Halloween is an old tradition, whose origin can be traced to Roman and Celtic times, but it is deeply rooted in the Catholic tradition too, as Mary Reed Newland points out in her article, All Hallow's Eve (for C2 level). Halloween marks the beginning of winter, the season of cold and darkness, where misty figures stir people's imagination to inspire spooky tales of terror. You can find lots of Halloween folk stories, for example, on American Folklore there is a long list of creepy short stories that can be read in class to swop stories and do an information gap task. I have chosen Jack and the Devil and The Lady in the Veil , while other stories can be just played for fun, to listen to the sound effects the voice of the storyteller makes, like Sifty, Sifty San. These three stories can be downloaded in Word format on this link, and here you can also find a vocabulary matching task for "The Lady in the Veil" and "Jack and the Devil", with its answer key.
Halloween can be the right moment of the year to revise vocabulary about horror stories and fairy tales, so here you can find a Halloween Word List and a Halloween Cloze Activity with its answer key, to practice some of this literay vocabulary. These activities can be used with B2 students and above. Some of the key words you can find in the cloze task are: candle, mist, goodies, ghost, haunted, a wizard, a corpse, gruesome, spine-chilling, costumes, to carve, to hollow-out, ghastly, a jack-o'-lantern, a spider web, an imp, a broomstick, a troll, spooky, a coffin.
In the Halloween Word List, students may feel curious about some words like a bat, bizarre, the bogeyman, to cackle, chilling, a curse, doomed, eerie, elf, evil, fairy, fangs, ghoul, grim, grisly, hocus pocus, a magic wand, a prank, repulsive, revolting, to shiver, a shriek, sorcerer, a spook, a tombstone, wicked, witchcraft.
And finally, if you love music, you can listen to the traditional song "A Soul Cake", which talks about the ancient religious antecedent of the "Trick or Treat" game that children play now on Halloween. You can choose between Sting's jazzy version of A Soul Cake (2009), or, if you are a fan of melodic music, Peter, Paul and Mary's version, A Soulin' (1965). Here you can find a fill-in the gap listening exercise based on Sting's version, and its answer key.