I'm an American in the UK who loves Halloween. If you're here for the spookiest day of the year, prepare to be disappointed.

31.10.2023 - 09:47 / insider.com

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday.

But when I moved from Tennessee to Scotland for college in 2017, I quickly realized that the UK celebrated it very differently.

That was made clear to me when I showed up to lectures on October 31 in full costume when everyone else wore normal clothes.

These are the biggest differences I've seen in my six years living here.

In the US, you'll likely have at least one house on your street that goes all out for Halloween, meaning string lights, spooky music, and a scary lawn display. And many houses will likely be decorated in some way, even if it's just pumpkins on the doorstep.

So prepare to be disappointed with British houses at Halloween. Those big lawn displays are rare, if seen at all, and in a typical neighborhood, I've found that most houses don't have any decorations.

When they are decorated, it's understated — a few carved pumpkins outside, an autumnal wreath on the door, or maybe cobwebs in the window.

I grew up going to haunted corn mazes in October with friends, where we'd all be chased by people in scary costumes with fake but real-sounding chainsaws and struggle to find the way out. It was terrifying but a rite of passage in celebrating spooky season.

I haven't managed to find anything of the sort in the UK. While corn isn't grown here at the level it is in the US, I think it's mainly because Brits don't celebrate Halloween for as long, which makes pop-ups such as mazes unviable.

In the UK, Halloween is mostly confined to a few days. If people have a party, it tends to be on the weekend before or after October 31.

When I lived in the US, we celebrated from the moment October began, with nights reserved for pumpkin-patch visits and carving, spooky movie nights, baking pumpkin pie, bonfires, and many costume parties.

After summer ended, it was always guaranteed that a Halloween superstore, probably Spirit Halloween, would open nearby as a one-stop shop for Halloween costumes and decor. Stores such as Target and Walmart also had huge Halloween offerings.

In the UK, you're lucky to find a small year-round costume shop, but even those mostly sell scary costumes. Some supermarkets will have minimal Halloween sections for decor, but your best bet is usually shopping online at Amazon or Etsy.

In my first year living in Scotland, I quickly learned from friends that the norm was to dress in a scary costume and that it's weird to dress as something fun, which Brits call "fancy dress."

While this is changing, with American-style celebrations becoming more prominent because of social media, I feel that scary costumes are still the most common, especially among those older than my Gen Z friends, who will dress scary, if they dress up at all.

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