Boo!

What do a hanged man’s teeth, a witch's cauldron and a skeleton at the bedside have in common? They all belong to the long, strange history of how we scare ourselves in the dark.

Hallowe’en takes its name from All Hallows’ Eve, the night before the Christian feast of All Saints. Many of its customs are thought to have older roots in Samhain, the Celtic festival marking the end of the harvest, when the boundary between the living and the dead was said to wear thin.

Shirley Markham painted this eerie gouache of a cauldron and spider web while she was a graphic design student in London in the 1950s - a mid-20th century take on traditional Hallowe’en imagery.

Death was never far away in earlier centuries, and artists made sure nobody forgot it. In Holbein’s Dance of Death, a skeleton leads away everyone from a duchess to a pauper. An 18th-century print of a skeleton appearing at a sleeper’s bedside carries the same message: remember you must die.

Superstition was never far behind. In A caza de dientes (“Hunting for teeth”), published in 1799, Goya shows a woman pulling teeth from a hanged man, since they were believed to be an essential ingredient in spells. Goya was mocking such beliefs, but he conveyed them very convincingly.

Then there are the creatures of the night. Our engraving of Chiroptera, with wings outstretched, includes the vampire and the similarly toothy bulldog bat. Bats have been linked with the supernatural for centuries, yet they are the only mammals capable of true flight.

Glowing ghosts and jack-o’-lanterns light up a San Diego garden in Ethel Davies’s 21st-century photograph. It shows how the old themes of death and the dead returning, once the business of Samhain and All Hallows’ Eve, have become a playful modern celebration.