At the turn of the 20th century, Halloween and the picture postcard found each other, and what a spooky courtship ensued.
The era from about 1905 to 1915 is often called the postcards’ “golden age,” and during that decade, Americans mailed some 900 million cards each year.
By that time, Halloween was collecting rituals and symbols such as black cats, witches’ brooms, and jack-o’-lanterns, and artists were busy projecting this iconography across glossy postcards.
Historian Lisa Morton estimates that around 3,000 distinct Halloween designs were produced in that period alone.
Flipping through these century-old cards is an uncanny experience. These were meant to travel, to be held in another hand, delivered to someone else, but now they hover in our screens instead.
Some of the rituals once common on these cards, like apple-bobbing or scrying with mirrors, have largely vanished from modern Halloween lore.
On the cards themselves: pumpkins marching in high heels (sometimes built from turnips), cats bursting from jack-o’-lanterns clutching sealed letters, and solemn witches riding broomsticks across the moonlit sky.
Images via publicdomainreview.org
