45 Halloween Trivia Questions and Answers, From Candy to Curses

Yes, it's July. Bookmark this anyway. Every year the same thing happens: it's October 29th, you've agreed to run the office Halloween quiz, and you're frantically googling questions with a bag of candy corn on your desk. Save yourself the panic.

Here are 45 Halloween trivia questions and answers covering the real history, the candy, the monsters, and the movies, arranged so you can run them as five rounds or just cherry-pick. Two of these have answers that got updated recently, so you'll be right when the internet is wrong.

Origins and history

1. Halloween grew out of which ancient Celtic festival?
Answer: Samhain, which marked the end of harvest and the start of winter. It's pronounced closer to SOW-in than anything you'd guess from the spelling.

2. Where does the name Halloween come from?
Answer: All Hallows' Eve, the night before All Hallows' Day (All Saints' Day) on November 1.

3. Which country is usually credited as the birthplace of Halloween?
Answer: Ireland.

4. Before pumpkins, what did people hollow out to make lanterns?
Answer: Turnips, mostly, along with beets and potatoes in Ireland and Scotland. A carved turnip is genuinely more unsettling than a pumpkin.

5. So why did pumpkins take over?
Answer: Irish and Scottish immigrants found them everywhere in North America, and they're far bigger and easier to carve.

6. What do Halloween's two traditional colors represent?
Answer: Orange for the autumn harvest, black for darkness and death.

7. In what year did the phrase trick or treat first appear in print?
Answer: 1927, in a newspaper in Alberta, Canada.

8. The Salem witch trials happened in which year and which colony?
Answer: 1692, in Massachusetts.

9. Which Mexican holiday falls on November 1 and 2 and gets mistaken for Halloween?
Answer: Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Different roots, different tone. It's a celebration of the dead, not a scare.

10. Which US holiday beats Halloween in consumer spending?
Answer: Christmas. Halloween usually sits second among American commercial holidays.

Candy, pumpkins, and traditions

11. What is the best-selling Halloween candy in the United States?
Answer: Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, which have held the top spot for more than a decade.

12. Candy corn was originally sold under what name?
Answer: Chicken Feed. It launched in the 1880s, back when most people still lived near actual chickens.

13. What's the party game where you grab floating apples using only your teeth?
Answer: Bobbing for apples.

14. Botanically speaking, is a pumpkin a fruit or a vegetable?
Answer: A fruit. It's technically a berry, in a category called a pepo.

15. How much did the heaviest pumpkin ever grown weigh?
Answer: About 2,819 pounds, grown by twin brothers Ian and Stuart Paton in England in 2025. Most Halloween lists still quote the old 2,749-pound record, so this is a good one to win with.

16. What are pumpkin seeds called?
Answer: Pepitas.

17. What is the fear of Halloween called?
Answer: Samhainophobia.

18. What were soul cakes?
Answer: Small spiced cakes handed out around All Souls' Day, given in exchange for prayers for the dead.

19. What was the old practice of going door to door for those cakes called?
Answer: Souling. In Scotland the costumed version was called guising, and that's the more direct ancestor of trick or treating.

Monsters and myths

20. Who wrote Dracula, and in what year?
Answer: Bram Stoker, in 1897.

21. Who wrote Frankenstein, and how old was she?
Answer: Mary Shelley. She was 18 when she started it and 20 when it was published in 1818.

22. In the novel, who exactly is Frankenstein?
Answer: Victor Frankenstein, the scientist. The creature never gets a name, which is the whole point and also the most-corrected mistake in trivia history.

23. Transylvania is a region of which country?
Answer: Romania.

24. What do you call a group of witches?
Answer: A coven.

25. Bats are the only mammals capable of what?
Answer: True flight. Flying squirrels are gliding, not flying.

26. What is a baby bat called?
Answer: A pup.

27. What is a group of ravens called?
Answer: An unkindness. A group of crows is a murder, which is somehow worse.

28. Zombie folklore traces back to which country's traditions?
Answer: Haiti, through Haitian Vodou.

Horror movies

29. Michael Myers's mask in Halloween (1978) was originally a mask of which actor?
Answer: William Shatner, as Captain Kirk. The crew bought it cheap and painted it white.

30. What was the first horror film nominated for Best Picture?
Answer: The Exorcist, in 1973. It picked up ten nominations in total and lost the big one to The Sting.

31. Which horror film is the only one to actually win Best Picture?
Answer: The Silence of the Lambs, in 1991.

32. Who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas?
Answer: Henry Selick. Tim Burton came up with the story and produced it, which is why almost everyone gets this wrong.

33. Who directed Halloween (1978) and also wrote its theme?
Answer: John Carpenter. He wrote the score himself because the budget was tiny.

34. What did the crew nickname the mechanical shark in Jaws?
Answer: Bruce.

35. Which Alfred Hitchcock film gave us the Bates Motel?
Answer: Psycho, from 1960.

36. Which 1999 film was marketed as real recovered footage?
Answer: The Blair Witch Project. Plenty of people walked out convinced it was real.

37. In The Shining, what sentence does Jack type over and over?
Answer: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Hard round

38. Halloween 2020 had a full moon. When is the next one?
Answer: 2039. A full moon lands on October 31 only about once every 18 or 19 years, which is why the classic Halloween image is almost always wrong.

39. Who wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and what is the schoolteacher's name?
Answer: Washington Irving, in 1820. The teacher is Ichabod Crane.

40. Which single word does the raven repeat in Edgar Allan Poe's poem?
Answer: Nevermore. The poem was published in 1845.

41. Which Halloween novelty song went to No. 1 in 1962?
Answer: Monster Mash, by Bobby Boris Pickett.

42. Vlad the Impaler ruled which region?
Answer: Wallachia, in what's now southern Romania. Stoker borrowed the name Dracula and very little else.

43. Where does the term jack-o'-lantern come from?
Answer: An Irish folk tale about Stingy Jack, who tricked the devil and ended up wandering the earth with a hollowed-out lantern.

44. Which plant is traditionally said to ward off werewolves?
Answer: Wolfsbane.

45. Which country lights bonfires for Guy Fawkes Night five days after Halloween?
Answer: England, on November 5.

How to actually run these

Five rounds of nine works cleanly if you keep the hard round last. Read each question twice, collect answers on paper between rounds, and do not let people check their phones, which is the single rule that decides whether a Halloween quiz is fun or pointless. If you want the full setup, we wrote a guide to hosting a trivia night at home and a longer list of trivia night theme ideas.

For more sets, try our movie trivia questions (which pair well with the horror round), music trivia, or a straight general knowledge set. Kids at the party? Here's an age-sorted version. And if you want to know why some of these facts are so widely repeated wrong, we covered the facts everyone gets wrong at trivia night.

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