How to Print This Sheet and Run It
Print one question sheet per team rather than one per person. It halves the paper and, more usefully, forces four people to confer instead of writing down four different answers. Keep a single key for yourself. If print preview breaks a round across two pages, set margins to minimum or scale to about 90 per cent. For a room with older eyes, go the other way: 150 per cent, one round per sheet. Nothing here depends on a picture.
Teams of four are the sweet spot; above six, half the table stops contributing. A round of ten takes about ten minutes on a handed-out sheet, or seven if you read aloud, twice through each question with twenty seconds after it. Score one point each, no half points, no marks for spelling, and have teams pass sheets one place to the left so nobody marks their own. Read the answers out between rounds rather than at the end.
Round 1: Halloween Warm-Up
Open with this round while people are still finding seats and filling in team names. Every question here is answerable by most adults, which matters on a printed sheet: a team that scores two out of nine in the first ten minutes usually stops writing. If you are running this for a mixed-age room, this is also the round to read aloud rather than hand out, so latecomers can join mid-question.
Several of the nine do more work than they look. Guising separates the older custom from trick-or-treating: it required a performance, a song or a poem or a joke, before anything was handed over. The UNICEF collection was started by Mary Emma Allison in Philadelphia at Halloween 1950 and raised seventeen dollars in its first year. Anoka's title is the town's own motto, resting on one of the first Halloween parades in 1920.
Q1.On what date is Halloween celebrated each year?Tap to reveal
Answer: 31 October
Q2.Halloween grew out of which ancient Celtic festival marking the end of harvest?Tap to reveal
Answer: Samhain
Q3.The word "Halloween" is a contraction of what older name for the night?Tap to reveal
Answer: All Hallows' Eve
Q4.Which Christian feast day falls on 1 November, the day after Halloween?Tap to reveal
Answer: All Saints' Day
Q5.What is the collective noun for a group of witches?Tap to reveal
Answer: A coven
Q6.In the older Scottish and Irish custom, costumed children had to perform a song, poem or joke before receiving a treat. What is that custom called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Guising
Q7.Which children's charity has run a Halloween coin-collection drive for trick-or-treaters since 1950?Tap to reveal
Answer: UNICEF
Q8.What is the collective noun for a group of crows?Tap to reveal
Answer: A murder
Q9.Which city in Minnesota bills itself as the Halloween Capital of the World, having held one of the first Halloween parades in 1920?Tap to reveal
Answer: Anoka
Round 2: Pumpkins and Jack-o'-Lanterns
This round splits neatly into folklore and botany, and the split is deliberate: the first half rewards people who know the Irish origin story, the second rewards gardeners and science teachers. Questions 4 and 5 are the hardest on the sheet after the date question that closes the round, so if you are scoring, consider making them worth double.
Two answers want a sentence of context. Illinois is not a close-run thing: the state grows roughly forty per cent of all the pumpkins raised in the United States, and its share of the crop grown for processing is put at about ninety-five per cent. The Stingy Jack question is asked in the conventional form because that is the form every quiz uses. It and the date question both want a word of explanation when you read the answers out, and the section on contested claims below supplies it.
Q1.Before pumpkins were used, which vegetable was hollowed out and carved for lanterns in Ireland and Scotland?Tap to reveal
Answer: The turnip
Q2.Besides the turnip, which large root vegetable was also carved into lanterns in 19th-century Britain and Ireland?Tap to reveal
Answer: The mangel wurzel (a type of beet)
Q3.The jack-o'-lantern takes its name from an Irish folk tale about a man denied entry to both Heaven and Hell. What is he known as?Tap to reveal
Answer: Stingy Jack
But the premise is folk etymology, not fact: "jack-o'-lantern" is attested in English from the 1660s meaning a night watchman with a lantern, and then the ignis fatuus / will-o'-the-wisp. The Stingy Jack legend is the later folk explanation attached to the name, not its documented source. Reword as "which folk-tale character is the jack-o'-lantern popularly named after?"
Q4.Botanists classify the pumpkin as a specific type of berry. What is it called?Tap to reveal
Answer: A pepo
Q5.Pumpkins belong to the same plant family as cucumbers, melons and squash. What is that family commonly called?Tap to reveal
Answer: The gourd family (Cucurbitaceae)
Q6.Which US state grows more pumpkins than any other, producing roughly 40% of the national crop?Tap to reveal
Answer: Illinois
Q7.Hulled, roasted pumpkin seeds are sold under what Spanish-derived name?Tap to reveal
Answer: Pepitas
Q8.The beta-carotene that gives pumpkin flesh its orange colour is converted by the body into which vitamin?Tap to reveal
Answer: Vitamin A
Q9.In which decade was the term "jack-o'-lantern" first recorded in American English as the name for a carved pumpkin?Tap to reveal
Answer: The 1830s (1837)
Round 3: The Candy Bowl
Candy history is where confidently wrong answers live, so every date and name in this round is drawn from the manufacturers' own documented histories rather than party-blog folklore. It is the strongest round for an office party because almost everyone has an opinion about candy corn, and the arguing is half the point. Put a bowl of the actual sweets on the table and the guessing improves noticeably.
The candy corn questions carry one honest caveat. George Renninger of the Wunderle Candy Company is the name attached to the invention in the 1880s, and Chicken Feed is the name attached to it in every retelling, but the documentary evidence for that brand belongs to the Goelitz Confectionery Company from 1898 onwards. Accept Chicken Feed; if a team asks where the name is actually recorded, the answer is Goelitz. Kit Kat is the other one people argue about: Rowntree's launched it in September 1935 as Chocolate Crisp and renamed it Kit Kat Chocolate Crisp in 1937.
Q1.What are the three colours of a classic piece of candy corn, from the wide end to the tip?Tap to reveal
Answer: Yellow, orange and white
Q2.When candy corn first went on sale in the late 1880s, what was it called?Tap to reveal
Answer: "Chicken Feed"
But the date in the question is wrong. The only documented "Chicken Feed" branding (rooster box, slogan "Something worth crowing for") belongs to the Goelitz Confectionery Company from 1898 onward. The late-1880s original by George Renninger of Wunderle is not attested under that name; the 1880s attribution is repeated candy-industry lore. Ask instead: "Under what brand name did Goelitz sell candy corn from 1898?"
Q3.The Goelitz Confectionery Company began making candy corn in 1898. By what name is that company known today?Tap to reveal
Answer: Jelly Belly
Q4.Snickers, launched in 1930, was named after what?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Mars family's favourite horse
Q5.Which former dairy farmer created the peanut butter cup in 1928 and gave it his surname?Tap to reveal
Answer: H. B. Reese
Q6.Before starting his own candy business, H. B. Reese worked for which famous chocolate maker?Tap to reveal
Answer: Milton Hershey
Q7.The two Ms in M&M's stand for the surnames of the two men behind the company. What are they?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mars and Murrie
Q8.Which German confectionery company's name is built from its founder Hans Riegel's name and his home city of Bonn?Tap to reveal
Answer: Haribo
Q9.Launched by Rowntree's in 1935, which four-fingered bar was originally sold as "Chocolate Crisp"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Kit Kat
Q10.Tootsie Rolls are named after the childhood nickname of whose daughter?Tap to reveal
Answer: The inventor's
Leo Hirshfield's daughter Clara
Round 4: Screen and Soundtrack
Eleven questions covering the films that show up on almost every Halloween watchlist, plus the two pieces of music that get played to death every October. The spread runs from 1962 to 1993 on purpose, so a room with a wide age range has something for everyone. This is the round most likely to spark a rewatch, so it is worth pointing teams at our [Halloween movie trivia](/trivia/halloween-movie-trivia/) questions afterwards.
The 1978 Halloween questions have good context behind them. The film was shot in about twenty days on a budget of roughly three hundred thousand dollars and took around seventy million, and the mask was a shop-bought Captain Kirk mask moulded from William Shatner's face, modified by production designer Tommy Lee Wallace. Monster Mash was number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for the chart weeks of 20 and 27 October 1962, and the BBC refused to play it that year as too morbid. Hocus Pocus opened in July 1993 against Jurassic Park, lost money in cinemas, and became a fixture only through years of October television repeats.
Q1.Who directed the 1978 slasher film Halloween?Tap to reveal
Answer: John Carpenter
Q2.Michael Myers's mask in the 1978 film was a modified store-bought mask of which actor, playing Captain Kirk?Tap to reveal
Answer: William Shatner
Q3.Which actress played Laurie Strode in the original Halloween?Tap to reveal
Answer: Jamie Lee Curtis
Q4.Bette Midler played which of the three Sanderson sisters in Hocus Pocus (1993)?Tap to reveal
Answer: Winifred (Winnie) Sanderson
Q5.Tim Burton wrote the original poem, but who actually directed The Nightmare Before Christmas?Tap to reveal
Answer: Henry Selick
Q6.Jack Skellington rules Halloween Town under what nickname?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Pumpkin King
Q7.Who wrote the songs for The Nightmare Before Christmas and also provided Jack's singing voice?Tap to reveal
Answer: Danny Elfman
Q8.In Beetlejuice (1988), how many times must you say his name to summon him?Tap to reveal
Answer: Three
Q9.Which giant marshmallow mascot becomes the final monster in Ghostbusters (1984)?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man
Q10.Who recorded the 1962 novelty hit "Monster Mash", performing it as an impression of Boris Karloff?Tap to reveal
Answer: Bobby "Boris" Pickett
Q11.Which horror actor delivered the spoken-word section at the end of Michael Jackson's "Thriller"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Vincent Price
Round 5: Ghost Stories and Old Traditions
A closing round drawn from books and from the traditions Halloween sits alongside, which makes it the least Americanised set on the sheet and the best one for a classroom. The two Día de los Muertos questions are there because the holidays get conflated constantly and a trivia sheet is a painless place to correct it. Keep this round for last: it produces the longest tiebreak arguments.
The Sleepy Hollow pair repays extra reading. Irving published the story in 1820 under the pen name Geoffrey Crayon, in The Sketch Book, and within the tale the Headless Horseman is a Hessian trooper who lost his head to a cannonball in the Revolutionary War. The story then undercuts its own ghost: the smashed pumpkin found next morning, and Brom Bones's amusement whenever the tale is retold, point at a staged prank. Salem asks only for the year the trials began, 1692, since they ran on into 1693.
Q1.Who wrote the 1897 novel Dracula?Tap to reveal
Answer: Bram Stoker
Q2.Which author wrote Frankenstein, published in 1818?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mary Shelley
Q3.What is the first name of the scientist in Frankenstein — the man, not the monster?Tap to reveal
Answer: Victor
Q4.In which year did the Salem witch trials begin in Massachusetts?Tap to reveal
Answer: 1692
Q5.Who wrote "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", published in 1820?Tap to reveal
Answer: Washington Irving
Q6.In that story, the Headless Horseman is said to be the ghost of a soldier from which war?Tap to reveal
Answer: The American Revolutionary War
Q7.What single word does the bird repeat in Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Nevermore
Q8.What is the name of the home altar built for Día de los Muertos, holding photos and the favourite foods of the dead?Tap to reveal
Answer: An ofrenda
Q9.Which bright orange flower, known in Spanish as cempasúchil, is used to guide spirits home during Día de los Muertos?Tap to reveal
Answer: The marigold
Which Questions People Get Wrong, and What to Keep for a Tiebreak
The question most likely to be missed is in Round 4: who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas. Almost every room says Tim Burton, and the room is not being stupid. Burton wrote the original three-page poem in 1982 and produced the film, and Disney released it as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, a marketing decision that Henry Selick has said was taken about three weeks before wide release. Selick directed the film; Burton was committed to Batman Returns and the pre-production of Ed Wood. Read that out with the answer and a lost point becomes the best thirty seconds of the round.
After that the stumbles are predictable. Very few teams produce mangel wurzel, which is why it earns its place: nobody minds losing a point to a vegetable they have never heard of. Pepo and Cucurbitaceae separate the science teachers from everyone else. Plenty of teams know the three colours of candy corn and still get the order wrong. And the Frankenstein question tends to catch someone out.
For tiebreaks, use nearest-without-going-over on a number: it settles in fifteen seconds and needs no judgement from you. Two that appear nowhere on this sheet: the first Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF collection, at Halloween 1950, raised seventeen dollars, and Hocus Pocus took a little over fifty million dollars worldwide against a budget of about twenty-eight million.
Where the Popular Halloween Story Is Wrong
Round 1 asks which Celtic festival Halloween grew out of, and the answer is Samhain, as in every published quiz. The honest position is less tidy. Some scholars hold that Halloween customs were shaped by Gaelic harvest festivals and that Samhain was in effect Christianised into All Hallows' Day; others argue that Halloween began independently as a Christian observance, the vigil of All Hallows'. The date settles nothing either way. The Frankish Empire formally adopted 1 November for All Saints' Day in 835, and the influence behind that has been attributed both to Alcuin of Northumbria and to Irish clerics at Charlemagne's court; some read a Celtic origin into the date, others a Germanic one. What is not documented is the tidy story that the Church dropped All Saints' Day on top of Samhain to smother it.
The turnip-to-pumpkin story has the same problem. Hollowed turnips and mangel wurzels carved with faces are well attested in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands in the nineteenth century, and masqueraders carrying scooped-out turnip lanterns were recorded in Scotland at Halloween in 1895, but the trail does not run back into antiquity and the name came from elsewhere. The Oxford English Dictionary records jack-o'-lantern from 1658 for the ignis fatuus, the marsh light also called a will-o'-the-wisp, and from 1663 to 1704 for a man carrying a lantern or a night watchman. Its first recorded use for a lantern carved from a turnip or pumpkin is 1837. Stingy Jack is the folk explanation later attached to an existing name, not its documented source.
Trick-or-treating is younger than most people assume and has two ancestors rather than one. Souling, in which poor people and often children went door to door during Allhallowtide for soul cakes in exchange for prayers for the dead, is attested from at least the fifteenth century in England, Wales, Flanders, Bavaria and Austria. Guising, the Scottish and Irish custom, required a performance first. The North American practice appears in print late: a Kingston, Ontario newspaper reported children guising in 1911, and the earliest known printing of the phrase, in the variant form tricks or treats, is in the Sault Daily Star of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, in 1917. The first United States sighting yet found is in a Michigan newspaper in 1928, and the first use in a national publication comes in 1939.
Two more stories are worth knowing well enough to shut down between rounds. The first is poisoned sweets. The sociologist Joel Best went through newspaper reports from 1958 to 1983 and found no verified case of a stranger killing or seriously harming a child with contaminated Halloween treats; the deaths blamed on strangers did not survive investigation. Both cases usually cited were family: a boy in Detroit in 1970 died after getting into his uncle's heroin, and relatives invented the candy story to protect the uncle; and in Deer Park, Texas in 1974, Ronald Clark O'Bryan murdered his own son with cyanide for insurance money. The second story is that the Puritans banned Halloween. They did oppose it, along with Christmas and the rest of the established Church's calendar, but there was little to suppress: almanacs of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries give no sign that Halloween was widely celebrated in North America. It arrived with Irish and Scottish immigration in the nineteenth century.
Adapting the Sheet for a Classroom, an Office, a Family Table or a Small Room
For a classroom hour, Rounds 2 and 5 carry the most teaching. Round 2 runs straight into botany: the pumpkin is a berry called a pepo, its family is Cucurbitaceae alongside cucumbers, melons and squash, and the beta-carotene that makes the flesh orange is what the body converts into vitamin A. Round 5 does the same for literature, and for the habit of conflating Halloween with Día de los Muertos, which the ofrenda and cempasúchil questions correct.
An office party wants Round 3 and little else: twenty minutes at a desk, everyone with a position on candy corn, the arguing supplying most of the value. The line worth reading out at the end is that several answers lead back to one company. H. B. Reese worked for Milton Hershey before he made the first peanut butter cup in 1928, and the second M in M&M's is Bruce Murrie, son of Hershey's president, whose stake secured rationed chocolate during the war.
A family table works best with the generations mixed into the same team, because Round 4 spans 1962 to 1993 and the knowledge really is split: the grandparents have Monster Mash and Vincent Price, the teenagers have Hocus Pocus and Beetlejuice. With three or four people in total, drop teams entirely, read aloud, and keep one tally of how many the table got. If the room is loud and several drinks in, cut to Rounds 1 and 4, read each question twice, announce answers immediately, and abandon written sheets. For younger players use our [Halloween trivia for kids](/trivia/halloween-trivia-for-kids/) set, for a full pub evening the [five-round Halloween quiz night](/trivia/halloween-quiz-night-rounds/), and for the background behind these answers our [Halloween history trivia](/trivia/halloween-history-trivia/) page.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I print the questions without the answers showing?
The answer key sits in a separate block at the end of this page rather than under each question, so the rounds print as a clean question sheet and the key comes out on its own. Print one sheet per team and keep a single key for yourself.
How many rounds do I need for a one-hour party?
Three rounds of nine to eleven questions fills an hour with teams of four: about ten minutes of play per round, plus a few minutes to swap sheets and mark. All five runs ninety to a hundred minutes. If you are short on time, cut Round 2 rather than shortening every round, because half-rounds make scoring awkward.
Are these suitable for a senior centre or a care home?
Rounds 3, 4 and 5 are the best fit: the candy, film and book questions all stop in the early 1990s, so they reward long memories rather than recent pop culture, and Round 4 spans 1962 to 1993. For large print, use 150 per cent with one round per sheet; no question depends on an image.
Can I use these at a school, church or workplace event?
Yes, print and hand them out freely for classroom, party or fundraiser use. Every answer is a checkable fact rather than a matter of opinion, which matters if someone challenges a result. For a school group, Rounds 2 and 5 carry the most curriculum. If you want a second set for the same crowd, our general 50-question Halloween page uses a different question pool with no overlap.
What do I do if someone challenges an answer?
Read the key, give the point and move on. Every answer is a name, a date, a number or a single word, chosen so a dispute can be settled rather than argued. The likeliest challenges are the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas, which is Henry Selick and not Tim Burton, and anything touching Halloween's origins, where the popular version really is contested by historians. The section on contested claims above covers both.
