Skeleton and skull
A human skeleton or skull: the dead made visible. Its place in Halloween goes back to the late-medieval Dance of Death and to the Christian days for the dead that follow Halloween.
Meaning
Halloween is the first night of Hallowmas, which the folklorist Stephen Winick of the Library of Congress describes as Halloween, All Saints’ Day (1 November) and All Souls’ Day (2 November). Jack Santino wrote in 1982 that “witches, ghosts, and skeleton figures of the dead are among the favorite disguises” at Halloween, and that dressing as the dead grew out of people “performing antics in exchange for food and drink”. The skull is also a Christian reminder of death: see the skull and crossbones.
Origin and history
The skeleton that comes for everyone began as theatre. The Cleveland Museum of Art explains that the Dance of Death started as a drama in the middle of the 14th century; after epidemics such as the Black Death it was staged in cemeteries and churchyards, where actors in pale costumes painted as skeletons summoned people of every class into a procession, to remind them to prepare for the Last Judgement. Ed Simon, writing in Hyperallergic, dates the earliest painted Dance of Death to 1424, at the Holy Innocents Cemetery in Paris. Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death woodcuts, cut before 1526, are the best known of the pictures that followed (see Grim Reaper).
The dead were shown on All Souls’ Day too. Chambers’s Book of Days (1864) records that at Naples the charnel houses were opened on 2 November, lit with torches and decked with flowers, and crowds visited the skeletons of their relatives, “dressed up in robes and arranged in niches along the walls.”
The skeletons of Día de Muertos
The painted skulls and skeletons of Día de Muertos belong to a different tradition. The Library of Congress calls it “a related but different holiday”, formed in colonial Mexico when All Souls’ Day mingled with Indigenous celebrations of the ancestors; its name means “Day of the Dead” but also “Day of the Ancestors”. Among Mexican Americans, Winick writes, All Souls’ Day, as Día de los Muertos, is the most widely celebrated day of Hallowmas.
Where you’ll see it today
whatdoesthissymbolmean.comSkull 💀A cartoon skull. Its literal meaning is death, and it turns up around Halloween, but in messages it most often means “I’m dead”: the sender found something so funny, or so embarrassing, that it killed them.See also
Skull and crossbones, Ghost, Grim Reaper, Jack-o’-lantern, Black cat, Witch’s hat and broom.
Sources
- Dance of Death: The Child (Hans Holbein the Younger; Cleveland Museum of Art, 1929.169), Cleveland Museum of Art, collection record 1929.169, woodcut designed by Hans Holbein the Younger, cut by Hans Lützelburger, Cleveland Museum of Art, object description
- Holbein the Younger Looked Death in the Eye (Ed Simon, Hyperallergic, 2024), Ed Simon, Hyperallergic, 14 October 2024, Hyperallergic, article text
- Halloween: The Fantasy and Folklore of All Hallows (Jack Santino, 1982; updated 2009), Jack Santino, lecture at the Library of Congress, 29 October 1982, published by the American Folklife Center; web version as archived January 2016, Library of Congress, American Folklife Center (Internet Archive copy), section on customs
- The Book of Days, vol. 2 (Robert Chambers, 1864), Robert Chambers, ed., The Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities, vol. 2 (London and Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, 1864 edition), Internet Archive (University of Toronto copy), November 2, All Souls, p. 538
- Halloween & Día de Muertos Resources (Stephen Winick, Library of Congress research guide), Stephen D. Winick, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress research guide, introduction (updated 2024), Library of Congress, Introduction
- Welcome to Folklife Today, and…Happy Halloween! (Stephen Winick, 2013), Stephen Winick, Folklife Today blog, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 30 October 2013, Library of Congress, post text
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Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research