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Plate 1 A tall pointed hat with a wide brim beside a besom broom

Witch’s hat and broom

The Halloween witch in a tall pointed hat, riding a broom. Witches on brooms were first drawn in a French manuscript of 1451; where the pointed hat came from is disputed.

Halloween symbols. Also called broomstick, witch hat, witch’s broom.

Meaning

Robert Burns, in the notes to his poem “Halloween”, called it the night “when devils, witches, and other mischief-making beings, are all abroad on their baneful midnight errands”. Brand quoted a nurse’s description from the tract Round about our Coal Fire: a witch “must be a haggard old woman, living in a little rotten cottage” and “must have a black cat, two or three broomsticks”. The Halloween witch is a costume; people who call themselves witches today, in neo-pagan religions such as Wicca, are a separate living tradition, and History.com notes that few if any of them claim to fly.

Origin and history

The oldest known picture of witches on brooms is in the margins of Martin Le Franc’s poem Le Champion des Dames, in a manuscript of 1451: one woman flies on a broom, the other on a plain white stick. Their headscarves mark them as Waldensians, a Christian movement the Catholic Church called heretical, partly because it allowed women to become priests. Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters call it “the first such illustration in the pictorial history of witchcraft.” Two years later Guillaume Edelin, a priest from Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris, became the first person known to confess to riding a broom; the confession came under torture, and he was imprisoned for life.

The staff is older than the broom in these stories. In 1324 investigators searching the house of Dame Alice Kyteler in Ireland reported “a pipe of ointment, wherewith she greased a staff, upon which she ambled and galloped through thicke and thin.” Other trials named other mounts: in 1644 Margaret Watson was told she had confessed that one woman “rode upon a cat”, another upon a cock, and another upon a hawthorn tree. Frazer, writing of Hallowe’en in the Celtic countries, has witches “sweeping through the air on besoms”, as black cats became their horses.

Where the pointed hat came from

Nobody knows; National Geographic calls it “a rather difficult question to answer.” Walter Stephens of Johns Hopkins University has suggested the dunce caps heretics were forced to wear, or 17th-century Puritan hats. National Geographic also names the tall hennins of medieval noblewomen, and the hats of the alewives who dominated England’s brewing trade. Another line runs to the pointed hats Jews were forced to wear in parts of medieval Europe: in 1431 Hungarian law made first-time sorcery offenders wear “peaked Jews’ caps” in public.

One argument goes back to Amelia Mott Gummere, in The Quaker: A Study in Costume (1901). She noted that the steeple-crowned hat, worn over a hood between about 1650 and 1675, was the hat of the earliest prints of Quaker women preachers, and that the great witch trials of Europe, England and Massachusetts all came in the second half of that century; she saw in it “the hat of the conventional witch of our childhood”. The dress historian Abby Cox told History.com that tall black felt hats were ordinary wear for women of every class through most of the 17th century.

See also

Black cat, Owl, Jack-o’-lantern, Black cat, Bat, Skeleton and skull.

Sources

  1. Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, vol. 1 (John Brand, ed. Henry Ellis, 1853), John Brand, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, arranged and revised by Sir Henry Ellis, vol. 1 (London: Bohn, 1853), Internet Archive (University of Toronto copy), Allhallow Even, pp. 379–380 (Burns, Halloween, note 1)
  2. Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, vol. 3 (John Brand, ed. Henry Ellis, 1853), John Brand, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, arranged and revised by Sir Henry Ellis, vol. 3 (London: Bohn, 1853), Internet Archive (University of Toronto copy), Sorcery or Witchcraft, p. 7
  3. The Golden Bough, abridged edition (James George Frazer, 1922), Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, abridged edition (New York: Macmillan, 1922), chapter LXIII, section 6, The Hallowe'en Fires, Internet Archive, chapter LXIII, section 6
  4. Why Do Witches Ride Brooms? (Sarah Pruitt, History.com), Sarah Pruitt, History.com, published 19 October 2020, updated 2026, A&E Television Networks (History.com), article text
  5. The First Known Depiction of a Witch on a Broomstick (Allison Meier, Hyperallergic, 2016), Allison Meier, Hyperallergic, 24 October 2016, Hyperallergic, article text
  6. How broomsticks, cauldrons, and pointy hats became essential witch gear (Johnna Rizzo, National Geographic, 2024), Johnna Rizzo, National Geographic, 25 October 2024 (adapted from The History of Witchcraft, 2024), National Geographic, sections on the hat and the broom
  7. Why Do Witches Wear Pointy Hats? (Elizabeth Yuko, History.com), Elizabeth Yuko, History.com, published 4 October 2023, updated 2025, A&E Television Networks (History.com), section on the hat
  8. The Quaker: A Study in Costume (Amelia Mott Gummere, 1901), Amelia Mott Gummere, The Quaker: A Study in Costume (Philadelphia: Ferris and Leach, 1901), Internet Archive, pp. 194–195

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Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research

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