They Called Our Ancestors’ Traditions Demonic — Then Sold Us Halloween
Every October, America becomes remarkably comfortable with the supernatural. Skeletons appear on suburban lawns, witches hang from front porches, children dress as ghosts and demons, and stores devote entire aisles to spell books, cauldrons, fortune-telling props and decorations inspired by the dead. Horror movies dominate television, haunted houses become weekend entertainment, and communicating with spirits can be reduced to a party game. Most of this is understood for what it is: fantasy, folklore, entertainment and an excuse to eat too much candy.
For many Black Americans, however, there is an interesting contradiction buried beneath all that orange and black. Generations of us were raised in families where Halloween itself was questionable because anything involving spirits, witches, divination or the supernatural could be considered demonic. At the same time, many traditions with African roots had already been given that same label long before Halloween decorations started appearing at Target. The result is a complicated relationship with a holiday that forces us to confront a larger question: How did America become comfortable playing with certain kinds of spirituality while teaching many Black people to fear traditions associated with our own ancestry?
Black Americans did not begin our story in this country spiritually empty. The Africans brought through the transatlantic slave trade came from numerous societies across West and Central Africa, each with its own languages, religious systems and cultural practices. There was never one universal “African religion,” just as there is no single African culture today. Across various traditions, however, there were beliefs and practices involving ancestors, spiritual protection, healing, divination and relationships between the visible and spiritual worlds. Enslavement violently disrupted those systems, but it did not completely erase them.
Fragments survived and changed. In America, African traditions encountered Christianity, Indigenous knowledge and European folk practices, producing new expressions of Black spirituality. Hoodoo, for example, developed within Black American communities through this complicated cultural environment. Even Black Christianity itself was shaped by African American experience rather than simply copied from white churches. The spiritual culture that emerged among enslaved and later emancipated Black Americans was therefore neither purely African nor simply European. It was something forged under uniquely American circumstances.
Christianity would eventually become one of the most important institutions in Black American history, and any discussion of this subject has to acknowledge that importance rather than reducing Black Christianity to something imposed on enslaved people. Christianity had existed in Africa for centuries before the Atlantic slave trade, and Black Americans later built churches that became centers of education, political organization, mutual aid and resistance. The Black church helped sustain communities through slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. For countless Black Americans, Christianity was not merely inherited; it became deeply and sincerely their own.
Still, that history exists alongside another one. African-derived spiritual practices were frequently dismissed within the broader Western world as primitive, superstitious, pagan or demonic. Over generations, some of those attitudes became embedded within Black communities themselves. Practices associated with ancestors, folk healing, spiritual protection or divination could be treated with suspicion even when similar supernatural concepts appeared elsewhere in American culture without producing the same reaction.
That is where Halloween becomes particularly fascinating.
American culture eventually figured out how to commercialize the supernatural. Witches became costumes. Ghosts became cartoons. Magic became children’s entertainment. Fortune-telling became something people did at parties. Skeletons became decorations sold next to scented candles and throw pillows. The supernatural was not removed from American life; much of it was simply stripped of religious seriousness, packaged as entertainment and sold back to the public.
For Black families with strong church traditions, however, those distinctions were not always persuasive. If you grew up in certain Black Christian households, Halloween could be the one holiday everyone else seemed to celebrate while your family wanted nothing to do with it. Your classmates went trick-or-treating while your church held a harvest festival or Hallelujah Night. You could still get candy, play games and sometimes even wear a costume, but witches, demons and anything considered occult were off limits. Parents were not necessarily trying to deprive their children of fun; many sincerely believed they were protecting them from something spiritually dangerous.
That experience was common enough to become part of Black cultural memory, but it was never universal. Plenty of Black Christian families celebrated Halloween without seeing a conflict between their faith and children wearing costumes. Others avoided only the darker imagery. Some rejected the holiday completely. The differences between those families demonstrate why talking about “the Black relationship with Halloween” requires some nuance. Black America has never been religiously or culturally monolithic.
Religion was not the only factor shaping that relationship. Traditional American trick-or-treating assumes that children can wander through neighborhoods, approach unfamiliar homes, knock on strangers’ doors and reasonably expect to be welcomed. For Black children living through segregation and its aftermath, that assumption could not always be taken for granted. Housing discrimination and racial hostility shaped where Black families could live and how safely they could move through certain communities. As with countless other American traditions, Black communities responded by creating their own spaces through churches, schools, neighborhood organizations and community centers.
Over time, however, Halloween became increasingly integrated into Black popular culture, and Black Americans did what we have repeatedly done with traditions that did not originate with us: We made them our own. Costume parties became part of Black nightlife. Families developed their own Halloween traditions. Black children dressed as superheroes and princesses regardless of whether Hollywood had imagined those characters as Black. More recently, social media and cosplay have turned Halloween into an enormous showcase for Black creativity, particularly among younger generations who often approach costumes with fewer racial boundaries around who they are “allowed” to portray.
The evolution of Black horror tells an even more interesting story. Mainstream American horror historically gave Black characters limited space, and when we appeared at all, we were often stereotypes, side characters or disposable victims. Black creators increasingly challenged that tradition by using horror to examine experiences that conventional horror had largely ignored. Films such as Candyman, Tales from the Hood, Get Out and Us demonstrated that racial violence, segregation, exploitation, generational trauma and social inequality could themselves provide the foundations for horror. Black filmmakers did not simply ask to be included in somebody else’s haunted house; they began explaining why our own history already contained plenty of ghosts.
At the same time, some Black Americans have begun reconsidering spiritual traditions that earlier generations were encouraged to reject. Interest in Hoodoo, African traditional religions, ancestral practices and other forms of Black spirituality has become more visible, particularly online. That revival has generated its own debates within Black communities, especially between people who view these traditions as cultural reclamation and Christians who consider some of the practices incompatible with their faith. Those disagreements are real, and neither side can be reduced to ignorance or cultural betrayal.
What is worth examining, however, is the historical double standard surrounding which supernatural traditions America has been willing to normalize. European witches can become lovable fictional characters. Ghosts can decorate children’s cereal boxes. Magic can anchor billion-dollar entertainment franchises. A suburban family can cover its lawn with tombstones every October without anyone assuming it has abandoned Christianity. Yet practices associated with Africa and the African diaspora have historically been far more likely to be described as threatening, primitive or evil.
That does not mean Halloween is secretly an attack on African spirituality, nor does it mean Black Christians must suddenly embrace religious practices that conflict with their beliefs. The history is far more complicated than either argument allows. It does mean we should be willing to examine how ideas about what is “normal,” what is “superstition” and what is “demonic” were formed, particularly when those judgments developed in societies that routinely treated European culture as the standard against which everything else was measured.
Perhaps that is why Halloween remains such an interesting holiday in Black America. It sits at the intersection of faith, assimilation, cultural memory, racial history and modern entertainment. One Black family may be heading to church for a harvest festival while another is putting the finishing touches on elaborate costumes, and both experiences belong to the Black American story.
The more interesting question, then, is not whether Black people should celebrate Halloween. People can make that decision according to their own faith, traditions and beliefs. The question worth asking is why America taught generations of people to laugh at some ghosts while being terrified of others — and whether some of the traditions Black Americans learned to fear were closer to our own history than many of us were ever taught.
