The Surprising Origins of 5 Creepy Sayings

When fall arrives, Halloween culture takes center stage everywhere. Streaming services show off their best horror shows, pumpkin spice products fly all over the grocery store, and your neighbor manages to fit a tacky Home Depot decor into his tiny front yard.

You’re starting to see the creepy in everything, even language that isn’t necessarily Halloween-specific. In honor of the season, here are the origins of five spooky idioms, from skeletons in the closet Unpleasant night shift.

Skeletons in the closet

Hiding someone’s skeleton in your closet is a pretty reprehensible and shameful thing to do, so it’s an apt metaphor for a reprehensible or shameful secret. When the phrase became popular in the early 1800s, it often referred to a family secret. For example, in an 1815 lecture, physician Joseph Adams mentioned people’s impulse to “hide the skeleton in the closet,” the skeleton being their family history of a hereditary disease. William Makepeace Thackeray, who popularized the term in literature, explained in an 1845 lecture Punch magazine article: “There is a skeleton in every house.”

The origin of skeletons in the closet are up for debate. One theory points to Bluebeard, a French fable that appears in Charles Perrault’s famous 1697 collection of fairy tales. Bluebeard is a wealthy man who forbids his wife to enter a specific room in their castle. She disobeys him and finds the room filled with the corpses of his previous wives.

Another theory suggests that the phrase relates to the 18th and early 19th century practice of robbing graves to provide corpses for doctors and medical students. Because this practice enraged the public, it seems plausible that a doctor would hide stolen skeletons when they were not in use, but there is no evidence to support this theory.

The witching hour

In the broadest sense of the word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the witching hour refers to “the time, (especially) the dead of night, when bad or sinister things are thought likely to happen.” The expression is inspired by the old folk belief that witches and other supernatural beings are incredibly powerful and active in the dead of night.

So when exactly is the witching hour? Midnight is probably the most popular answer, but it’s also said to last from midnight to 3am or from 3am to 4am. For what it’s worth, Shakespeare – one of the first to put the belief on paper – didn’t specify the time. In Hamletsays the title prince, “‘Tis now the most witchy time of night, / When churchyards yawn, and hell itself / Breathes out contagion on this world.” (Although most of the characters are still awake at this point, it may not be 3 a.m.)

The Bard witches time had made way for the witching hour in the mid-eighteenth century, as evidenced in Elizabeth Carolina Keene’s 1762 poem “Nightmare”:

“It is the ominous witching hour,
Behold! the moon withdraws her light;
Listen! From that round tower there
Screams the ominous bird of the night…

Devil’s Advocate

Today, a devil’s advocate is someone who takes a stand against a particular point of view, whether as an annoying troublemaker or for the nobler purpose of looking at an issue from all sides. But it started out as a real job. In the Roman Catholic Church, the devil’s advocate (devil’s advocate in Latin) was given the task of arguing against a candidate for sainthood (or beatification, a precursor to canonization). The devil’s advocate would expose you if you faked your miracles or had other skeletons in your closet.

Sources date the origin of the term to the papal reign of Pope Leo X between 1513 and 1521, although the position itself was not formalized until 1587. The official name is promoter faithLatin for “promoter of the faith,” and it is no longer a crucial part of the canonization process (Pope John Paul II made some changes in the 1980s).

Make your blood clot (or grow cold)

If something makes your blood run cold or run cold, it fills you with fear. According to the Oxford Dictionary of English IdiomsBoth expressions arose from medieval beliefs about the four humors, of which blood was one. “Under this scheme, blood was the hot, moist element, so the effect of horror or fear in allowing the blood to become cold or coagulate (clot) was to render it unable to perform its proper function of supplying the body with vital heat or energy,” the book explains.

Even without any connection to the four humors, the sentences are consistent with other figurative fear-related language. If your blood runs cold and you get goose bumps, you are undoubtedly dealing with a terrifying, horrifying event. If your blood clots, on the other hand, it is too thick to keep pumping, leaving you standing still in terror.

That being said, to curdle the blood was not always exclusive to fear; it originally included any “strong negative emotion,” according to the OED, especially “fear or dread.” The earliest known reference, from Edmund Spenser’s 1579 poetic work The Shepherds’ Calendartackles much more than just those two. It’s about how depressing it is when a bit of February sunshine makes you think spring has sprung, only to have winter come rushing back, “Shooting a stormy arrow, / That melts the blood and pricks the heart.” You pay for your false hopes with “howling, and fumbling, and misery.” A bloodcurdling ordeal, to be sure, but not in the creepy sense we’re most familiar with.

Cemetery service

According to legend, the expression night shift first referred to the practice of sitting in a cemetery all night to free anyone accidentally buried alive. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your taste for the macabre), the historical record does not support this origin story. In fact, cemeteries do not seem to have been involved at all: Early records of night shift And graveyard watchboth of which became popular in the late 19th century, refer to various performances that took place in the middle of the night.

“All large gambling houses employ three shifts of men for each game. The early morning after midnight is called the graveyard shift, but why that name should apply more to that hour than to others is not quite clear,” wrote a Pennsylvania newspaper in 1888. Other graveyard shifts and guard duties, from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. and from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m., were mentioned in newspapers.

Gershom Bradfords 1927 Glossary of maritime terms claims that the night watch (in this case from noon to 4 a.m.) was named “because of the number of disasters that occur at that time.” Another nautical reference from 1929, however, says it was “so called because of the silence throughout the ship.” Since it’s characteristically quiet wherever you are in the dead of night, the latter explanation seems especially logical.

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