Here's how Halloween is celebrated around the world

• In the US, costumes and trick-or-treating sum up the Halloween experience.
• But in other parts of the world, Halloween celebrations range from cemetery gatherings to buffalo-racing. 
• The Festival of Cows in Nepal is a carnival that celebrates the dead.
• Meanwhile, the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts is an ancient Chinese tradition that includes lighting lanterns and going to the opera.
• Here's how other countries celebrate the spookiest holiday of the year. 

Dressing up as a ghost, ghoul, fantasy figure or celebrity and kids trick-or-treating is the American idea of Halloween. But its somber roots are in its very name: originally All Hallows’ Eve, it was the night before All Saints' Day, followed by All Souls Day, both honoring the dead. But Halloween is just one of many festivals to remember the dead worldwide, whose events range from lantern-lighting and partying in cemeteries to buffalo-racing.

Barriletes Gigantes

Flying gigantic kites at cemeteries is how the towns of Sumpango and Santiago Sacatepequez celebrate All Saints Day in Guatemala. The kites are usually round, often 40 or more feet wide, and intensely colorful, painted with flowers, animals, and geometric patterns like the country's Mayan textiles. The kites are hand-made from paper and cloth with bamboo frames by villagers. It's believed the higher the kites fly, the closer their messages are to reaching the dead in heaven. The 3,000-year-old Mayan tradition began long before the Spanish brought Catholicism to Guatemala.

Banks of the Foyle Halloween Carnival

Ireland is where Halloween was born as the Celtic festival of Samhain, when ghosts walked among the living. Traditions abound, like bonfires and eating barmbrack, a fruitcake whose contents can tell your fortune. Find a ring, and you'll be married within a year; a thimble, and singlehood is in your future; a stick, and lots of travel is in your future (we can help). So it's fitting Europe's biggest Halloween costume parade is in Derry (Londonderry) in Northern Ireland, next to County Donegal. Derry's 400-year-old, 18-foot-high walls are the site of ghastly performances, installations, lights, and music from October 27-30, and a parade of circus and street performers and costumed revelers walk the streets on October 31, topped off by fireworks.

O-Bon

For this three-day Lantern Festival in August, people light lanterns in their homes to welcome the souls of their ancestors to earth, and place lanterns on rivers or ponds to guide them back on the final day. In Kyoto, the best place to see the magic of glowing colorful lanterns at night on the water is the Arashimaya district, full of temples and gardens. Bonfires are lit on five mountains that tower over Kyoto to guide the souls and defend against evil, a tradition dating to the 13^th century: three fires shaped like Chinese characters used in Japanese writing, one shaped like a Shinto shrine gate, and one in the shape of a boat.  Almost 10,000 lanterns with wishes tucked inside are set afloat, as monks chant, in Eihei-ji in Fukui prefecture.

Traditional dancing in kimonos and wooden sandals also takes place in Gujo city and Tokushima city. Fruit and vegetable offerings are left at Buddhist temples, where a fire is lit at the gates at the start and end of O-Bon.