Old Time Halloween Games for Finding a Lover

Halloween is, of course, filled with bats, spiders and ghosts but it’s also filled with opportunity to find love. Most Halloween parties, of the more turn-of-the-century variety, were simply excuses for men to touch women’s arms or for women to fondle a man’s mustache, how profane. These aspects of the Halloween season have been mostly forgotten, cast aside for plastic skulls and styrofoam gravestone but “no more”, I say. Let Halloween be returned to the lovers …or those who are destined to walk the dark roads of loneliness for eternity.

Let the games begin

• It is said that before you go to bed you should dampen the sleeve of a shirt and hang it to dry before a fire. Lie in bed and carefully watch the shirt until midnight. As the witching hour passes the apparition of your future husband, or wife, will appear and turn the sleeve.

• You may glimpse your future husband, or wife, by going to bed in silence, and remain silent, until the stroke of Midnight. At that time you are to rise and stand before a mirror, eat and apple and comb your hair. You should see your future spouse peering over your shoulder. If you do not you are destined to live alone.

• Take three tea cups, one filled with clean water, one cold tea and one is to remain empty. A person is blindfolded and the cups are moved about and rearranged by a friend. The blindfolded person moves their finger above the cups and then dips their finger into one of the cups. If the person chooses the clean water they will be married, happily and forever. But, if they chose the cold tea they will be married… yet it will be unhappily. If they go for the empty cup they will remain single.

• If a person desires whether to know if the one they love will love them back it can be determined with two apple seeds. You must eat an apple, to the core, and then pluck out two apple seeds. One seed should, represent “Yes, true love” the other seed should represent “No, love unreturned”. One seed should then be stuck on each cheek and the person should say:

“Pippin, pippin, I stick thee there, That which is true thou mayst declare”

The seed that stays attached to the cheek the longest is the correct answer.

• You are to write each letter of the alphabet on individual slips of paper, one letter on each slip. Take all twenty-six slips and turn them over, face down in a pan of water. Then, walk backwards to bed and go to sleep in silence. The next morning some of the letters in the pan will be found face up and the name of your true love revealed.

Now, that you know the tricks get out there and get some treats. Whoo Hooo.