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30 Halloween Costumes Best Left In History

Updated on Oct 31, 2021. Originally added on Oct 27, 2015 by Daniel Pinna

While witches, ghosts, and vampires are commonplace Halloween costumes today, I bet you won't recognize many of the costumes our ancestors dressed in.

Spooky, silly, homemade, and store bought - these photos show the creative and often whimsy Halloween costumes from previous decades. How many of these costumes do you recognize?

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Homemade Halloween Costumes from the Past

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Welcome to Halloween!

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A studio photo from around the turn of the century - we thought that this was the perfect Halloween photo!

Adult Halloween party - they are scary in their own way!

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Dad looks like a demented Ernie from Sesame Street, and his kid is as scared as we are

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Creepy family!

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There's something about these homemade costumes from the '20's and '30's that is creepier than anything today!

A giant mosquito on a bike?

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This would be especially spooky in Florida!

1930's or '40's? We know that they're homemade costumes

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There's a clown, a farmer, a mechanic, a Robin Hood, and I think that one child on the bottom right was pretending to be the pope?

Look at those masks!

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Another homemade mask . . .

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That would scare the daylights out of us!

Watch out pirates - there's a skeleton stalking you!

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Fancy for 1930!

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Sheri Johnson
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shared on 06/15/2014

I bet somebody's Mom sewed.

Someone had a sense of humor!

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The gnome and the four kitties?

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Who has heard of this tale?

It looks like a costume . . .

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but it may have been 1915 high fashion??

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She's right in character - sitting on the wall

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Wonder if she fell and broke at the end of the night?

Halloween party circa 1908

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Sandy McClay
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shared on 10/31/2013

No costumes - but black pumpkins?

Our idea of advanced robotics in the 1950s - Robot X-100

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A lion, a witch, and a duck performing a seance?

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Meet the creepy neighbors (c. 1930-1940)

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Hooligans dressing like hooligans (c. 1910)

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These are actually "maskers". At the end of November every year, "maskers" would dress up and roam the streets, begging for fruit and money. In the late '20's, Halloween supplanted this "hooligan" practice.

I really don’t know what these things are

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But I do know that I will have nightmares.

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