Quick answer: A hundred Halloween trivia questions with answers, sorted into twelve rounds: where the night came from, pumpkins, horror films, monsters and myths, Halloween around the world, the science of a fright, and a hard round to finish. Highlights below include the mask that was really Captain Kirk, the vegetable that came before the pumpkin, and the fact that nobody was burned at Salem.
For the other eleven months, trivia questions by category holds sixty questions across ten categories, plus a hundred on history and fifty each on movies and the nineties.
Most Halloween quizzes recycle the same eight questions. These do not. Each round moves from easy to hard, so you can cut it wherever your crowd starts groaning.
Good for a party, a classroom, or an October round at a pub quiz. If you want a general round instead of a themed one, the 500-question pub quiz covers ten categories. And if you want a gentler warm-up before the spooky round, start with 50 easy trivia questions.
Prefer to play rather than read? The interactive version below draws twenty questions from a bank of sixty, tells you which round you were weakest in, and explains every answer as you go. It is the same material in a different shape, and it lives on our Halloween 2026 page.
The written round starts below. If you would rather know where all of this came from first, we have the history of Halloween, the shorter question of why we celebrate Halloween, and 50 Halloween facts with the sources attached.
Round one: where Halloween came from
1. Which ancient festival is Halloween descended from?
Samhain, the Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest and the start of winter. It is pronounced SAH-win, not sam-hain.
2. What does the word Halloween actually mean?
It is a contraction of All Hallows' Eve, the night before All Hallows' Day. Hallow is an old word for saint.
3. What date is All Saints' Day?
1 November. Pope Gregory III moved it there in the eighth century, which is how 31 October became its eve.
4. When did Samhain begin?
At sunset. In the Gaelic calendar the day started in the evening, so the festival ran from the evening of 31 October into 1 November.
5. Which two countries carried Halloween to North America?
Ireland and Scotland, through mass emigration in the nineteenth century.
6. What medieval custom is trick-or-treating descended from?
Souling. The poor went door to door on All Souls' Day offering prayers for the dead in exchange for small cakes.
7. What were those cakes called?
Soul cakes.
8. What is the Scottish tradition of dressing up and going door to door called?
Guising. Unlike modern trick-or-treating, you had to earn the treat with a song, a poem or a joke.
9. Where and when does the phrase trick or treat first appear in print?
Blackie, Alberta, in 1927, in a Canadian newspaper. The custom is North American, not Irish.
10. What is the fear of Halloween called?
Samhainophobia.
Round two: pumpkins and jack-o'-lanterns
11. What were the first jack-o'-lanterns carved from?
Turnips. Also beets and potatoes. The pumpkin only took over in America, where it was native, larger and far easier to hollow out.
12. Who is the jack in jack-o'-lantern?
Stingy Jack, an Irish folk figure who tricked the devil twice and was refused entry to both heaven and hell. He wanders the earth with an ember inside a carved turnip.
13. Is a pumpkin a fruit or a vegetable?
A fruit. Botanically it is a berry, of the type called a pepo.
14. Which US state grows the most pumpkins?
Illinois, by a wide margin, and most of them end up in tins rather than on doorsteps.
15. Roughly how heavy is the world's heaviest recorded pumpkin?
Over 2,700 pounds, which is more than 1,200 kilograms. The record has been broken repeatedly since 2010.
16. Which cultivar do nearly all giant competition pumpkins descend from?
Atlantic Giant, bred by Howard Dill in Nova Scotia.
17. What is the stringy inside of a pumpkin properly called?
The pulp, though growers usually just call it guts.
18. Which part of the pumpkin plant is also edible and often wasted?
The seeds, the flowers and the young leaves. The flowers are a staple in Mexican and Italian cooking.
Round three: horror films
19. Whose face is the mask in Halloween (1978)?
William Shatner's. The crew bought a Captain Kirk mask, widened the eye holes, teased the hair and painted it white. It cost under two dollars.
20. Who directed and scored Halloween (1978)?
John Carpenter did both. He wrote the theme in a few days, in 5/4 time.
21. Roughly what was Halloween's budget?
About 300,000 dollars. It became one of the most profitable independent films ever made.
22. Who is the killer in the first Friday the 13th?
Pamela Voorhees, Jason's mother. Jason himself does not wear the hockey mask until Part III.
23. Who plays Freddy Krueger?
Robert Englund, in Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).
24. What was used for blood in Psycho's shower scene?
Bosco chocolate syrup. The film is black and white, so it read perfectly on camera.
25. Who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas?
Henry Selick. Tim Burton wrote the story and produced it, and his name on the title has been confusing people ever since.
26. Which Stephen King novel did Stanley Kubrick adapt in 1980?
The Shining. King has never hidden his dislike of the result.
27. What are the three sisters called in Hocus Pocus?
The Sanderson sisters: Winifred, Sarah and Mary.
28. Which 1999 film was marketed as real recovered footage?
The Blair Witch Project. The cast were listed as missing or deceased on early film databases as part of the campaign.
29. Who directed Michael Jackson's Thriller video?
John Landis, who had made An American Werewolf in London two years earlier.
30. Who provides the spoken section at the end of Thriller?
Vincent Price.
Round four: books and monsters
31. Who wrote Frankenstein, and in what year?
Mary Shelley, published anonymously in 1818. She had begun it at eighteen.
32. What is the monster's name in Frankenstein?
It does not have one. Frankenstein is Victor, the scientist. The creature is called the creature, the daemon or the wretch.
33. Who wrote Dracula?
Bram Stoker, in 1897.
34. Which historical ruler is often linked to Dracula?
Vlad III of Wallachia, known as Vlad the Impaler. How much Stoker actually drew from him is still argued over.
35. Which Edgar Allan Poe poem repeats a single word?
The Raven (1845). The word is nevermore.
36. Who wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow?
Washington Irving, in 1820.
37. What is the schoolteacher called in Sleepy Hollow?
Ichabod Crane.
38. What is a group of witches called, and how many are traditionally in one?
A coven, traditionally thirteen.
Round five: superstitions and animals
39. In Britain and Japan, what does a black cat crossing your path mean?
Good luck. The bad-luck version is largely American and continental European, which makes this a reliable table-splitter.
40. What makes bats unique among mammals?
They are the only ones capable of true powered flight. Flying squirrels glide.
41. Do vampire bats exist?
Yes. Three species, all in Latin America, and only one feeds mainly on mammals.
42. What is the traditional witching hour?
Midnight to three in the morning.
43. How many people were burned at the stake in the Salem witch trials?
None. Nineteen were hanged and one, Giles Corey, was crushed to death under stones. Burning was a European practice.
44. In what year were the Salem trials held?
1692.
Round six: sweets, records and odd corners
45. What was candy corn originally called?
Chicken Feed. It was invented in the 1880s and sold in boxes with a rooster on them.
46. What are the three colours of a candy corn kernel?
Yellow at the base, orange in the middle, white at the tip.
47. What Irish Halloween bread has a ring baked into it?
Barmbrack. Whoever finds the ring is said to marry within the year.
48. What is the Mexican festival of the dead called, and when is it?
Día de los Muertos, 1 and 2 November. It is a celebration of the dead rather than a fright night, and the marigolds are said to guide the spirits home.
49. When was the last full moon on Halloween, and when is the next?
2020, and 2039. They arrive roughly every nineteen years, on the Metonic cycle.
50. Which commercial holiday is bigger in the United States than Halloween?
Christmas, and only Christmas. Halloween is consistently ranked second.
Round seven: Halloween around the world
51. What are the three days of Allhallowtide?
All Hallows' Eve on 31 October, All Saints' Day on 1 November and All Souls' Day on 2 November. Halloween is only the opening night.
52. Which Protestant holiday shares 31 October with Halloween?
Reformation Day. It marks the date in 1517 when Martin Luther is said to have nailed his 95 Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, and it is a public holiday in much of eastern and northern Germany.
53. What are the decorated sugar skulls of Día de los Muertos called?
Calaveras. They often carry the name of the person being remembered, written across the forehead in icing.
54. What is the cut-paper bunting that hangs over Day of the Dead altars?
Papel picado: tissue paper punched into lace-like patterns, strung in bright rows.
55. Which city in Northern Ireland bills its Halloween festival as the biggest in Europe?
Derry, also called Londonderry. The festival runs for several days and ends in fireworks over the River Foyle.
56. Which New York neighbourhood has hosted a Halloween parade since 1973?
Greenwich Village. It began as a puppeteer walking his children around the block and now draws tens of thousands of costumed marchers.
57. What is the Isle of Man's own Halloween called?
Hop-tu-Naa. Children carry carved turnips and sing a traditional song door to door on 31 October.
58. What is the Welsh name for the first day of winter, the cousin of Samhain?
Calan Gaeaf, on 1 November. The night before, Nos Calan Gaeaf, was a spirit night when sensible people stayed indoors.
Round eight: sweets, games and Charlie Brown
59. Which chocolate bar was named after a horse?
Snickers, named in 1930 after a favourite horse of the Mars family.
60. Which sweets first went on sale in 1941 and were shipped to American soldiers because the shell kept them from melting?
M&M's.
61. What slowed trick-or-treating in the United States during the Second World War?
Sugar rationing, which ran from 1942 to 1947. The custom took off properly in the boom years that followed.
62. What is the difference between a candy apple and a caramel apple?
A candy apple has a hard, glassy coat of cooked sugar, usually dyed red. A caramel apple is dipped in soft caramel.
63. What do the Scots call apple bobbing?
Dooking for apples. Ducking is the older English word for the same wet game.
64. Orange and black: what are the two colours traditionally said to stand for?
Orange for the harvest and autumn, black for darkness and death.
65. In the 1966 Peanuts special, who waits all night in the pumpkin patch?
Linus, waiting for the Great Pumpkin. Sally waits with him and misses trick-or-treating.
66. What does Charlie Brown get at every house?
A rock. "I got a rock" is one of the most quoted lines in any Halloween special.
67. Which famous escape artist died on Halloween 1926?
Harry Houdini, of peritonitis after a ruptured appendix.
68. What has been held in his honour on Halloween ever since?
A séance. His widow Bess held one every Halloween for ten years, trying to reach him with a code they had agreed in advance. He never answered, and fans still hold one every year.
Round nine: more horror films
69. What is the name of the clown in Stephen King's It?
Pennywise, the Dancing Clown.
70. Which 1982 film made "They're here" a catchphrase?
Poltergeist. The line is spoken by a small girl talking to a television.
71. What is the hotel called in The Shining?
The Overlook.
72. What is the name of the possessed girl in The Exorcist?
Regan MacNeil.
73. Which 1974 film introduced Leatherface?
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It was sold as a true story, and it was not.
74. What is the killer doll in Child's Play called?
Chucky. In the story he is the soul of a strangler named Charles Lee Ray.
75. Which 2017 horror film won Jordan Peele the Oscar for best original screenplay?
Get Out.
76. What does Ghostface ask his victims on the phone in Scream?
"What's your favourite scary movie?"
77. Which star of Halloween (1978) was the daughter of the woman killed in Psycho's shower scene?
Jamie Lee Curtis, daughter of Janet Leigh.
Round ten: monsters, myths and words
78. Which kitchen ingredient keeps vampires away in folklore?
Garlic.
79. What metal kills a werewolf in most modern stories?
Silver, usually in the form of a silver bullet.
80. What is a group of crows called?
A murder.
81. Which Irish spirit wails to warn that someone is about to die?
The banshee, from the Irish bean sí, woman of the fairy mound.
82. Who had snakes for hair in Greek myth?
Medusa. One look at her face turned you to stone.
83. What is lycanthropy?
Turning into a wolf, the condition of the werewolf. The word comes from the Greek for wolf and human.
84. What is a golem?
A figure shaped from clay and brought to life, from Jewish folklore. The most famous one guarded the Jews of Prague.
85. Which 1968 film by George A. Romero created the modern zombie?
Night of the Living Dead. Strangely, the word zombie is never spoken in it.
Round eleven: the science of a fright
86. Which hormone floods your body when something makes you jump?
Adrenaline, also called epinephrine. It speeds the heart and sends blood to the muscles.
87. Which almond-shaped part of the brain handles fear?
The amygdala. There is one on each side of the brain.
88. Why do you get goosebumps when you are scared?
Tiny muscles at the base of each hair contract. In furry ancestors that made the coat stand up and the animal look bigger. On us it does nothing.
89. What is the fear of spiders called?
Arachnophobia.
90. What is the fear of the number thirteen called?
Triskaidekaphobia.
91. How do most bats find insects in the dark?
Echolocation. They send out high-pitched calls and listen to the echoes.
92. What colour are pumpkin flowers?
Bright yellow, and they last about a day.
Round twelve: the hard round
93. Which radio broadcast went out on the night before Halloween in 1938 and fooled some listeners?
The War of the Worlds, directed and narrated by Orson Welles. The panic was smaller than the newspapers claimed, but the legend stuck.
94. Who composed Night on Bald Mountain, the witches' sabbath heard in Disney's Fantasia?
Modest Mussorgsky. Fantasia used an arrangement based on Rimsky-Korsakov's version.
95. Which organ piece is the stock soundtrack of every haunted house?
Toccata and Fugue in D minor, credited to Bach. Some scholars doubt he wrote it, which makes it a good tiebreaker.
96. Which Halloween novelty song reached number one in the United States in October 1962?
Monster Mash, by Bobby "Boris" Pickett.
97. What is punkin chunkin'?
A contest to throw pumpkins as far as possible, with catapults, trebuchets and air cannons.
98. Which Irish school break always falls around Halloween?
The October mid-term break, a full week off, which is why the night is still so big in Ireland.
99. What do the Latin words memento mori mean?
Remember that you will die. Skulls in old paintings carry the same message.
100. Which dwarf planet is named after the Roman god of the underworld?
Pluto. The name was suggested in 1930 by Venetia Burney, an eleven-year-old girl in Oxford.
How to run these as a quiz
A hundred questions is two quiz nights, or one long one. Six rounds of roughly eight questions is about forty minutes with scoring, which is the right length before attention starts to go. Read each question twice, never three times, and collect answer sheets between rounds rather than at the end.
The two questions that reliably catch people are number 43, because everyone assumes Salem meant burning, and number 32, because Frankenstein has been misused for two centuries. Save them for a tiebreak.
For more rounds, try general knowledge questions and answers or the general knowledge test. If you want to be the person who actually knows this stuff rather than the one reading it off a sheet, getting better at pub quizzes is mostly a matter of how you revise, not how much.
And if you want the rest of the night explained rather than quizzed, start at the Halloween 2026 page, which carries the date, the origins, the facts and this quiz in one place. When October is over, the Christmas trivia questions take over, with a free Christmas quiz of their own.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are good Halloween trivia questions for adults?
The ones with a twist people think they already know. Nobody was burned at the stake in Salem: nineteen were hanged and Giles Corey was crushed to death. The Michael Myers mask in Halloween (1978) is a Captain Kirk mask with widened eye holes, painted white. And Frankenstein is the scientist, not the monster, which has no name at all.
What were the first jack-o'-lanterns made from?
Turnips, and sometimes beets or potatoes, carved in Ireland and Scotland. Pumpkins replaced them only after the tradition reached North America, where pumpkins were native, much larger and far easier to hollow out.
Where does the word Halloween come from?
It is a contraction of All Hallows' Eve, the night before All Hallows' Day on 1 November. Hallow is an old English word for saint. The festival underneath it is Samhain, the Gaelic marker for the end of harvest, pronounced SAH-win.
When was the last full moon on Halloween?
2020. Full moons land on 31 October roughly every nineteen years, following the Metonic cycle, so the next one is 2039.
What was candy corn originally called?
Chicken Feed. It was invented in the 1880s and sold in boxes carrying a rooster, back when corn was something you fed to livestock rather than ate as a sweet.
How many Halloween trivia questions do you need for a party quiz?
Around forty to fifty for one party, split into rounds of eight. That runs about forty minutes once you include scoring. The hundred here are enough for two nights, or for picking the best round from each set.
Every NerdSip course clears a four-layer fact-checking pipeline before it reaches the app: grounded in live sources, scored nightly, gated on failure, and reviewable by a person at one tap. Articles on this blog are drafted with AI assistance, then researched, verified, and edited by our team.
Editorial responsibility: ai51 UG (haftungsbeschränkt). Responsible editor named in the imprint.
📚 Keep Learning
- The History of Halloween: From Samhain to Trick or Treat
- Why Do We Celebrate Halloween? Six Answers, One Per Era
- 50 Halloween Facts That Are Actually True
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- 150 General Knowledge Questions and Answers (With the Top 10 First)
- Why You Blank at Quiz Night on Answers You Definitely Know
- 50 Movie Trivia Questions and Answers
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