About The Hollow Lantern

The Hollow Lantern is an independent magazine about Halloween, written for readers who want the history and the practice of the night rather than a shopping list. It covers four subjects: where Halloween came from, the vintage imagery and paper objects it left behind, how October is made today, and how to keep the evening itself calm and safe.

How the pages are written

Everything on the site is written in the third person by a small editorial team. The pages describe the holiday, its history and its customs from the outside. They do not speak as a business, a club or an organisation, and the site sells nothing. Where a page names a company or an institution, it does so to describe what that body made or published, not to recommend it or to claim any connection with it.

Each article prefers the documented version of a story over the tidy one. Where a claim rests on a single source, the page says so. Where a practice belongs to folklore rather than to history, it is labelled as folklore. Where a date is disputed, the page gives the dispute rather than picking a side for effect. Sources are named in the text and linked where they are useful to the reader, and the site does not pad its pages with decorative bibliographies.

What the site does not do

The Hollow Lantern does not sell tickets, costumes, decorations or sweets. It does not run competitions or collect email addresses. It does not publish advertising that pretends to be editorial. The only contact route is a plain email address, given on the contact page.

A note on the subject

Halloween is a public holiday with a long and mixed history, kept in different ways in different countries. This magazine treats it as exactly that: a subject worth describing carefully. Where the night is commercial, the pages say so. Where it is old, the pages date it. The aim throughout is a clear, honest account that a reader can use at home, in a classroom or at a kitchen table.

How to use the site

Readers who want the background should start with the origins section. Readers who want to make something should start with decorating and carving. Readers planning the evening should start with celebrating and safety. Every page links to the others, so the site can be read in any order, and a reader who arrives on one article can find the rest from the links inside it.