The royal family is banned from celebrating Halloween due to this strict rule
The house of Windsor ain’t no haunted house.
Members of the British royal family have been reportedly banned from celebrating Halloween in public after Queen Victoria instituted a rule that members should “uphold total class and sophistication” at all times.
Royal expert Christina Reeves told the Daily Express Sunday that Victoria, who occupied the throne from 1837 to 1901, wanted members of her household to have “complete self-respect and good behavior when in front of the general public.”
The rule has endured all the way to current members of the royal family — though it’s noticeably less strictly enforced.
In 1941, then-Princess Elizabeth and her sister, Margaret, dressed up as Cinderella to take part in a re-enactment of the fable.
Following her ascent to the throne in 1952, Queen Elizabeth II fully stopped dressing up.
Despite the archaic rule, several royals have been known to flout authority and dress up anyway.
One notable occurrence was when Prince Harry and Meghan Markle celebrated the spooky holiday with Princess Eugenie and her husband, Jack Brooksbank, at Soho House in Toronto.
Markle, now 42, and the Duke of Sussex, 41, had not yet revealed they were dating — let alone broken away from the royal family — so they went out incognito.
“It was a post-apocalypse theme [at the party], so we had all of this very bizarre costume going on, and we were able to just have one final fun night out,” Markle told Ellen DeGeneres on her talk show in 2021. Harry “came to see me in Toronto and our friends and his cousin Eugenie and … Jack, they came as well.”
“And the four of us snuck out in Halloween costumes to just have one fun night on the town before it was out in the world that we were a couple,” Markle reminisced.
Another notable time was in 2005, when Harry attended Olympic show-jumper Richard Meade’s “native and Colonial” dress party, where the former royal was spotted and photographed wearing a Nazi uniform complete with a swastika armband.
Seeking to minimize the damage, the royal family issued a full apology after the photo was published in the Sun.
“I am very sorry if I have caused any offense,” said then-20-year-old Harry. “It was a poor choice of costume, and I apologize.”
Harry revealed in his memoir “Spare” that he spoke with a rabbi in London after the incident and said that the visit had a “profound impact” on him.
In his bombshell best seller, the royal claimed that his brother, William, and William’s then-girlfriend, now-wife, Kate Middleton, told him to dress in the controversial outfit.
“I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought. Nazi uniform, they said,” Harry wrote. “They both howled. Worse than Willy’s leotard outfit! Way more ridiculous! Which, again, was the point.”
Harry later called wearing the costume “one of the biggest mistakes in my life.”
