Halloween Trivia Night

True

Fun fact: Fossilised droppings show that ancient giant mammals such as mastodons and woolly mammoths ate small squashes and helped spread their seeds across North America.

Three

Fun fact: Winifred is the eldest, Mary is the middle sister who can smell out children, and Sarah is the youngest. They are played by Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker.

Dracula

Fun fact: Stoker originally named his vampire Count Wampyr. He took the name Dracula from a book on Wallachia and Moldavia that he borrowed from a Yorkshire public library.

False

Fun fact: Some bats, including a few fruit bat species, have vision said to be three times better than ours, and some can detect ultraviolet light.

• Spooky creatures: Vampire, Werewolf, Mummy
• Sweet treats: Candy corn, Toffee apple, Gummy worms

Fun fact: Worm-shaped gummy candy is credited to the German confectioner Trolli in 1981, and candy corn was originally called Chicken Feed.

Jackson

Fun fact: The video was directed by John Landis and runs for about 14 minutes. It debuted on MTV on 2 December 1983.

Eve

Also accepted: Evening

Fun fact: Halloween comes from a Scots shortening of All Hallows' Eve, where even is the Scots word for evening, contracted to e'en. Dictionary.com dates the word to the 1550s or 1560s.

Turnips

Fun fact: Metal lanterns were expensive, so people hollowed out root vegetables. Irish immigrants to America later switched to pumpkins.

True

Fun fact: In the tale, Stingy Jack tricks the Devil, is refused entry to both heaven and hell, and wanders the night with an ember in a carved turnip. The story first appeared in print in the 19th century.

• Vampire → Garlic
• Werewolf → Silver bullet
• Wicked Witch of the West → Water

Fun fact: Wikipedia says garlic was a standard folk defence against vampires, while National Geographic notes the specific garlic-vampire link was popularised by 19th and 20th century novels and films. Silver as a werewolf weakness appears in 19th-century German tales and folklore collections.

Mary Shelley

Fun fact: Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein aged 19 after a gloomy summer in 1816 at the Villa Diodati, when Lord Byron challenged the group to write ghost stories. The first edition in 1818 appeared anonymously.

False

Fun fact: A group of crows is called a murder, and a group of witches is traditionally a coven.

Samhain

Fun fact: Samhain is pronounced sow-in. The Celts marked their new year on 1 November and believed the boundary between the living and the dead blurred the night before.

True

Fun fact: Goelitz started marketing candy corn as Chicken Feed in 1898, and the box showed a rooster. The name suited a time when corn was seen mainly as livestock feed.

Romania

Fun fact: Stoker never visited Transylvania. Romania's communist government promoted the castle as Dracula's in the 1960s because it looked Gothic enough.

1. Nosferatu
2. Psycho
3. The Exorcist
4. Halloween
5. Scream

Fun fact: Nosferatu premiered in Berlin in March 1922, and Scream reached US cinemas on 20 December 1996.

Samhainophobia

Fun fact: The word comes from Samhain, the ancient Celtic festival. Dictionary.com says the fear is usually linked to a traumatic event connected with the holiday.

True

Fun fact: Houdini died in Detroit at the age of 52, of peritonitis, about twelve days after being punched in the stomach in Montreal.