarot education, and writings that explore life, death, intuition, and the unseen world.
If you’re searching for a “psychic near me,” the best tarot reading, or a trusted psychic medium to help you understand life after death, Christopher Bennett’s work as The Tarot Medium has become a guiding light for thousands seeking answers beyond the ordinary.
