Why We All Get a Little Witchy Every October

Every autumn, the search bar fills up with spells, witchcraft, and manifesting, and the trail leads back through Halloween postcards, witch trials, and a very old night of fortune-telling.

• Searches for "how to become a witch" grew 248% in the past month
• "WitchTok" searches have spiked 245%.
• "How to cast a spell" searches have spiked 218%.
• "How to manifest someone" searches have spiked 170%
• "Witch movies" searches have spiked 502%

Somewhere around the first week of October, people start looking up how to become a witch, then how to cast a spell, and, a little more sheepishly, how to manifest one specific person.

Costumes and ghost stories climb on the same October rhythm, so the timing isn’t a mystery. What’s interesting is that people are searching for instructions.

That habit has a long paper trail: a village practitioner whose reputation got rewritten, a holiday that needed a face, and a night once reserved for asking who you’d end up with.

Worldwide searches for “how to become a witch” climbed 248% over the past month, and in the US, “how to cast a spell” rose 218%. These are instructional queries, the kind you type when you’re ready to try something.

Pop culture moves with them. In the UK, “witch movies” jumped 502%, and worldwide, “WitchTok,” the corner of social media devoted to modern witchcraft, grew 245%.

Then there’s the one that gives the pattern away: “how to manifest someone” is up 170% worldwide and 123% in the US. Hold onto that one. It’s the oldest search on the list, wearing new clothes.

Much of what today’s witch is pictured doing was once an ordinary local service. You’d visit the cunning man or cunning woman: a village practitioner of folk medicine who also offered divination, tracked down lost and stolen property, and helped undo witchcraft.

People drew a line between that figure and a witch. A witch did harm, while a cunning woman fixed things. Historian Owen Davies found that in Essex, of roughly 400 people put on trial for witchcraft, only four were identifiably cunning folk.

The European witch hunts, roughly 1450 to 1750, hardened the other half of the picture into the one we inherited: the devil, the familiar, the fear. Then the law changed its mind. Britain’s Witchcraft Act of 1735 ended executions for witchcraft.

Instead, it made claiming magical powers an offense, punishable by up to a year in prison. Witchcraft started becoming folklore, and folklore eventually became costume material.

Halloween is widely traced back to Samhain, the Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest and the start of winter, when the line between the living world and the Otherworld was thought to be easier to cross.

Robert Burns, in a note to his poem about the evening, calls it “a night when witches, devils, and other mischief-making beings, are all abroad on their baneful, midnight errands.”

The visual Halloween we recognize spread later, through the postcard. According to historian Lisa Morton, around 3,000 unique spooky designs were created during the postcard’s golden era, roughly 1905 to 1915.

They helped standardize the holiday’s imagery: witches’ brooms, black cats, jack-o’-lanterns, and girls using mirrors and candles to glimpse their future husbands. Costumes and a century of films did the rest.

Here’s the part that got lost. At Samhain, households practiced divination, especially to learn about marriage, using apples, hazelnuts, and cakes with a ring hidden inside.

Burns wrote “Halloween” in 1785, and with his own notes it reads like a field guide to the evening’s rituals:

• Pulling kale. You pulled up the first stalk you touched with your eyes shut. The taste of its heart revealed your future spouse’s temper, and earth clinging to the root meant a dowry.
• The apple and the mirror. You ate an apple alone in front of a looking glass and watched for your future spouse’s face peeping over your shoulder.
• The blue yarn. You threw a ball of yarn into the kiln-pot in the dark and wound it back. When something held the other end, you asked, “Who holds?” The answer was supposed to be your future spouse’s name.
• The three dishes. Blindfolded, you dipped your hand into one of three dishes. Clean water meant a maiden, foul water a widow, and an empty dish no marriage at all.

Strip away the kale and the kiln, and the format is familiar: a specific night, a small repeatable ritual, and a question about one particular person.

“How to manifest someone” is the apple and the candlelit mirror with the Wi-Fi switched on. A written intention or a 369 method saved from someone’s video now does the job a stalk of kale used to do. WitchTok passes the rituals along by video, and witch movies are the modern postcards, arriving right on cue with the season.

The dark comes early, the year winds down, and people reach for the oldest tools we have for handling uncertainty: ritual, storytelling, and the hope that the universe takes requests.

So if you’ve typed any of these searches this month, you’re not having a strange autumn. You’re keeping up a habit people have had for centuries. They had a field, a fire, and an apple. You have a search bar.

This research is based on Google search-volume growth data collected through Glimpse on October 14, 2026, measuring month-over-month growth across terms related to witchcraft, spellwork, manifesting, and witch-themed entertainment. Figures reflect worldwide, US, and UK search volumes depending on the term.

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