Masks and Disguises: Spirits, Guisers, and the Birth of Costume

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Masks and Disguises: Spirits, Guisers, and the Haunted Face of Halloween

Every October, as the wind sharpens and twilight lingers, masks return to our streets. We think of them as playful—painted faces, store-bought disguises—but their roots run deep into older fears. For centuries, to put on another face at Samhain was not a game. It was protection.

1. The Night the Dead Walked

Across the Celtic world, Samhain marked the turning of the year’s light into darkness. On that night, the dead were said to rise and walk the earth, mingling with the living. Spirits, fair folk, and wandering souls moved unseen through villages, drawn by hearth light and offerings of food. To survive their gaze, the living turned to disguise. A mask was more than costume—it was camouflage.1

Old Irish tales warn of travelers who ventured out unmasked and never returned, “taken” by the sidhe for their beauty or their defiance. But those who covered their faces might walk safely among the dead, mistaken for one of their own. The disguise was both shield and spell.

2. False Faces and Firelight

By the Middle Ages, this ritual of disguise had grown into custom. In Scotland and Ireland, young people went “guising,” donning false faces and roaming the lanes on All Hallows’ Eve. They carried hollowed turnip lanterns to light their way and ward off spirits. In Ayr, Scotland, boys were recorded in the 19th century with “bits of turnip lanthrons in their hand, and false faces upon them,” haunting the dark like miniature specters.2

These disguises were not meant to celebrate death but to survive it. If a ghost or wandering soul came calling, the mask confused it. A familiar spirit might pass by its own reflection and move on. The living blurred themselves into the company of the dead.

3. The Mask as Spell

In the dim countryside, it was whispered that some masks could draw spirits as well as deflect them. A carved visage, painted with ash or ochre, was thought to house echoes of the departed. In certain Irish parishes, masked mummers were banned from entering churchyards lest the spirits mistake the human face beneath for a vessel to possess.3

Elsewhere, in the Highlands, tales spoke of those who removed their masks before midnight and fell ill—or worse, were found wandering days later, claiming the face they wore had followed them home. A charm recorded in the 17th century instructed: “Burn the guise before cockcrow, lest its eyes remember thee.”4

4. The Church’s Uneasy Watch

Ecclesiastical writers of the Middle Ages frowned upon these disguises, calling them “devilish mummery.” They warned that masked processions blurred the line between the faithful and the demonic. Some clerics believed that spirits attended the guisers’ revels, drawn by imitation. One 15th-century sermon from York accused such revelers of “wearing the Devil’s own likeness that he might not know his prey.”5

And yet, the Church’s own feast—All Hallows’—existed to remember the dead. The same bells that tolled for souls in purgatory echoed through nights filled with masked wanderers. Fire, sound, and disguise worked together as ancient defenses against the unseen.

5. When the Mask Becomes the Spirit

Folklore tells of masks that grew too convincing. In a late Irish tale, a young man who mocked the dead by dressing in shrouds at Samhain found his mask could not be removed. His mother washed his face with milk and holy water, but it clung until dawn—when it slipped away, leaving him white-haired and silent ever after.6

Such stories reflect a primal fear: that in pretending to be a spirit, one might become one. The mask, once meant to hide the soul, could open it.

6. A World of Masks

Even beyond Ireland’s borders, masks were believed to repel the supernatural. In China, the fangxiangshi wore bear masks with “four golden eyes” to banish ghosts during funeral rites.7 In Micronesia, the Devil Mask of Chuuk was set at thresholds to frighten wandering spirits away.8 Though worlds apart, these rites share the same instinct: that a face of power might stand between the living and the unseen.

7. The Face We Still Wear

When we dress for Halloween today, we echo that older fear—half in jest, half in memory. Behind every painted smile or skull mask lingers the whisper of a time when disguises were spells, and faces were fragile things. The living hid among the dead, praying to pass unnoticed until dawn. And though we tell ourselves it’s all in fun, perhaps a part of us still knows why we mask at all.

Each cake eaten was said to release a soul from purgatory.1

Footnotes

  1. Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 369. ↩︎ Back
  2. “Halloween,” Notes and Queries, 7th Series, Vol. X (1890), p. 463. ↩︎ Back
  3. John Brand, Observations on Popular Antiquities (1777), p. 240. ↩︎ Back
  4. Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica (1900), Vol. II, p. 87. ↩︎ Back
  5. York Minster Sermon MS 243, “De Festis Sanctorum,” c. 1450. ↩︎ Back
  6. Patrick Kennedy, Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts (1866), p. 212. ↩︎ Back
  7. “Fangxiangshi,” Encyclopedia of Ancient China (Cambridge University Press, 2017). ↩︎ Back
  8. “The Devil Mask Tepwanu of Chuuk,” Moon Mausoleum (2023). ↩︎ Back

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