The Wandering Dead - 2

The church maintained that the gods and goddesses and other spiritual beings of traditional religions were diabolical deceptions, that the spiritual forces that people had experienced were real, but they were manifestations of the Devil, the Prince of Liars, who misled people toward the worship of false idols.

Thus, the customs associated with Halloween included representations of ghosts and human skeletons--symbols of the dead--and of the devil and other malevolent, evil creatures, such as witches were said to be. The original festival for the pagan Lord of the Dead became a festival of Christian dead.