“From the Archives” is an opportunity for various writers to visit the Middlebury Special Collections and write about a different artifact each week. The Special Collections boasts hundreds of thousands of historic items, and through this column we encourage writers to explore not only the college’s history, but also the history of the world around us.
When you think of a romantic holiday, you probably think of Valentine’s Day, a day dedicated to love. Save for a cute couple’s costume, Halloween is typically a night of trick-or-treating and scary movies. Halloween is perhaps one of the least romantic holidays to come to mind. However, this wasn’t always the case.
Historically, the last night of October was regarded as an ideal for witchy rituals from fortune-telling to Celtic customs, many of which focused on the search for love. In the spirit of Halloween, I ventured into Special Collections to visit their extensive collection of Halloween-themed picture postcards and learn about their fascinating history.
The book “Halloween: Romantic Art and Customs of Yesteryear” by Diane Arkins gave me valuable insight into the history of Halloween rituals and their accompanying visual art. According to Arkins, the first two decades of the twentieth century were known as the “Golden Age of Postcards.” The country was “smitten with the phenomenon of the illustrated picture postcard” as inexpensive yet enchanting art pieces to send to friends and family.
Companies played into postcard popularity with cards for every occasion, including Halloween. For a society emerging from strict Victorian morals, Halloween provided an exciting opportunity for young people to socialize, and fortune-tellers rose in popularity as party entertainment.
In Special Collections, I paged through dozens of illustrated Halloween-themed postcards. Postcards typically depicted a variety of detailed Halloween-themed imagery, often including autumnal symbols like pumpkins, apples, witches and mirrors.
Some postcards, like “Hallowe’en Precautions,” displayed a more specific ritual to find true love. The design of this postcard is intricate, with layers of illustrations and silver embossing. The card reads, “If at midnight with a pumpkin light / You steal to your room unseen / In the mirror appears the face, / Of your lover true on Halloween.”
According to Arkins, mirrors and other reflective surfaces were a common element of Halloween rituals, promising to give curious young people a glimpse of a future lover.
Another postcard, titled “Hallowe’en Greetings,” invites readers to participate in an old Scottish ritual involving pools of colored water. “When spells were cast under the bewitching aura of Halloween night, even ordinary bowls assumed mystical proportions,” Arkins adds in her book.
This postcard depicts a blindfolded young woman with fingers reaching toward bowls of colored water, part of a popular party game that allowed participants to peer into the future. Red water symbolized great fortune, blue water foretold a trip across the water and clear water represented a great honor to be bestowed.
This ritual played into the spirit of the evening: “On Hallowe’en, / By pumpkin’s light, This witch / Will help you choose aright.” This postcard was sent in 1923, and the message on the back is simple and mysterious. The sender only wrote “From a friend” in cursive writing.
You don’t have to wait until Feb. 14 to search for love. Consider looking backward in history at some of the fun and enchanting Halloween rituals, and send a postcard to a friend or family member to celebrate the season.
Charlie Keohane ’24 (she/her) is an Editor at Large. She previously served as the SGA Correspondent and a Senior Writer.
She is an environmental writing major and a psychology minor from Northern California. Outside of academics, Charlie is a Senior Admissions Fellow at the Middlebury Admissions Office. She also is involved with the women’s track team and hosts Witching Hour, a radio show on 91.1 WRMC. In Spring 2023, she studied abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, watching Greta Gerwig movies, polar plunging, sending snail mail, and FaceTiming her rescue dog, Poppy.
