The Coven appeared in the Spooktober festival's 2019 "Haunts" lineup in St Kilda, built around the witch, probably the single most recognisable image in all of Halloween imagery. Where other attractions in the same lineup used a haunted building or a specific fear as their organising idea, this one used a figure with centuries of folklore attached to her, most of it only loosely connected to anything that actually happened historically. The attraction ran for that one season and is not currently operating, but the folklore behind the imagery is real, and worth untangling properly rather than taking the costume-shop version at face value.
What The Coven Was
Little detail from the festival's own records survives beyond its listing in the "Haunts" section, but the name points clearly to a witch-themed attraction, likely leaning on candlelit rooms, ritual imagery and the familiar trappings of witchcraft rather than a haunted building or a single fear. It sat alongside other themed rooms in the same lineup, including a swamp-set escape room run under the name Escape the Swamp, and ran for the 2019 season before the festival's programme changed.
Where the Witch's Costume Actually Comes From
Most of what people picture when they hear "witch", the pointed hat, the broom, the cauldron, the black cat familiar, is a costume built from everyday medieval and early modern objects rather than anything occult in origin. The broom traces back to the besom, a simple bundle-and-handle sweeping tool found in ordinary households for centuries, with the word itself shifting from the Old English "besma" into "besom" and eventually "broom". One historical detail that usually gets left out of the Halloween version: in the 1500s, English alewives sometimes placed a broom outside their door as a sign that ale was for sale inside, a trade symbol rather than anything to do with magic. The cauldron has a similarly mundane root as ordinary kitchen equipment, though some historians connect its later witchcraft associations to the idea of a "familiar", an animal companion a witch was believed to keep and feed. Black cats picked up their association with witches specifically because early modern witch hunters linked the two directly, reasoning that a cat's ability to see in low light and move unnoticed made it a natural companion for someone practising witchcraft, an association that hardened over the following centuries into the general idea of black cats as unlucky. The pointed hat is the shakiest of the four historically, with some writers tracing it to religious or regional dress from the medieval period, though the evidence for that specific link is thinner than for the broom or the cat.
From Witch Hunts to Halloween Icon
The imagery sits on top of a genuinely dark period of history. Witch hunts in Europe began in the early fifteenth century and continued in various forms for roughly the next three hundred years, a period in which real people, overwhelmingly women, were accused, tried and often executed based on exactly the kind of folklore described above. The lighthearted, pointy-hatted witch familiar from Halloween decorations today is largely a product of the 1800s and 1900s rather than a direct inheritance from that period. A widely cited example is an 1899 verse from a children's rhyme collection describing an older woman in a black pointed hat with a black cat familiar and a flying broomstick, a description that reads almost exactly like a modern Halloween costume, which gives a sense of how long this particular combination of props has stayed fixed in the public imagination.
Using the Imagery for Costumes and Decorations
If you're putting together a witch costume rather than just buying one off a shelf, the folklore above gives you more to work with than the standard hat-and-broom combination. A familiar, not necessarily a cat, costume jewellery shaped like a raven or a toad works just as well, a visible "trade sign" prop nodding to the broom's alewife history, or a cauldron used as a prop rather than a punchline, all read as more considered than a generic costume. If you're aiming for a festival costume contest rather than a Halloween party at home, our notes on how costume competitions tend to judge entries cover what tends to stand out to judges, detail and a clear concept tend to beat an expensive costume bought outright.
Seeing the Theme Around Melbourne
Witch imagery turns up constantly around Halloween in Melbourne, from shopfront decorations to themed bars, and St Kilda specifically has a history with Halloween events worth knowing if you're planning to visit the area this year. Our page on Halloween in St Kilda covers that local history and what to expect if you're heading there, separate from any one attraction or theme.
